Five Ways to Do Something
There are five ways to do something:
Trust someone else to do it.
Trust someone else to do it and verify that they did it.
Do it together.
Do it yourself.
Not do it.
And just because you did something one way once, doesn’t mean you have to do it that way ever again. In fact, the way to do most things should be evolving over time. Take, for example, the task of my son getting dressed. We couldn’t not do it, so first, when he was a baby, my wife and I did it. Then, as he grew up and had opinions, we did it together. Now that he’s almost a teenager, he does it himself but we check to make sure he makes appropriate choices. Then someday he’ll do it all himself (though I still need to teach him to tie a tie.)
So that’s one effective use of this paradigm. How is what am I doing getting done and is it the best right way? If my wife and I were still dressing my son, for example, that’d be a big red flag.
But thinking about the world this way can also be an effective way to organize action items at the end of any collaboration. Because if you have a list of ideas it’s important to know who’s doing what and, sometimes more importantly, what you’re not going to do. Further, decide what can and should be outsourced, what needs further collaboration, and what an independent contributor can do on his or her own.
Lastly, this framework can help identify processes that are not working, which is what’s happening when a task is getting done in more than one of these ways. For example, if there is something you don’t think should be done, but someone else is doing it, that's a problem. Or if someone thinks you’re trusting them to do it, but you’re also actually doing it, that’s confusing. Or worse if someone thinks you’re trusting them to do something, but you’re verifying, that might be undermining.
The point isn’t that there is an optimal way to do anything (and it can get more complicated than this), but rather that when you do or don’t do something you should be explicit with everyone involved about which one of the five ways you are choosing to do it and why. Otherwise you’re inviting inefficiency into your organization and creating the potential for conflict on your team.
– By Tim Hanson