Amy Kennedy Leadership

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.

You can plan for resilience in your work. You don’t have to carry the burden of resilience on your shoulders alone.