Overload, delegation and renegotiation

Emergency triage

Sometimes the load genuinely exceeds capacity. That is not an organisational failing, it is a volume problem, and it is handled differently.

Protocol, twenty minutes.

1. List every commitment in progress, without exception, with its real deadline.
2. Sort into three categories. A, serious consequences if not done. B, real but manageable consequences. C, no consequences or minimal ones.
3. Drop all of C, explicitly, telling the people concerned. That is usually twenty to thirty per cent of the list.
4. Renegotiate B: deadlines, scope, expected quality.
5. Put everything into A.

The difficulty is not identifying C. It is announcing it.

Delegating cleanly