Do not hand off what you cannot pick up
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I do not see how this has any chance at scaling. Who sits at the root of the delegation tree? The CEO? And they are spending all their time doing things they do not know how to do (as your rule does not allow them to delegate those tasks, and presumably there are enough to take all their time)? That does not sound to me like how competent delegation should look like. And being able to do X vs being able to evaluate someone else doing X are of course related, but still quite different skills.
Pretty decent chance it doesn't scale! I am not choosing the principles for Lightcone based on what I expect to scale to hundreds of people. Larger organizations probably need different principles.
That said, in my experience when I look into competent companies, this holds surprisingly true. The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly. Executives at their companies are also selected to be strong generalists capable of performing (to an acceptable standard) a large fraction of the work going on in the organization.
And they are spending all their time doing things they do not know how to do
I don't know where you picked this up. In my experience getting to a point where you can perform a task at a basic level takes maybe a few days, and it's rare that you need to add a whole modality of tasks to your domain of management. I do spend a lot of my time learning new skills and figuring out how to do things I've never done before, but it's like 20% of my time, not more than that.
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn't take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don't know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
And those are three of the more complicated tasks that I am tracking as bigger holes in my skillset! Learning how to clean a room to hotel standards, or learning how to fix most issues with a broken toilet, or how to set up a podcast studio, or learn a new programming language, or put up a wall, are much simpler and can be learned in a few hours. Lightcone as an organization works on a very wide range of projects, and I've had no issues achieving basic competence at all the kinds of things we do. I don't see any particular issue for why not at least my executives should not be able to do the same for things in their purview.
I think you're right and I honestly think OP's point is the exception not the rule. They're thinking of when a sr eng can delegate to a jr eng or something. Engineering managers can't always replicate their ICs' work but the ICs' work typically should be legible to them.
If I "delegate" a kitchen renovation, that's just called hiring a contractor, and yeah it's hard to do well, especially as your ability to evaluate their work goes down. But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
It's really not hard to learn how to renovate a kitchen! I have done it. Of course, you won't be able to learn how to do it all quickly or to a workman's standard, but I had my contractor show me how to cut drywall, how installing cabinets works, how installing stoves works, how to run basic electrical lines, and how to evaluate the load on an electrical panel. The reports my general contractor was delegating to were also all mostly working on less than 30 hours of instruction for the specific tasks involved here (though they had more experience and were much faster at things like cutting precisely).
My guess is learning how to do this took like 20 hours? A small fraction of what a kitchen renovation took, and a huge boost to my ability to find good contractors.
This is the kind of mentality I don't understand and want to avoid at Lightcone. Renovating a kitchen is not some magically complicated tasks. If you really had to figure out how to do it fully on your own you could probably just learn it using Youtube tutorials and first-principles reasoning in a month or two. Indeed, you will be able to directly watch the journeys of people who have done exactly that on Youtube, so you can even see what likely goes wrong and not make the same mistakes.
Of course, then don't do it all on your own, but it's really not that hard to get to a point where you could do it on your own, if slowly.
Ehh my experience trying to hang a picture says otherwise. I got a stud detector that just beeps when it feels like and still haven't really figured out what material my walls are made of. Claude has it narrowed down to like 14 different possibilities. A kitchen reno is also a highly regulated task where I live https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/property-or-business-owner/renovating-kitchens-bathrooms.page not to mention additional HOA rules since you're affecting people above you, below you, and next to you. Plus my building has an "ancient pipes" problem and during renos they require you to fix plumbing as you go. Electric work would probably intimidate me because you have to wait and see if your house doesn't catch fire to find out if you did it right or not.
Conversely I just haven't renovated it because all the problems you said with delegating still hold.
I did manage to caulk my bathroom, looks awful but less roaches now.
I think I can see how this might scale.
The way this looks to me is that if you're applying this consistently in an organization, you don't need to actually fully do all tasks that need doing. You need to be able to recurse 1 level (which if you actually do might involve going down a level... but you mostly don't need to go down 1 level, going down 2 levels is much more rare, etc.).
To use your example: low-level tasks should not be bubbling up to CEO level. If a controversy about naming a variable bubbles up from a code review to a CEO of a company with 100k people - clearly there has been a failure on multiple levels in the middle (even if the CEO is not up to date on the style guide for the language). The CEO might make the call but more importantly they need to do something about the suborganization before it blows up.
But I'd like to know if this is how Lightcone sees scaling of this principle.
Nice principle.
Reminds me of the following quote from classic management book High Output Management:
Given a choice, should you delegate activities that are familiar to you or those that aren’t? Before answering, consider the following principle: delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations. Because it is easier to monitor something with which you are familiar, if you have a choice you should delegate those activities you know best. But recall the pencil experiment and understand before the fact that this will very likely go against your emotional grain.
Oh nice! I love that book, but had forgotten it also took a stance on this. Thank you for digging up the quote.
Maybe I will make a (somewhat lazy) LessWrong post with my favorite quotes
Edit: I did it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAH4dYhbw3CkpoHz5/favorite-quotes-from-high-output-management
1This does not sound to me like good advice in general? It could work with a small, driven team on a single focused project who wants to be sure everyone has hands on everything. But in general, specialization is an extremely powerful tool that we use to accomplish things we cannot accomplish alone. I would not benefit from insisting on understanding the whole fertilizer production supply chain before I could eat breakfast.
my understanding of OP’s main point is: if you only delegate stuff that you’re capable of doing — even if you’re unskilled/inexperienced/slow/downright-pareto-worse-than-a-cheaper-potential-delegatee at the task — you’ll likely head off a bunch of different potential problems that often happen when tasks get delegated.
however, it seems that commenters are misinterpreting OP’s core claim of “do not hand off what you cannot pick up” as one or more of:
- do not hand off what you are not good at
- do not hand off what you are not better at than the person to whom you would hand it off
- do not hand off what you will not pick up
- etc
my understanding is that OP is not making any of those claims in this piece (though i imagine he might separately believe weaker versions of some of them).
also, it seems to me that this heuristic could scale to larger organizations by treating ‘ability to delegate X broad category of task effectively’ as itself a skill — one which you should not hand off unless you could pick it up. e.g. learn delegation-to-lawyers well enough that you could in principle hire anyone on your legal team at your company before you hire a recruiter for your legal team (one who is presumably still much more skilled/experienced than you at hiring lawyers).
1Go and call the plumber (or ideally, ask the person on our staff who already knows). Then ask the plumber to explain to you what they are going to do to fix the problem. Then fix the problem yourself.
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If you don't have a person on your staff who already knows, and if the plumber isn't on call, I hope you are paying the plumber for calling him and asking him to explain, while knowing in advance that your plans won't include hiring him.
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Who's going to do the event invoices when you're fixing the plumbing yourself? You have comparative advantage over the plumber; it doesn't matter that fixing the plumbing yourself instead of having the plumber do it benefits you, because doing the event invoices benefits you more.
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It seems like this would fall under "Knowing how to perform a task yourself at all is not the same as knowing how to perform it as well as the person you are delegating the task to." Doing the plumbing yourself requires more skill (and probably equipment) than is necessary to understand the plumbing.
If you don't have a person on your staff who already knows, and if the plumber isn't on call, I hope you are paying the plumber for calling him and asking him to explain, while knowing in advance that your plans won't include hiring him.
Sorry, the thing you do is hire the plumber and ask "hey, can you help me fix an issue with my sink/toilet/whatever" (de-facto Lightcone has full-time staff with this skillset, so this exact thing hasn't come up in a long while, but it's how we got started).
Then, when they show up, you explain what you've observed the problem to be and ask "what is the first thing you would do yourself to figure out what's up?". Then they would either tell you, or start doing the thing. Then you follow them and watch with them, or try it yourself (don't be dumb and open up random valves, ask him to watch you and stop you before you do anything dumb).
In my experience most contractors I have called love to talk about their work and are happy to get paid to explain what they do. Also, the vast majority of problems really are very easy to understand. The usual way this kind of stuff works tends to be:
Me: "Hey, so we have this toilet seat which has some water coming up below the toilet when you flush."
Them: "Oh, yeah, that's a super common problem. These things have a seal below that often comes loose."
Me: "How would you fix it?"
Them: "Oh, yeah, I would just open up these bolts, then lift up the toilet, then look at the seal. There are like 3 kinds of seals different toilets use. One always tends to cause problems."
Me: "Mind if I do it?"
Them: "No, not at all. Here let me help you hold the seat"
Me: "Oh, cool, so this is the part below the toilet. I can see some standing water here around this notch, is that where the seal is?"
Them: "No, that's just the lowest point of the toiler, the seal is actually over here".
Me: "Ah, I see. This thing?"
Them: "Yes"
Me: "How would you tell it's broken? Is it broken?"
Them: "Let me take a look" leans over "Hmm, yeah, I am not sure, but it does look a bit wrong. See here? This corner should usually be flush, but it's elevated. My guess is someone installed it wrong."
Me: "Oh, interesting. Does this kind of installation error happen frequently?"
Them: "I've seen it a few times, but usually people mess up in different ways"
Me: "Great, so we replace it?"
Them: "Yeah"
Me: "Is it this part?" shows Home depot website with product page open
Them: "Nope, that's the wrong part for this toilet, you want this one" points at a related listing
Me: "Do you have one with you?"
Them: "Yeah, I happen to have that part with me, let me grab it"
Then you install the part, test it, it works. Everyone is happy, and if you had to you could do the same kind of task next time. If you've done this 4-5 times, you honestly will be able to solve most common plumbing problems yourself. It took you maybe 2 hours in total to learn.
Who's going to do the event invoices when you're fixing the plumbing yourself? You have comparative advantage over the plumber; it doesn't matter that fixing the plumbing yourself instead of having the plumber do it benefits you, because doing the event invoices benefits you more.
I mean, the whole point of this post is to argue that it's better for the organization if you learn how to do it yourself. Next time you have a decent chance of being able to solve the problem yourself in 5 minutes, which will save you much more time than the 30 minutes you spent calling around for good plumbers, and the 10 hours you wasted when you hired a bad plumber and they flooded the whole bathroom and forced us to replace half of the wooden floor because you weren't able to evaluate competence in the space.
Doing the plumbing yourself requires more skill (and probably equipment) than is necessary to understand the plumbing.
Yeah, equipment and things that are dangerous are often two things that are an obstacle to people getting to the point of fully doing it themselves. I do not encourage people to run their own electrical lines, even if they know how it works. Not worth the risk. But it's quite easy to basically understand all the steps involved in doing so and use that to become well-calibrated at evaluating the difficulty of a task, or to speed someone else up with a task.
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1OP thinks they solved the trade school problem. You could have one plumber power a chat bot and replace a whole city's plumber force.
What actually happens is the plumber says "it's probably X but I need to check out the sink." You can try your luck on X but more likely they make a house call and you're billed for a house call even if you insist on turning the wrench yourself. The next time you have an issue, you can try the same fix again, but if it has a different cause you're calling the plumber again.
Also ChatGPT does have nontrivial impact here -- people can probably DIY a bit more fixes than they used to, and they can certainly evaluate more plumber advice than they used to.
What actually happens is the plumber says "it's probably X but I need to check out the sink." You can try your luck on X but more likely they make a house call and you're billed for a house call even if you insist on turning the wrench yourself. The next time you have an issue, you can try the same fix again, but if it has a different cause you're calling the plumber again.
As I clarified above, don't do remote instruction! This is definitely not what I meant. I meant "have the plumber come by in person, show you how to solve the problem in person, then have him get paid for his time and be happy and leave".