Learning Center / Operating an Outcome

Course 2 · Lesson 5 of 5

Knowing when it is done

A solicitor closes a client matter. The file goes into the archive, the final bill is issued, the client is told. Three weeks later a letter arrives from the other side's solicitor, and somebody has to work out whether the matter was ever really closed or merely assumed to be.

Done is not a feeling of completion. Done is a state that somebody else could confirm.

Writing a definition of done

For an outcome that happens once, done is usually obvious. For an outcome that recurs, it needs writing down, because the whole point of a recurring outcome is that it is never finished permanently.

Take a tenancy renewal, an outcome that happens forty times a year:

The renewal is done when the signed agreement covering the new term is on file, the deposit

scheme record shows the new term, the first payment of the new term has been received or

scheduled, and the previous term's record is closed.

Four conditions. Anybody in the office can check all four in three minutes. Any one of them missing means the renewal is not done, no matter how far along it looks.

The four conditions also reveal where renewals actually fail: often not at the signature, but at the deposit scheme record, which is a separate system that nobody opened.

What done is not

• *Done is not "sent".* Sending is an activity. The application arrives or it does not.
• *Done is not "the client seems happy".* That is a signal, not a state.
• *Done is not "nothing is on fire".* Quiet is the normal condition of unfinished work.
• *Done is not the same as the deadline.* Some outcomes are done early, some are done late, and the definition does not move.

Outcomes that should end

Not every outcome deserves to continue. Three endings exist, and only one of them is success:

• *Achieved and closed.* The bridge is open, the album is released, the dissertation is submitted.
• *Abandoned deliberately.* The client retired, the plot was sold, the tour was cancelled. Written down and closed, this is a decision. Not written down, it becomes a ghost.
• *Transferred.* Somebody else now holds it, with a named date and a named handover.

The fourth possibility, which is not an ending, is the dangerous one. An outcome that nobody is working on and nobody has closed sits in the diary taking up attention for years. A photographer with four hundred unedited shoots from three years ago is not holding an outcome. She is holding a debt.

Give every outcome an off-switch

Two dates, written in the same place as the outcome:

*A review date.* When will somebody ask whether this outcome still needs to exist? Annually is usually enough. A renewal that has run for six years with no thought is a candidate for the bin.

*A stopping rule. What would make this end? If the client has not responded by the third attempt, the matter is closed and the file is archived.* Deciding this in advance is far easier than deciding it in the twelfth week of silence.

The honest part

Most people carry more outcomes than they can hold, and the reason is almost never laziness. It is that nothing they hold has ever been given an off-switch, so the pile only grows. Closing something deliberately is not a failure of commitment. It is the same skill as naming, applied in the other direction.