The Seventh Yes

Nobody changed the plan. By the end of the quarter, it was a different plan anyway.

Picture a team that starts the quarter with five commitments and the people to deliver them. A few weeks in, a peer function asks for help with a customer escalation. Reasonable. Then a senior leader wants a quick analysis ahead of a board discussion. Also reasonable. Then a launch elsewhere needs two people borrowed, then a new recurring report, then a pilot someone else is sponsoring. The seventh request takes about eleven minutes to approve.

Every one of those yeses was defensible on its own. Nobody did anything wrong. And when anyone finally looks at the original five, two of them have quietly slipped to "later," and nobody can say when that was decided, or by whom.

Yes got delegated. No stayed at the top.

Look at almost any delegation of authority and you will find spending limits, hiring, contract signatures. Every one of those is a form of yes. Nobody wrote "authority to refuse" on the page, because it does not read like a power. It reads like a personality trait.

So the people on your team can commit real capacity without asking you, and almost none of them can decline a request from a peer function without asking you first. The cost of saying yes is nothing. The cost of saying no is a conversation with the boss, a justification, and the risk of looking uncooperative. People are rational. They say yes.

Which means your capacity is being allocated by whoever asked most recently.

Approvals are granted one at a time. Capacity is spent all at once. Nowhere in your operating calendar is there an exchange rate between the two.

Where the arithmetic actually happens

Five commitments plus seven yeses cannot fit in the space of five. The conversion still has to happen, and somebody is doing it. That person is usually two or three layers down, holds none of the decision rights involved, and performs the trade every week in the form of what quietly slips.

They would not call it a decision. They would call it sequencing. The slipped commitment is still on the plan, it is just later, and "later" is a word that lets a real prioritization call pass as a scheduling note.

This is also where "everything is priority one" comes from. When a leader declines to rank, the ranking does not stop. It moves down to whoever is closest to the work, and they rank on instinct. What is loudest this week. What is easiest to finish. Whose manager is most intimidating. You still end up with a real priority list. You just cannot see it, because on paper everything is still equally important.

So the most consequential trade-off in your plan, which commitments actually get the people, has been delegated by accident to the level with the least authority to make it and the least information about what each one is worth.

Putting the trade-off back where the yes happens

The first move is to perform the conversion in the room that approves the work. When a new commitment is approved, name what it displaces, in the same meeting, before the record closes. A specific thing. A date that moves. A team that gives up two people. If nobody in the room can name it, the yes was not actually made. It was only announced, and somebody downstream will make it for you.

The second is to delegate the no. Write down the level at which someone can turn down a request on your behalf. Then, the first time one of them does it and the other function comes to you, back them where that function can see it. A delegated no that gets overturned once, in public, teaches everyone the authority was never really granted.

The third is the least comfortable. Say out loud what is first, and accept by saying it that other real things come after. A priority you are not willing to protect at the expense of something else is not a priority. It is a wish with good marketing.

The work does not drift from the plan because people stop caring about the plan. It drifts because every yes had an owner, and every trade-off did not.

Mike