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Telling People What to Do Is Not Leadership. It’s a Failure of System Design.

Explores why real leadership means designing systems that enable team autonomy, flow, and accountability—rather than relying on command-and-control management.

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If your organisation still measures leadership by how many decisions a manager makes, you are not leading. You are leaking value.

There is a stubborn, Taylorist holdover in many companies—the belief that work gets done when someone is told exactly what to do. The assumption is that certainty comes from control, clarity comes from instruction, and delivery comes from compliance.

It doesn’t.

In complex systems, command-and-control is not just ineffective—it’s a bottleneck. The moment you start “assigning tasks,” you’ve already failed to design a system that enables flow, autonomy, and accountability.

You Don’t Need to Tell People What to Do in a Well-Designed System

In organisations grounded in empirical process control, leadership isn’t about orchestrating every move. It’s about creating the conditions where teams can inspect, adapt, and deliver value continuously.

Modern management is not about allocating tasks. It’s about removing the need for anyone to allocate tasks in the first place.

When teams are working against clear goals, with shared understanding, visibility of work-in-progress, and constraints that enable—not restrict—decision-making, they don’t need instructions. They need clarity, context, and trust.

Great systems aren’t static. They evolve through structured feedback loops—Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, operational telemetry, and small experiments. Inspection and adaptation are what make systems empirical, not just idealistic.

Taylorism Is for Factories. You Run a Cognitive Organisation.

If you’re still managing by job title, project plans, and hour-counting, you’re not running a professional organisation. You’re running a factory LARP. The playbook you’re using was written for physical labour and linear processes. Not software. Not services. Not strategy.

And yet, I still see it everywhere:

You don’t need more control. You need a better system.

Leadership Is Creating Systems That Don’t Need You

Real leadership isn’t about your presence. It’s about what happens in your absence.

This is the ethos behind Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps:

Together, they form a coherent strategy for managing systems of work without resorting to micromanagement. When teams understand their constraints, have the tools to respond to change, and are accountable for outcomes, not just activity, they no longer need to be told what to do.

Speed is not the goal, but it is a critical capability. In a competitive environment, reducing time-to-market isn’t just about efficiency—it’s how organisations learn faster, respond sooner, and stay ahead of disruption. For a deeper dive into why frequent delivery is a competitive advantage, read There Is No Place Like Production .

Telling People What to Do is an Expensive Workaround

Every time you assign a task manually, you’re compensating for a failure upstream:

You’re treating the symptom instead of fixing the system.

And let’s be honest—if you have to tell people what to do, why did you hire professionals?

Design the System. Get Out of the Way.

If your team is waiting for instructions, your system has no intelligence. If you’re managing to utilisation, your system has no flow. If your engineers are busy but not delivering, your system has no value.

Stop focusing on the people. Start focusing on the system.

Scrum is not about rituals. DevOps is not about pipelines. These are practices that expose the health of your system. And if your system requires constant intervention, it’s not a system. It’s a mess.

So stop telling people what to do. Instead, design a system where people know what to do—and have the freedom, clarity, and support to do it. Here are 10 things that you can do to augment your system:

1. Establish Intermediate & Tactical Goals

Without goals, people default to following orders or invent their own. Goals create the shared context necessary for autonomous decision-making and are the foundation for meaningful self-management.

Too often, the Product Backlog becomes a list of features instead of a narrative arc that advances a meaningful goal. When you write backlog items without a Product Goal, you are setting the team up to deliver outputs instead of outcomes.

Product Goals are not aspirational fluff. They are intermediate strategic goals that define value in a complex system. When absent, the result is drift. When present, they unlock focus, flow, and accountability.

2. Enable Self-Management with Constraints

Agency without boundaries is chaos. But command-and-control masquerading as clarity is just as destructive. Real autonomy comes from deliberate constraints that define how freedom is expressed, not whether it exists.

Professionalism is rooted in clear, shared expectations, delivered through disapline. A team that understands how work flows, where decisions are made, and what quality signals readiness at each stage doesn’t need micromanagement—they already operate within a system that tells them what excellence looks like.

3. Stop Misusing Estimation, Start Right-Sizing

Telling people what to build, in what order, and how long it should take kills creativity and accountability. It fragments ownership and encourages compliance over curiosity. Worse, it masks the real problem: your system doesn’t support flow, so you fall back to control.

Traditional estimation is often misused as a proxy for distrust or certainty in uncertain domains. When you right-size instead—grounding delivery in data and observability—you shift from permission-based planning to capability-based planning. That’s not just more efficient. It’s fundamentally more respectful of the people doing the work.

4. Introduce Pull Systems with WIP Limits

Introducing a work-limited pull system is key to understanding capacity and planning for a successful delivery . Push systems undermine accountability, responsibility, and ownership by enforcing direction from above. When teams have work pushed onto them without control or influence over the timing or readiness, their sense of ownership evaporates. This loss of autonomy directly stifles self-organisation and self-management, leaving teams disempowered and reactive.

Push systems flood teams, forcing them into reactive firefighting and constant context-switching. The focus becomes merely “showing progress” rather than genuinely delivering value. This model not only overwhelms teams but also actively erodes their ability to take responsibility for outcomes, as decisions are stripped away from those who do the work.

In contrast, pull systems enhance accountability and ownership by starting with readiness. Teams pull work into their systems only when they have the capacity, when tasks are right-sized, and when the system is genuinely ready to support the flow of work.

WIP limits are not about control—they are about providing meaningful feedback. They indicate when your system reaches capacity, signaling the team to focus and prioritise effectively. Pull-based systems are essential for sustainable, predictable value delivery. If your teams constantly feel overwhelmed and lack autonomy, it’s time to recognise this as a systemic issue: your organisation is pushing rather than enabling.

5. Use evidence-based management practices

Measuring hours worked or tasks completed tells you nothing about whether the work mattered. Effort is not value. Activity is not improvement. Velocity is not progress.

Evidence-Based Management replaces arbitrary judgement with actionable data . It doesn’t just measure outcomes—it enables accountability for them.

6. Deploy Frequently to Production

Nothing signals trust like letting teams ship. But more than that, frequent delivery to production is the fastest path to feedback, accountability, and customer impact.

There’s no place like production . Everything else is theatre.

7. Invest in Professional Scrum Masters & Product Owners

Most Scrum Masters and Product Owners are either appointed without preparation or promoted into the role without development. The result? They don’t coach, guide, or lead—they coordinate. And when those roles fail to create clarity and enable delivery, managers step in to fill the vacuum with control.

Scrum Masters are not passive facilitators. They are system stewards—accountable for enabling transparency, optimising flow, and coaching both teams and managers to operate within an empirical system. If they’re not improving the system, they’re part of the dysfunction. If you want to understand what separates a competent Scrum Master from a glorified coordinator, read Why Most Scrum Masters Are Failing—and What They Should Know .

The problem isn’t Scrum. The problem is that we keep filling these roles with people who aren’t ready or worse never will be. Raise the bar, or get out of the way.

8. Collapse Siloed Structures

Separate roles create handoffs, and handoffs create dependency . Dependency creates delay. Delay kills flow.

Structure should follow flow, not function. Organise around value creation, not roles. That’s how you collapse the gap between intent and impact.

9. Use Sprint Reviews for Stakeholder Alignment

Sprint Reviews aren’t demos. They’re not a PowerPoint parade or a status update. They are working sessions with stakeholders—strategic checkpoints to make decisions based on what we’ve learned.

10. Teach Managers to Serve Systems, Not Direct People

Managers clinging to authority are a bottleneck. They inject delay, decision paralysis, and unnecessary oversight. If you’re telling people what to do every day, you’re not leading—you’re throttling flow.

This isn’t about abdicating control . It’s about relocating it into the system where it belongs.

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