Idea 004
Capability and Constraint
The distance between what people are able to do and what the system permits them to do — and the habit of reading the second as the first.
- First appeared
- Last updated
- Domains
- Organizational Behavior, Measurement
Why it matters
Organizations observe behaviour and infer capacity. The inference is usually wrong, because most behaviour is a faithful response to a constraint: a measurement, a window, a form, a queue, an absent piece of information.
The concept matters wherever performance is being assessed. If the constraint is not named, the resulting judgement attaches to the person, and the organization spends its effort on the wrong object.
The idea appears in
Essays
Not yet developed in an essay.
Field Notes
- Everyone Has Ideas. Operations Pays for the Wrong Ones.
The cost of a proposal is estimated by the people who benefit from it, and paid by the people who do not.
3 min read
Related ideas
How the idea has evolved
Introduced as a caution against reading constrained behaviour as limited potential.
Applied to estimation. A team asked to estimate only what it can see will produce an accurate estimate of the wrong scope.