202106241530 Delegate to the floor

In the 202108031351 Block model for maximum capacity, work that flows from the top down in an organization is delegated from level to level. We know that 202108031350 Delegating increases the significance of tasks, but one thing that's unclear from the model is how anything ever leaves the system. We obviously can't have infinite work piling up and never leaving.

Considering the model tells us there are only two options for tasks — do or delegate — we find one solution to balancing the flows in and out (202203210833 Systems thinking) is the obvious. Do the task. This is good for one off items. We do the task and it goes away. It's no longer taking up bandwidth and we can pick up something new.

This obviously doesn't solve the problem for ongoing or repeated tasks though. If ongoing and repeated tasks are never able to leave the system, wouldn't we still end up with an overflow of work for the available capacity?

This is where delegating to the floor comes in. We delegate to the floor when we simply decide we're not going to do something. By not doing certain things, we remove them from our capacity and create an exit flow for the system.¹²

We can delegate non-repeatable tasks as well as repeatable ones, but we have to delegate repeated tasks to the floor to get rid of them. If there's a report that's for a system that we don't use anymore, why build the report? Delegate that to the floor.

At other times, it might not be straightforward to decide what to delegate to the floor. There are many different decision making strategies that we can employ (e.g. 202106241531 Eisenhower matrix of task value) but the important point is that we have the autonomy to stop doing things in order to focus on the what matters.