How Do You Know It Will Land?

The review is on Thursday. Every workstream on the slide is green. The program lead walks through the milestones, the open risks have owners, and the room nods along.

Then someone asks: besides the meetings, the status updates and the reports, how do we actually know this is going to land?

If the honest answer is "because the updates say so," the initiative is supplying its own evidence. The update is the initiative describing itself. A good report shows progress and surfaces risk, and you need both. What it can't show you is what happens at the handoffs.

The update is the initiative describing itself.

What happens at the handoffs

Almost no initiative that matters lives inside one function. It crosses layers and teams, and every handoff is a moment where someone has to decide what happens next: act or escalate, accept the work they were handed or send it back. None of those moments show up on a slide until one of them goes wrong.

So alongside the report, ask two questions about the people carrying the work.

What can people decide without you?

Early in a role running a business unit, I had two functional leads who kept bringing me decisions they already had the authority to make. Performance and discipline issues on their own teams. Routine requests from other functions. Items they would double-check with me, or route through me, before acting.

They weren't weak leaders, and the authority was already theirs. What they didn't have was anyone telling them their left and right limits, so every decision felt safer with me. I was absorbing work that wasn't mine, at an altitude that wasn't mine.

So I wrote the limits into their job scope: what they could decide on their own, when they needed to bring something to me, and what had to come to me no matter what. It became a quick reference they kept at their desks, which is what separated it from another chart in a shared drive. Our meetings got sharper, and better information went up the chain because I was no longer distilling the small stuff on its way through. A peer running another business unit saw it and used the same approach with his own leaders.

Notice that a real limit has two sides. Most delegation tells people what they can say yes to. Far less of it tells them what they can say no to. Without both, people either escalate everything or agree to everything, and the plan pays for it either way.

Ask the people at each handoff what they can decide without asking anyone. If they hesitate, the initiative is moving at the speed of your calendar.

Could anyone involved recite what "done" means?

Most initiatives have a definition of done somewhere, in a charter or a kickoff deck. The real question is whether the people doing the work carry the same one.

Ask three of them, separately, what would have to be true before they would call it finished. Not the milestone dates - the finish line. Then compare what each of them would accept, not just the words they use.

If you get three different answers, the status reports are measuring progress toward three different finish lines, and "green" means on track to whichever one the person reporting has in mind. Nobody is hiding anything. They are aiming at different targets, and the report can't see the difference.

A good definition of done is short enough that anyone involved could state it word for word, in a hallway, without notes, and specific enough that they would all accept the same result. If it takes a slide to explain, it isn't a definition yet.

Here is a test for any initiative you can't afford to lose. Imagine you stopped reading the updates for a month. Would the people carrying the work still know what they can decide, and would they all recognize finished when they reached it?

If not, the green on the slide is carrying more confidence than the work underneath it has earned.

A green report on its own gives you the feeling of confidence. Clear limits and a shared finish line give you the grounds for it.

Mike