The Sanitation Problem

Most organisations are managed. A few are actually run. The difference is almost never talent.

Start with the email from last Thursday. The decision you've been cogitating on for a fortnight. The conversation you keep meaning to have. Each one is a small weight. They accumulate. Twenty of them and capable people end the day feeling flattened, unable to explain why.

The standard response is to work harder. Get up earlier. Download the productivity app. These have the virtue of making you feel productive while the pile grows.

There is one move that works. Handle the thing. Every outstanding item gets one of three treatments: do it now if it takes two minutes, put it somewhere you trust with a date on it, or give it to the person whose job it is. No fourth option. Carrying something in your head and calling it thinking is not a fourth option, even though it costs as much as actually doing it.

Do this consistently, and the drag lifts. You find you can think again. Not because you've added hours, but because you've stopped bleeding the ones you have.

This is not a breakthrough idea. It's closer to sanitation. But most of what gets diagnosed as leadership failure, team dysfunction, or individual burnout is, at root, a sanitation problem. Things left undone, accumulating, until the smell becomes someone else's emergency.

“Leave it with me” is the phrase I use most. I mean it literally every time. The trust gets built not in the saying but in the following through, reliably enough that people stop checking. That's the standard worth holding.

The work of handling the undone on an ordinary working day, nothing to show for it, nobody watching, is the mechanism behind every organisation that actually functions. It isn't the strategy. It won't make the case study. But without it, the strategy is just noise.

- Archie, Head of Staff