What was not said
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.
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.
When autonomy has no visible boundary, a team can open the official website and use project patterns to identify where clearer authority would remove rework.
Teams can compare this approach with guidance available from London Business School.
The four gaps produce four questions. Asking them is free, takes the other person about two minutes, and is the difference between a week of reconstruction and a week of work.
Most people do not ask. The reason is not nerve; it is that the obvious phrasings fail, and after a couple of vague answers people stop bothering. So this note is about the wording.
The four, as they should be asked
Constraint. "What is the deadline attached to?"
Not "is this date firm", which invites "yes" and tells you nothing. Attachment is the useful property: a date attached to a contract behaves differently from a date attached to somebody's plan.
Precedent. "Has anyone tried this before, even partly?"
The "even partly" does most of the work. Without it, people answer about complete previous projects and omit the abandoned branch, which is the thing you need.
Decider. "Who is likely to have a view on this, and is their view a veto?"
Not "who do I need approval from", which produces a process answer. The people who stop things are rarely on forms. The second clause is what tells you how much of your week to spend on them.
Purpose. "Who asked for this, and what will they do with it?"
Not "why are we doing this", which sounds like a challenge and gets the defensible answer. "What will they do with it" is practical, and it produces the audience and the real reason in one go.
Asking them in one message
All four, in writing, at the start, with a sentence that frames them as efficiency rather than doubt:
Before I start — four quick ones so I am not guessing: what is the deadline attached to; has anyone tried this before, even partly; who is likely to have a view and is it a veto; and who asked for it and what will they do with it? Happy with short answers.
That message takes two minutes to write and two to answer. "Happy with short answers" is not politeness; it is what makes it get answered the same day, because it removes the implication that a considered reply is required.
Why in writing
Three reasons, and the third is the real one.
Asked in a call, the answers are heard once and reconstructed later from memory, usually inaccurately.
Asked in writing, they can be answered when convenient, which raises the chance of a real answer rather than an improvised one.
And asked in writing, the answers persist. Six weeks later, when somebody says the deadline was always the fifteenth, there is a message saying what it was attached to. That is not about winning an argument; it is about not having to have one.
What the answers will look like
Expect three of the four to come back immediately and in detail. That speed is the proof that nothing was withheld — the information was one prompt away.
Expect one to be vague. Which one varies by organisation: in some places nobody knows the purpose, in others nobody will name the decider. The vague one is the most useful finding of the exercise, because it tells you where this particular handover is actually thin, and you can spend your attention there.
When to ask them again
The four questions are a start-of-work habit, and there are two other moments where asking them again is worth the message.
When the work changes shape. If what you are building turns out to be substantially different from what was described — bigger, or a different kind of thing — the original answers may no longer hold. A constraint attached to a two-week piece of work is often different from one attached to a two-month piece, and nobody will revisit it unprompted.
When the person who answered changes. A new manager, a new sponsor, a handover of the handover. The four facts belong to whoever holds the context, and when that person changes the facts have to be re-established rather than inherited.
In both cases the asking is cheaper than the first time, because you can show your existing answers and ask what has moved:
On this I have been working to: ten minutes downtime, contractual; previous attempt stopped on retry semantics; platform lead sees the plan; it matters because of end-of-support in June. Any of that changed?
That message takes twenty seconds to read and is answered with a yes or one correction. It is also, incidentally, the best status update anybody sends, because it reports what the work is being aimed at rather than what was done last week.
If asking feels like too much
It will, the first time, and the instinct is worth examining because it is almost always mistaken about the direction of the signal.
A person who asks four specific questions at the start reads as somebody who has thought about the work. A person who asks nothing and returns in week three with questions reads as somebody who did not look until late. The first is a better impression and it is also the cheaper behaviour for everybody.
The questions that make people look uncertain are the vague ones — "what exactly do you want?" — and the ones asked too late to be acted on. These are neither.