The TRIGGER is what starts the process.

When you find yourself saying (or even thinking) things like: “I just assumed they would …” “I’d just expect people to …” “I shouldn’t have to explain …” These are red flags that indicate there's a disconnect with an output that is required or expected. The best thing to do in this case is to make sure you’re clear on the output you want to see and

That’s why it’s useful to specify certain types of decisions as outputs. Then they can be assigned to people and those people can be trained and evaluated.

Teams need workflows to be designed and structures within which people can be most effective. It is the manager’s job to provide these if they want to maximize productivity.

The INPUT is what people need in order to operate the system.

Good management starts by defining what outputs someone needs to produce.

When you find yourself saying (or even thinking) things like: “I just assumed they would …” “I’d just expect people to …” “I shouldn’t have to explain …” These are red flags that indicate there's a disconnect with an output that is required or expected. The best thing to do in this case is to make sure you’re clear on the output you want to see and

It’s accountability all the way down. Sounds simple when it’s said like that. But a culture of accountability is not as common as you’d think. It’s simple but not easy, and incredibly powerful—even though it leads to hard conversations if the outputs are not adequate.

Brilliant process management is our strategy. We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes. —Daniel T. Jones, Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy