Everything has to sit with the team

I used to work with someone who always said the same phrase.

Everything has to sit with a team.

What did he mean by this?

Simply put, there was no longer any ad hoc pieces of work sitting on someone's notepad that they said they were getting round to.

Everything was on a board, and every task on that board had a name against it saying who was going to pick it up.

The part I have only come to realise since though is that for this to work, it has to sit with a team that is genuinely capable of delivering it.

This sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is, but in practice it gets overlooked constantly.

In the world of AI augmented delivery that I live in, people are routinely expected to advise or deliver on work they have not been equipped to do.

This gets highlighted in most organisations at the sign-off point, when the professionals are asked to put their name behind what has been discussed (for much longer than it needed to be).

Over the past year I have sat in a lot of rooms with businesses trying to work out whether they can say yes to AI implementations.

When the security, compliance and risk professionals all get asked to raise their views the difficulty is almost always that they do not know what they do not know, so rather than a decision or a clear path you get a stall, because nobody can responsibly approve something they have not been given the grounding to understand.

The inspiration for this post came after I finished The Trillion Dollar Coach, about Bill Campbell. Campbell is in a board meeting, a serious problem gets raised, and rather than let the room grind through it he closes the item by saying "I know which team will handle that".

There was no attempt to come to a solution, because that was not the point of the meeting. Campbell, a former football coach, simply had complete belief in the teams the organisation already had within it, and their ability to deal with the problems.

Because when it comes down to it, what good is a system if the people who are part of it don't have the right skills to operate it?

If this resonates, or it is something you are actively wrestling with, whether that is rethinking the systems themselves or upskilling the people who will end up running them, please do drop me a message.

Thank you for reading.

Oli