The Boomerang Project · The Green Beret Way

The Boomerang Project

We’ve only got a small crew in here right now, so I’m going to keep these real and useful.

I handed off a project once and my idea of “done” was different from theirs. And of course I didn’t see this until it was almost due (because I didn’t need to check it, right? We both knew what “done” looked like, right). And of course it wasn’t done right and I didn’t want to punish them for my lack of clarity and I ended up redoing much of it over the weekend.

Lesson learned: if the end state isn’t clear, the work will boomerang. Not because people are bad, but because I left room for interpretation and then punished the interpretation by taking it back.

If you’ve got a similar story, share it.

What was missing from your definition of “done,” and what metric or example would have prevented the boomerang?

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