The fifth Key Factor in transitioning from Whitewater to Predictable Success® is that of Delegation, and its counterpart, Decision-making.
These are two sides of the same coin – managers cannot delegate if employees aren’t capable of making effective decisions. Conversely, if managers don’t delegate, employees can never learn to make effective decisions.
During the very early stages (Early Struggle and Fun), there is little delegation, for the simple reason that there is no-one to delegate to! So, later (during late Fun and Whitewater), when delegation is necessary - to break decision-making bottlenecks, the managers have little or no experience in delegating.
Also, the employees, who have not been accustomed to being delegated to, have little experience in decision-making.
So it’s not difficult to work out what happens the first few times the managers try to delegate – the whole thing is a shambles, and the experiment is never repeated.
Getting to Predictable Success® involves managers learning anew how to delegate, and equally, employees learning how to train their under-developed decision-making muscles back to working fitness.
