A plan and a request

The plan for the autumn is written by now. Tomorrow the offices fill up again and the first meeting will treat every line on it as work.

So the last quiet morning is worth spending on one question, asked line by line: does this need anybody outside this team.

Some of it does not. The writing needs nobody. The replies need nobody. The send times, the words on the menu, the order the products sit in on the page, the photographs, the shop window, the opening hours on the listing, the answer to the question the same customer asks forty times a week. None of that waits on a signature, a budget increase, a supplier or a meeting. It waits on somebody sitting down and doing it, which is a different kind of difficulty and a much smaller one.

The rest of the list is stock arriving, a licence granted, a price approved, a developer's fortnight, a contract signed, a person hired who has not been interviewed yet.

Both halves go into the same document, in the same font, under the same heading, and both get a status colour in the monthly review. That is where the quarter goes wrong. The first list is a plan. The second list is a request, and a request belongs to whoever can grant it.

So I separate them on the page, and I write the word request beside the lines that are one, with a name and a date next to each. It reads worse than a plan. It is also the only version that is true.

A team that does not draw that line spends the quarter answering for decisions it was never allowed to make.