The cost of guessing
Why the cost lands on one person
A minute saved by the person handing over becomes a quarter spent by the person receiving, and neither of them experiences the trade.
Decisions this page is about, and where the line actually was
Changing the wording on a customer-facing error message
4 → 1It had been yours all along
Refunding a customer under fifty pounds
3 → 1A written policy you had never been shown
Telling a customer a date
3 → 6Dates are committed by one person here
Reordering your own week
4 → 1You asked twice before believing the answer
- 1Decide it alone and say nothing
- 2Decide it alone and mention it afterwards
- 3Check with one colleague first
- 4Check with the person who assigned it
- 5Needs a decision one level up
- 6Cannot be decided here at all
four decisions · three of them you had more room than you thought · one gave you less · the median gap was three steps on the scale
Four of the nine decisions counted on this site.
A fair pilot starts with a shared purpose and baseline; managers can learn more here before comparing the results of a new handover practice.
For an independent perspective on management and working practice, consult Prosci.
The arithmetic is not complicated. Four sentences take about ninety seconds to write. Reconstructing the same four facts from evidence takes somewhere between three days and three weeks.
What makes it persist is not the ratio. It is that the saving and the cost are paid by different people, in different weeks, in forms that do not look like each other.
The two experiences
The person handing over experiences a short conversation. They say what the work is, the other person says yes, and the exchange is forgotten within the hour. From their side nothing happened that could be described as a decision, so there is nothing to reconsider.
The person receiving experiences a difficult month. They do not experience it as "I was under-briefed"; they experience it as the work being harder than expected, which is an ordinary thing for work to be. When asked how it went, they say it was trickier than it looked.
Both descriptions are sincere, neither mentions the brief, and the causal link between them is never spoken aloud by anybody.
Four reasons the link stays invisible
- The delay. The ninety seconds not spent in January and the three weeks spent in February are too far apart to be connected without somebody deliberately connecting them.
- The attribution. Difficulty gets attributed to the work. "It turned out to be more complicated than we thought" is the universal phrase, and it closes the question.
- The asymmetry of standing. Saying "the brief was thin" to the person who wrote it requires the receiver to criticise their assigner's work, which most people will not do over three weeks they have already absorbed.
- The successes. Most guesses are right, so most thin briefs produce acceptable outcomes, which confirms the thin brief as sufficient.
Who else pays
The cost does not stay with the receiver either, which is worth saying because it changes who should care.
It lands on whoever waits for the work, as lateness with no visible cause. It lands on the team as a reputation for slowness. It lands on the next person in the role, who inherits the same undocumented context and spends their own quarter rediscovering it.
And it lands back on the person who handed it over, eventually, in the least useful form available: as a growing sense that this person is slower than expected.
Making the trade visible
One sentence, said at the moment the cost appears, connecting it to the cause:
This went back to the outline because the reader turned out to be the board. Three days. Worth saying who the reader is next time.
Said once, it is information. Said three times over a quarter, it is the only mechanism that will ever change the briefing behaviour, because it is the only time the two halves of the trade appear in the same sentence.
It has to be specific, it has to be immediate, and it has to carry a number. "The briefs could be better" is a complaint and will be heard as one. "Three days, because of one unsaid sentence" is an observation about a cost, and it is hard to disagree with.
Why the receiver rarely says it
Even people who notice the pattern clearly tend not to raise it, and the reasons are worth setting out because they are not cowardice.
It arrives as a complaint about somebody's work. The brief is the assigner's output. Saying it was thin is saying their work was poor, which is a thing people avoid upwards regardless of how it is phrased.
The cost is already absorbed. By the time the pattern is visible, the three weeks have been spent and nothing can be recovered. Raising it feels like relitigating something finished for no gain.
It sounds like an excuse. Said after a piece of work ran long, "the brief was thin" is indistinguishable from a person explaining away their own slowness, and both parties know it.
There is no good moment. During the work it reads as a complaint; after it reads as an excuse; at a review it reads as deflection.
The way through all four is timing and specificity: say it at the moment the cost becomes visible, about one fact, with a number attached, and without reference to the brief as a whole.
That goes back to the outline because the reader turned out to be the board — about three days.
Nothing in that sentence is a judgement about anybody's work, and it contains the entire finding.
The version for whoever hands work over
If you want to know whether you are doing this, do not ask whether your briefs are clear. Everybody's briefs are clear to themselves.
Ask the person who did the last one: "what did you have to work out that I could have told you?" The answer arrives in about four seconds, because they remember exactly, and it is the cheapest piece of management information available anywhere on this site.