Learning Center / Operating an Outcome

Course 2 · Lesson 2 of 5

What recurs

An architect's professional indemnity cover renews on 1 April every year. He has held the policy for eleven years and has never once missed it, because the broker telephones in February. Then the broker retires, the firm that bought the book sends an email instead of telephoning, the email goes to an address he stopped reading, and on 2 April he discovers he has been practising without cover for a day.

Nothing about the outcome changed. The reminder changed.

The renewal cycle

Most recurring outcomes contain a cycle with the same three parts:

• *A period.* Twelve months, three years, a quarter, a week.
• *A lead time.* How long the work takes once it starts. Renewing a licence may take two days. Renewing a lease can take six weeks.
• *An act.* Something that must be done by a date, or the state stops being true.

Write those three down and the arithmetic does the rest. If the licence expires on 14 March and renewal takes two days, the work starts on 1 March, not on 13 March. If the lease ends on 30 September and renegotiation takes six weeks, the letter goes out in the first half of August.

Work backwards, not forwards

A reminder tells you when something is due. A cycle tells you when to start, and those are different dates with a comfortable gap between them.

A student's term follows the same shape: enrolment opens in September, module choices close in October, the dissertation proposal is due in January, submission in May. Four dates, four lead times, one year. A student who works forwards from each reminder spends every deadline week in a state of mild panic. A student who works backwards from the submission date has a plan in October.

Cycles that are not dates

Not every recurring thing has a calendar date attached. Some are triggered by an event:

• A tenancy ends, which starts the deposit return window.
• A statement arrives, which starts the reconciliation.
• A car returns to the yard, which starts the cleaning and the damage check.
• A job is delivered, which starts the invoicing period.

Event-triggered cycles are harder, because the trigger is invisible to anybody not watching for it. The antidote is the same: name the trigger, name the lead time, name the act.

The end date is not the deadline

This is the sentence worth remembering from this lesson. The date printed on the certificate is not when the work starts. It is when it is already too late.

A market trader's pitch agreement expires on 31 December and renewal requires the council to process an application in fourteen days. The deadline is 17 December in a normal year and earlier in a December with two bank holidays in it. The trader who knows this pays in November.

Cycles that nobody owns

The commonest failure is not a missed date. It is a cycle that was never written down as a cycle at all, only as a chore that somebody remembers. Those survive exactly as long as that person's memory, and memory hands over badly at exactly the moment the business is busiest.

A short list of cycles, each with its period, its lead time and its act, is one of the most useful documents a small organisation can hold. It is also one of the least likely to exist.