What was not said
What was not said
The context that never arrived, the context that arrived in week three, and why the people holding it cannot see that it is missing.
Decisions this page is about, and where the line actually was
Picking the library for the new parser
1 → 4The architect had a standing view
Dropping a requirement nobody had asked about in six weeks
2 → 5A commitment made before you joined
Telling a customer a date
3 → 6Dates are committed by one person here
- 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
three decisions · not one of them gave you more room than you thought · three gave you less · the median gap was three steps on the scale
Three of the nine decisions counted on this site, all going the same way.
The context that arrives in week three
Information that arrives after the decisions it should have governed is a second brief, arriving into work already shaped around its absence.
Four lines of chat and nothing else
The worst handovers are not the hurried ones. They are the ones where the work sounded simple enough that nobody thought a brief was needed.
What the person handing over forgot
Nobody withholds the four things. They are invisible to whoever holds them, in the specific way that anything learned by being present becomes invisible.
The curse of knowing where the line is
Once you know something, you cannot reconstruct not knowing it. This is why experienced people are often the worst at handing work over, and what to do about it.
Reading a brief for what is missing
Ten minutes with a new brief, looking for the four absences rather than reading what is there. A procedure and the questions each gap produces.
Asking the four questions at the start
Four questions, one message, two minutes of somebody's time. The wording matters more than it should, and this is the wording that works.
The handover that had everything
Only one of eight arrived with all four things. What it contained, what it cost to write, and why the practice does not spread on its own.
Written briefs and the ones nobody writes
Remote work is supposed to force things into writing. In practice it forces the task into writing and leaves the context in the places it always was.