It has driven me to some “back to basics” thinking. One model I’ve been playing with lately is the triad of Exception, Presence, and Delegation. The ideas aren’t new, but it has sparked some good conversations and thoughts.t
The specific cost of delegation without exception systems: the problem doesn't disappear, they just becomes distributed. Instead of one bottleneck surfacing visibly at the system level, you get every team hitting the same ambiguity wall independently ...in separate rooms, at different times, with no shared language for what went wrong.
It looks like isolated failures but it's a coordination architecture problem wearing the costume of individual ones. The exception system isn't bureaucracy- it is what makes shared context possible at scale.
The "exec says we're empowered, team says nothing is actually delegated" pattern was the most common failure I saw in 15+ years of project and engineering portfolios (automotive, rail systems, industrial sensors). The cause was almost never a missing intention — it was the missing list: nobody had written down which decisions the team owned and which ones triggered an escalation. Verbal authority didn't survive the first real surprise.
Nice one @cutlefish. I've been writing about something I'm calling the delegation trap, which maps to your "delegation without exceptions and presence" failure mode from a different angle.
When leaders push authority to teams, to AI, to tools, without the exception systems
and shared context that give delegation meaning, what you get isn't autonomy. Rather, it's
This definitely resonates really strongly with my experience lately. AI is making us faster but we're launching many more initiatives in an org and especially roles that haven't been adapted to that configuration. I'm overloaded with too many topics, and just being told to handle 'context-switching' better, meanwhile I've been flagging top-down strategy clarity and prioritization as real needs for months now (so trying to obtain more PRESENCE or clearer DELEGATION from higher up). On the other side I've also been constantly struggling to bring bottom-up visibility since so many initiatives means condensing information for escalation (= improving EXCEPTION flagging) is exponentially more difficult. It's definitely exhausting.
The specific cost of delegation without exception systems: the problem doesn't disappear, they just becomes distributed. Instead of one bottleneck surfacing visibly at the system level, you get every team hitting the same ambiguity wall independently ...in separate rooms, at different times, with no shared language for what went wrong.
It looks like isolated failures but it's a coordination architecture problem wearing the costume of individual ones. The exception system isn't bureaucracy- it is what makes shared context possible at scale.
The "exec says we're empowered, team says nothing is actually delegated" pattern was the most common failure I saw in 15+ years of project and engineering portfolios (automotive, rail systems, industrial sensors). The cause was almost never a missing intention — it was the missing list: nobody had written down which decisions the team owned and which ones triggered an escalation. Verbal authority didn't survive the first real surprise.
Nice one @cutlefish. I've been writing about something I'm calling the delegation trap, which maps to your "delegation without exceptions and presence" failure mode from a different angle.
When leaders push authority to teams, to AI, to tools, without the exception systems
and shared context that give delegation meaning, what you get isn't autonomy. Rather, it's
diffused accountability dressed as ownership.
This definitely resonates really strongly with my experience lately. AI is making us faster but we're launching many more initiatives in an org and especially roles that haven't been adapted to that configuration. I'm overloaded with too many topics, and just being told to handle 'context-switching' better, meanwhile I've been flagging top-down strategy clarity and prioritization as real needs for months now (so trying to obtain more PRESENCE or clearer DELEGATION from higher up). On the other side I've also been constantly struggling to bring bottom-up visibility since so many initiatives means condensing information for escalation (= improving EXCEPTION flagging) is exponentially more difficult. It's definitely exhausting.
This was great, thanks for sharing it. I’m currently in discussion with @Sachin about similar topics, for example the heaviness you mentioned!
How do I sign up for the next SF meetup?