Lesson 29: Write Down What Worked, Then Give It a 90-Day Owner
The improvement held for exactly as long as the person who built it stayed in the role.
She moved to another team in month four. By month seven the daily operator checks she’d introduced were being done twice a week, then not at all. The signal drifted back. When I asked what happened, the answer was the one I’ve heard many times since: nobody knew they were supposed to keep doing it.
Which was true. It was in her notebook, in her head, and in a habit she’d built personally. None of those transfer.
The Rule: Short Cycles Are Experiments, Medium Cycles Are Policy
A thirty-day loop proves something can work. It doesn’t prove it’ll survive contact with a reorganization, a busy quarter, or the departure of the person who cared most.
That’s what the ninety-day owner is for. Someone accountable for the improvement continuing to exist after the excitement has worn off and the original team has moved on to the next thing.
A Real Example: The Automation That Outlived Its Author
After losing that first improvement, I changed how we closed a cycle.
We produced a compact lessons-learned document. Three sections: what to keep, what to stop, and what we still don’t know. It ran to about a page and a half and took an afternoon.
Then we named a ninety-day owner with a specific deliverable – not “monitor this,” which means nothing, but a plan to convert the daily manual operator checks into an automated validation that ran without anybody remembering to run it.
The automation shipped inside the ninety days. The signal improvement held after the original owner had gone, because by then it didn’t depend on any particular person noticing.
The lessons-learned document turned out to have a second life I hadn’t anticipated. When a new team lead joined eight months later, it was the thing that told her why the process looked the way it did. Without it she’d have inherited a set of rules with no reasoning attached, and the first thing people do with unexplained rules is remove them.
How To Do This Yourself
At the close of every thirty-day cycle:
- Write the three sections. Wins to keep. Failures to stop – and be specific, because a vague failure teaches nobody anything. Open questions you didn’t resolve.
- Include the things that didn’t work. A document that only records success is marketing, and the next person will trust none of it.
- Name a ninety-day owner. One person. Not a team, not a committee.
- Give them a deliverable, not a duty. “Automate the daily check” is a deliverable. “Keep an eye on adherence” is a wish.
- Book the day-90 briefing now, while you’re all still in the room. Fifteen minutes: did it hold, what decayed, what’s next.
Say plainly that the ninety-day owner doesn’t have to be the person who built it. Often it shouldn’t be – the improvement needs to prove it can be carried by someone who wasn’t there when it was made.
The Honest Lesson
This is the least enjoyable lesson in the series and the one I’d defend hardest.
Writing up what happened after the work is done feels like homework. The energy is gone, the team wants to move on, and there’s always something more urgent. I skipped it for years and paid for it repeatedly, always in the same way: a good system quietly dying because the only copy of the reasoning left the building.
The mistake I’d most warn against is naming a ninety-day owner without a deliverable. I’ve done it. It’s a comfortable thing to do because it feels like you’ve handled the risk. Ninety days later the owner reports that things are broadly fine, nobody has measured anything, and the improvement is already half gone.
Accountability without a specific artifact isn’t accountability. It’s a name on a slide.
Close your current cycle with a page and a half and a named owner with something to build. It’s the least glamorous half-day you’ll spend and it’s the reason the work outlives you.
Next time, I’ll close out this series with “Publicize One Measurable Result and Announce the Next Flow” – see you there.