The little RedQuadrant rules

Little RedQuadrant rule #1: Start with purpose. A project plan without purpose is decorative administration.

1. Start with purpose. A project plan without purpose is decorative administration.
2. Ask ‘What would you like to happen?’ before asking what’s wrong.
3. Keep the final outcome and the next concrete action in view at the same time.
4. A next action has a person, a verb, an object, and a time. Otherwise it’s weather.
5. If nobody leaves able to act, the meeting produced minutes, not movement.
6. Facts before ideas.
7. Never accept a plausible explanation merely because it arrived fluently.
8. A fluent explanation can be ignorance that has practised.
9. Say what you saw, not the motive you assigned to it.
10. Only the truth sounds like the truth. Unfortunately, bullshit can rehearse.
11. Every word is a prejudice. Use words anyway, carefully.
12. Ask ‘So what?’ until the answer touches a choice.
13. Ask ‘Now what?’ before the energy leaks away.
14. Don’t use ‘strategic’ to mean ‘far away from the work’.
15. Don’t call it transformation because the PowerPoint has arrows.
16. Current results tell you more about the actual design than the strategy deck does.
17. Never confuse announced purpose with operative purpose.
18. Don’t ask for values. Watch the trade-offs.
19. The values are in the calendar, the budget, the queue, the exception, and who gets interrupted.
20. Every policy is an intervention in somebody’s day.
21. Every intervention contains an idea of the sort of person being intervened upon.
22. State your assumptions before they harden into facts.
23. State uncertainty before someone else mistakes confidence for evidence.
24. Label inference as inference.
25. Confidence is not competence.
26. Novelty is not insight.
27. ‘Common sense’ means somebody’s context has become invisible.
28. Data selection is a political act, even when the spreadsheet is pastel.
29. The map is not the terrain. It is also not innocent.
30. Ask what the map leaves out.
31. Ask who benefits from that omission.
32. It will always be flawed. So what?
33. Every time you advise someone who is free to choose, you are consulting.
34. Consultancy begins before the contract and continues after the invoice.
35. The technical problem and the relationship around the problem are both the work.
36. Techniques are not enough.
37. A larger toolbox can make a more dangerous fool.
38. The client’s stated problem is the beginning, not the brief.
39. Look for the client behind the client.
40. Look for the problem behind the problem.
41. Look for the consultant inside the problem.
42. Ask what your presence makes easier, and what it makes impossible.
43. Take half the responsibility for a half-owned relationship.
44. Don’t take 100 per cent responsibility for a 50–50 relationship.
45. Don’t hide from your 50 per cent behind ‘client ownership’.
46. Don’t steal the client’s work.
47. Don’t abandon the client in the name of empowerment.
48. Help can become control wearing a fleece.
49. Curiosity is usually less violent than advice.
50. When you feel compelled to rescue someone, ask what you’re rescuing yourself from.
51. Expertise is a gift. Domination is not.
52. Use your expertise plainly, then return the choice.
53. Contracting isn’t administration before the work. It is the first work.
54. Contract repeatedly. Reality has no duty to honour the original terms.
55. Say what you want from the client.
56. Ask what the client wants from you.
57. Agree what each of you will do.
58. Agree what neither of you will do.
59. Ask what can be said in this room.
60. Ask what must be carried elsewhere.
61. Ask who can stop the work.
62. Ask who pays, who decides, and who has to live with the result.
63. A triangular contract exists whether or not anybody has drawn the triangle.
64. ‘Stakeholders’ are often people whose names haven’t been learned.
65. A clean contract can still contain dirty power.
66. Client responsibility never cancels expert duty.
67. Power asymmetry doesn’t disappear because everybody uses first names.
68. Name the mixed motives. Organisations have them because people do.
69. Ask directly about exposure, control, vulnerability, and the fear of looking stupid.
70. Resistance is information about the offer, the relationship, the risk, or the history.
71. Don’t diagnose resistance as a quality located inside the other person.
72. When the work is stuck, say ‘I think we’re stuck’.
73. Then stop talking.
74. Silence isn’t failure unless you fill it with panic.
75. Feedback is data plus joint interpretation, not a verdict.
76. Share relevant inconvenient data, including data outside the original assignment.
77. Involve the client in interpreting what the data means.
78. Don’t collude by inventing explanations that leave the solution outside the client’s control.
79. Don’t project your anxiety and call it their unreadiness.
80. Support the client where they’re right.
81. Confront them where they’re helping to reproduce the problem.
82. Say both without making a compliment sandwich.
83. Be descriptive, focused, specific, brief, and human.
84. Authenticity isn’t dumping.
85. Confidentiality isn’t secrecy.
86. Never speak against an individual client person for sport.
87. Don’t wait for someone else’s transformation.
88. Ask ‘How am I contributing to the thing I’m complaining about?’
89. Being right about them may still leave you powerless.
90. Blame offers short-term relief and long-term helplessness.
91. No blame doesn’t mean no accountability.
92. Accountability without voice is surveillance.
93. Voice without consequence is theatre.
94. A compulsory ‘yes’ is not commitment.
95. Make room for ‘no’.
96. Dissent is often the first honest part of commitment.
97. Ask for doubts before they become delays.
98. When someone says ‘There’s no time’, ask what reservation the timetable is protecting.
99. When someone says ‘There’s no budget’, inspect priority before arithmetic.
100. When someone says ‘Everybody agrees’, find the silent person.
101. When someone says ‘We all know’, ask how.
102. Don’t get people ‘on board’ before checking whether there is a boat.
103. If there is a boat, ask who chose the destination.
104. Don’t enrol people into a future they had no part in forming.
105. An invitation without a real possibility of refusal is an instruction in a cardigan.
106. Participation without power is unpaid user testing.
107. Co-production isn’t asking people to colour in a decision.
108. Engagement isn’t persuasion with biscuits.
109. A mandate can start work. It cannot manufacture ownership.
110. Prefer participation to presentation.
111. A recommendation nobody owns is organisational litter.
112. Confront people with their agency, not just their need.
113. Don’t treat adults as children because the system is anxious.
114. Partnership is not better parenting.
115. Ask what promise someone is prepared to make, not what incentive will purchase them.
116. Bring gifts into the centre, especially gifts found at the margins.
117. Deficiency industries need people to remain deficient.
118. A gap analysis may reveal the gap analyst’s business model.
119. Don’t spend your whole life improving the same weakness.
120. You cannot serve people you haven’t met.
121. Data about people isn’t a relationship with them.
122. A persona isn’t a person.
123. A case isn’t a citizen.
124. ‘Hard to reach’ usually describes the institution’s arm length.
125. ‘Complex family’ often means that several simple services have collided.
126. The citizen is inside the system, not waiting outside to be processed.
127. The professional is also inside the system, not a neutral hand descending from a cloud.
128. Relationship is infrastructure, not soft material around the real work.
129. Start with the person’s purpose, not the service’s category.
130. Demand is the system’s description. Purpose is the person’s.
131. Need is never simply discovered. It is interpreted, negotiated, and made consequential.
132. Standardise when you can, personalise when you must.
133. Don’t standardise away the reason the service exists.
134. Don’t personalise preventable chaos.
135. Absorb complexity at the boundary instead of bouncing it back to the citizen.
136. A good boundary worker needs judgement, authority, information, time, and backup.
137. Autonomy without support is abandonment.
138. Control without intelligence is panic.
139. Front-line staff don’t need ‘empowerment’ to carry more pain.
140. Build sensors where life meets the organisation.
141. A complaint is a sensor.
142. A complaints process can turn the sensor into an anaesthetic.
143. Failure demand is intelligence sent collect.
144. Queues are policies made visible.
145. Handoffs are where purpose goes to lose its coat.
146. Every form contains a theory of the citizen.
147. Every exception tells the truth about the standard.
148. Good service often costs less.
149. Don’t make humanity justify itself solely through savings.
150. Efficiency in every part can make the whole brittle.
151. Redundancy isn’t waste when the world varies.
152. Spare capacity is how a system breathes.
153. Economies of scale can create diseconomies of distance.
154. Automation scales assumptions before it scales value.
155. Never automate a relationship you haven’t understood.
156. Before buying ‘business automation’, ask whose business, whose process, and whose view.
157. Digital transformation is often analogue confusion in a better typeface.
158. Procurement can purchase outputs. It cannot outsource purpose.
159. A contract can move risk on paper while reality keeps it.
160. Count the end-to-end cost: chasing, checking, correcting, escalating, waiting, repeating, and apologising.
161. Local optimisation is a system-wide tax.
162. Targets create shadow systems. Look there before declaring success.
163. What gets measured gets managed, gamed, displaced, or worshipped.
164. What isn’t measured still acts.
165. Every dashboard is a theory of what deserves to exist.
166. A system is a distinction made by an observer for a purpose.
167. Don’t turn the distinction into a thing, then blame the thing.
168. The organisation isn’t the system.
169. The organisation chart isn’t the organisation.
170. The process map isn’t the process.
171. A causal loop isn’t a cause.
172. One map that pleases everybody probably omits the conflict.
173. Boundaries are decisions with beneficiaries and casualties.
174. Ask who is inside, who is outside, and who is affected anyway.
175. Anyone claiming a ‘whole-system view’ is standing somewhere.
176. Include the observer in the observation.
177. Include the method in the effects.
178. Include yourself in the mess.
179. Systems language doesn’t exempt you from ordinary evidence.
180. Calling something complex isn’t permission to be vague.
181. Complexity depends on framing, purpose, knowledge, time, and the ability to act.
182. A problem can be complex for you and routine for somebody else.
183. Don’t hide incompetence behind complexity.
184. Don’t flatten uncertainty into a risk register.
185. Don’t flatten politics into stakeholder management.
186. Don’t flatten relationships into process.
187. Don’t flatten outcomes into indicators.
188. Don’t flatten indicators into targets.
189. A green light can conceal a burning building.
190. A red light can show that the sensor works.
191. Surprise isn’t always failure. Sometimes it’s contact with the world.
192. Strengthen sensing before strengthening prediction.
193. Ask what is accumulating.
194. Ask what is draining away.
195. Ask what comes back amplified.
196. Ask what comes back too late.
197. Ask what everybody is compensating for.
198. Ask what behaviour is locally rational.
199. Ask who bears the cost of adaptation.
200. Ask which rules people must break to do the job.
201. The workaround is often the real process.
202. The official process is sometimes the alibi.
203. Policy resistance isn’t mere disobedience. It may be the system answering back.
204. Don’t blame people for gaming while paying them to play the game.
205. Every control creates a counter-control.
206. Every simplification exports complexity somewhere.
207. Every centralisation creates new local work.
208. Every decentralisation creates new coordination.
209. Requisite variety is not a slogan for more meetings.
210. Stop calling exhaustion ‘resilience’.
211. Put variety where the response is needed.
212. The person who sweeps the floor should choose the broom.
213. The person using the system should help shape the system.
214. Anybody held accountable needs the means to respond.
215. Work at three levels: output, process, and system.
216. Fix the output when somebody needs the answer now.
217. Fix the process so the next person doesn’t need rescuing.
218. Fix the system so the process can remain fixed.
219. ‘Five whys’ can become an interrogation. Use it when the causality warrants it.
220. Root causes are rarer than roots.
221. A limited scope may save the project and kill the purpose. Hold both facts.
222. Never reinvent the wheel. Always reinvent the wheel. This wheel is on a different road.
223. Borrow methods, but inspect their assumptions before inheriting their claims.
224. A framework should help you notice. It shouldn’t make you right.
225. Hammer training includes learning to recognise non-nails.
226. Methodology is too small a god to worship.
227. Multi-methodology isn’t emptying the toolbox onto the table.
228. Use the right tool. You cannot slice a loaf with a pencil.
229. Every ‘but’ is an ‘and’; every ‘and’ is a ‘but’.
230. Be philosophical enough to challenge the frame, and pragmatic enough to send the invitation.
231. Start fast when action will teach you.
232. Slow down when speed will only repeat the mistake more efficiently.
233. A prototype is a question made material.
234. Prototype the relationship as well as the service.
235. ‘Safe to fail’ doesn’t mean safe for the people carrying the downside.
236. Scale is not copying. It may mean connecting people who can learn from one another.
237. Learn by doing.
238. You learn nothing from experience alone.
239. Reflection without altered action is tasteful rumination; action without reflection is recurring expense.
240. Build capacity while delivering, not afterwards.
241. Make the method transparent enough for the client to disagree intelligently.
242. Make yourself unnecessary, but stick around long enough to deliver and leave before dependency becomes the product.
243. Ending is a legitimate phase: what happened, what changed, what remains, and who owns the next move?
244. Arrange the room as though relationships matter.
245. Always rearrange it at least enough to expose the defaults.
246. Geometry is governance.
247. Put people with strangers. Like-mindedness is comfortable and unsurprising.
248. The small group is the unit of transformation. Don’t leave it together long enough to found a sect.
249. Don’t make speeches.
250. Ask questions that are ambiguous, personal, and slightly alarming.
251. Don’t answer a question that was doing useful work.
252. Every workshop needs a purpose, an outcome, and a concrete next action. A workshop isn’t the change.
253. Plan the food, access, temperature, toilets, technology, cables, and breaks. Catering is infrastructure.
254. Prepare, bring extra pens, make backups, name the version, over-communicate by a factor of ten, and then check that you actually said the thing.
255. The issues are serious. The people needn’t be. Play beautiful football.
256. Do the next thing. Sweep the floor. Back up the file. Send the follow-up. Pay the invoice. Go home.