FAIL-SAFE

FAIL-SAFE: Use commander's intent to empower others to act and make decisions without you.

— from Leadership & Business (Leadership/Business) · Clear Thinking: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions by Shane Parrish

In the book

I learned three hard lessons about this: that you can't expect your team to decide on their own unless you've told them how; that if they decide with the right thing in mind and it still goes wrong, you cannot punish them or they'll never decide again; and — most humbling — that sometimes the reason you can't tell them the most important thing is that you haven't figured it out yourself. The military has a clean phrase for the fix: commander's intent. You give people the intent — the why and the what — clearly enough that they can act and decide without you in the room. Beware the most common delegation blunder of all: when a project runs late, the instinct is to add people, but the burden of onboarding and coordinating the newcomers makes the late project later still. […] Lead by growing others. Once you're the captain, your scoreboard is their development, not your own brilliance. Decide, then delegate with intent. Make the call; teach your people how to decide; hand them the intent and get out of the way. Build psychological safety, then demand candor. Make it safe to speak, appoint a devil's advocate, and have the courage to say the hard thing yourself. — Leadership & Business (Leadership/Business)

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