Amy Kennedy Leadership

A community organization I’m part of has spent a year trying to grow its membership. A committee of volunteers meets once a month to move it forward, and every meeting opens the same way: ten or fifteen minutes spent rebuilding where things stood, because the last conversation was four weeks and a hundred other responsibilities…

Several years ago I worked on a small team doing a critical project. All at once, we multiplied to three separate teams covering adjacent areas in non-adjacent spaces. The governing decisions lived on a whiteboard, and someone photographed that board and sent the pictures out to the teams that didn’t share the room. Low rent,…

For a few weeks now I’ve pointed you toward the diagnostic. I’ve said it takes about 10 minutes and gives you a read on where your work is exposed. I haven’t told you what comes back. So you’ve meant to take it, and every time, something with a clearer payoff got the 10 minutes instead.…

You have a project that’s been with you a while. It hasn’t gotten dramatically worse. No deadline slipped, no one escalated it. It sits there, a little heavier each month, and you would like to deal with the part that keeps routing back to you. It doesn’t get dealt with, because nothing about it forces…

Ask someone on a distributed team what they’d change about how their work is set up. Not the people, not the tools, the structure of how the work holds together. Most of them answer in about three seconds. The speed of that answer means the problem was never hard to find. So why is the…

A team ran a product launch last year. The people who built the original launch process had moved on, and the team didn’t track them down. The process was recorded in a way that carried its own reasoning, so they applied it to a situation the authors had never seen and ran the launch. No…

New quarter planning opens with a review of last quarter. You ask what is measurably different because of the work the team did, and the answers come fast: a backlog worked down, a release shipped, urgent problems handled the week they surfaced. Then the question turns to the business itself, and the activity doesn’t add…

Every team has someone who knows the work from the inside. She was there when the approach was decided. She knows why that constraint exists, what was tried before, and what that means for anything similar now. When she is in the room, work moves. When she is not, things slow in ways that are…

Work moves. Meetings happen. Updates go out. A portion of each meeting is reconstruction: someone asks what was decided last month, a new team member needs the background explained, the manager asks a question the written record doesn’t answer. The team responds, and the conversation does the work the record was supposed to do. The…

A team gives a status update. It runs twenty minutes. The leader asks a clarifying question. The team answers at length. Nobody is padding. Nobody is covering for weak work. There is just no short answer, because the update wasn’t held to anything short enough to measure against. The length is a signal, and it…

Leadership asks for a progress report. The team has been working hard on work that matters. The update can’t be written in a way leadership will understand. A decision from three weeks ago is back on the table; the reasoning didn’t survive the gap. This is what work erosion looks like, and the cause is…

The departure itself is not where the loss happens. By the time someone leaves, the organization has already been losing ground for months, sometimes years. Capable contributors carry the reasoning behind decisions, the context for commitments, the history of what was tried and why. This burden has no formal name and no designated location. It…

How team work creates organizational debt… and how to avoid it and create conditions for sustained innovation instead.