Idea 002
Operational Inheritance
The operating condition a team is handed rather than chose — decisions made elsewhere whose consequences are absorbed here.
- First appeared
- Last updated
- Domains
- Organizational Design, Vendor Systems
Why it matters
Every operation runs on a set of conditions it did not select. Some were chosen by a predecessor, some by a project that has closed, some by a vendor under a contract that has since ended. The work of running the system includes the work of carrying those choices.
The concept matters because accountability tends to follow the budget rather than the decision. A team can be held responsible for a cost profile it inherited, measured against a baseline it had no part in setting, and asked to improve a condition it cannot reach.
The idea appears in
Essays
- Your Opex Problem May Have Started Ten Years Ago
Some operating expenses belong to the ordinary cost of running a system. Others are the recurring price of decisions made years earlier.
8 min read
Field Notes
- The Vendor Knows Your Network Better Than You Do
Outsourcing the work also outsources the knowledge of how the work actually behaves.
3 min read
Related ideas
How the idea has evolved
First used to name the gap between who decides and who carries.
Broadened from assets to knowledge. What transfers at a boundary is documentation; what does not transfer is judgement built by repetition.