What an organisation needs to know is usually already in the building, paid for once and collected never.
It is twenty past eleven on a Thursday, and nine people have just approved the date. At the lift, the head of logistics steps in beside the operations director, and as the doors close he says, "It won't be March." She says, "I know." Between them, in four floors, they hold the most accurate project review of the morning, and nothing upstairs was built to hear it.
What holds a firm back is rarely missing. It is knowledge that has stopped moving. Chris Argyris watched State Department memoranda "get edges rounded off" on their way up, and wrote in 1980 that the information needed was usually there, only scattered. John Little proved in 1961 that the time work spends inside a system follows from how much is waiting and how fast it is finished, which is how an order holding under an hour of work takes six days. Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson, watching nurses at nine hospitals, estimated in 2003 that thirty-three minutes a shift went on working round faults that could have been removed.
The book finds five places it stops: the meeting after the meeting, the week an order waits between desks, the question an analyst leaves in her notebook, the nurse who fetches linen from another unit, and the number a finance director is asked to sign. Each has one practice. A question asked before the vote: "What are we saying in the hallway that we're not saying at the table?" An order walked backwards, three questions at each desk. A round begun by the newest person. A page on the wall, every line answered within a week. A measure agreed before anyone knows the answer, from records the firm already keeps. A ninety-day plan sets them in order, and a field manual carries the run sheets.
Ammanuel Santa Anna founded Luminous Prosperity Inc., which works with organisations to find the gains they already hold. The colour art edition carries twenty-one photographs; every study is given with what it cannot show, every composite is labelled, and it does not describe how a measured gain is divided. It reads beside The Margin, on the list too long to finish, and The Cairn, on the sentences hardest to say out loud.
Its last scene is a Monday, day ninety-one: a lead time written in days on a wall, a page of answers on a night ward, a signed sheet in a drawer. "None of these has a name. Nobody has announced anything."
It is offered as the author's reading of the evidence and of practice. It is not legal, financial or employment advice, and it is not a promise of any outcome.
102 pages · 21 photographs · five questions to carry through it · EPUB and PDF, 8.5 × 11 in, in colour
Seven chapters
- 1 · The Meeting After the MeetingA decision is made twice, once at the table and once in the lift, and the second is usually the true one.
- 2 · One Order, One Desk, One WeekAn order that holds fifty minutes of work waits six days, and the waiting is where the cost lives.
- 3 · The Question Nobody AsksThe newest person in the room often holds the question that matters, and keeps it in a notebook until someone senior goes first.
- 4 · The Person Who Already KnowsThe nurse who fetches linen from another unit has solved the problem for her patients, and nobody who could stop it happening has been told.
- 5 · A Number Both Sides Can SignA gain can be shared only when both sides trust the count, so the measure is agreed first and read last.
- 6 · The First Ninety DaysFive practices set in order, from listening before changing to measuring what was found.
- 7 · The Field ManualTwelve working pages, the run sheets, the walk sheet, the arithmetic and the agreement, ready to carry into a room.
Five questions to carry through it
- What did you last say in a corridor, or a lift, that you did not say at the table, and what would it have cost to say it there?
- If you walked one ordinary piece of work backwards through your building, desk by desk, where would you expect it to have waited longest, and who would know why?
- Which question have you watched the newest person in a room keep to themselves, and what did the most senior person do just before that?
- Who in your organisation quietly works round the same fault every week, and who would need to hear about it for the fault to stop?
- Before anyone knows the answer, what number would both sides of your organisation sign, and from which records you already keep would it be read?
The five articles it grew from
Each chapter began as an article in the house's magazine. They are gathered in Leadership, each with its pictures and its opening.
Ammanuel Santa Anna works with a small number of leadership teams on where their organisations stop collecting what they know. The first step is a conversation.