Recently deceased assumptions
A few management assumptions worth revisiting. Keep what still helps. Retire what gets in the way.
Served faithfully. Outlasted several of its own tasks.
A role description helps people understand responsibility. It becomes less useful when the work changes faster than the document.
Keep clarity about purpose, authority and accountability.
List the tasks that changed in the last six months. Then ask whether the role’s boundaries still make sense.
Expected to finish in June. Nobody specified which June.
A programme can finish. The need to respond to changing capability, customers and conditions continues.
Keep deadlines for concrete commitments and reviews.
Separate the things you can complete from the capabilities you will need to keep exercising.
Completed every module. Still could not get permission.
Training cannot by itself fix missing authority, inaccessible information or a process that blocks the work.
Keep deliberate practice and learning that responds to real gaps.
Before booking the course, identify whether the obstacle is knowledge, information, permission or workflow.
All the boxes were correct. The work went somewhere else.
Reporting lines explain one kind of authority. They often leave out the handovers, informal expertise and exceptions on which delivery depends.
Keep visible accountability. Add the connections people actually rely on.
Follow one piece of work across the organisation and draw every handover.
Produced at 9:42. Understood sometime after lunch.
Output still has to be checked, accepted, integrated and used. Faster production can move effort onto someone else.
Keep a clear definition of what an acceptable outcome looks like.
Measure the effort from the first request to a result someone can use.
Present at every incident. Responsible for none of them.
A comforting phrase that names a box on a process map. It rarely says which human, making which decision, at what point, with what evidence and what authority.
Keep humans accountable for outcomes, with the time, understanding and authority to intervene.
Pick one AI-assisted process and answer the five questions above in writing. If any answer is “unclear”, so is the safety.
Deployed to thousands. Changed almost nothing.
Licences, logins and usage dashboards measure contact with a tool, not change in the work. Plenty of organisations have crossed this finish line and found nothing on the other side of it.
Keep measuring, but measure the work. Cycle time, rework, error, customer outcome.
Take your most-quoted adoption number and ask what changed in the work of the ten heaviest users. Answers may vary.
Seen an assumption that deserves a plot here? Send the epitaph to info@eatshiftdie.com. Best submissions get buried with full honours.