Week 36 Day 7: Assignment: Spend One Hour This Week Designing Instead of Doing

Choose one recurring problem that your team handles manually. Instead of fixing the next occurrence, use your design hour to create a system that addresses all future occurrences. This could be a process, a template, a decision framework, or a structural change. The goal is to invest one hour of design time to save many hours of future operating time.

Here is the design hour protocol. Before the hour: identify the systemic issue you want to address. Pick something that is recurring (happens at least twice per month), impactful (costs the team more than 2 hours per occurrence), and solvable (you can design a realistic improvement, not a fantasy). Write the issue down in one sentence. During the hour: apply the four-lens framework from Day 5. Inputs: what is entering the system that causes this problem? Outputs: what is the system currently producing versus what it should produce? Constraints: what is limiting the team's ability to handle this better? Feedback loops: what information is missing that would enable the team to self-correct? Then design the minimum viable intervention. Following the Week 35 Day 3 principle -- start with the lightest process that addresses the most common failure mode. Write the design as a one-page document: the problem statement (one paragraph), the root cause (one paragraph), the proposed system (one paragraph describing what changes), the expected outcome (one sentence), and the implementation plan (3-5 bullet points for the steps to put it in place). After the hour: share the design with your team and ask for feedback. Do not implement unilaterally. The team will identify practical issues you missed, which improves the design. Schedule the implementation for the following week. Track the results over 30 days. Was the recurring problem reduced? By how much? What adjustments are needed? This is the design-build-measure cycle applied to organizational architecture. Add both the design and the 30-day results to your Leadership Operating Manual under 'Organizational Architecture.'

The design hour protocol implements what Schon (1983) calls 'reflective practice' -- the deliberate allocation of time for thinking about the work system rather than working within it. His research on professionals across multiple fields (architecture, engineering, medicine) found that practitioners who regularly engaged in reflective practice -- stepping back from execution to examine and redesign their approach -- produced measurably better outcomes than practitioners who maintained continuous execution without reflection. The one-page design format implements what Lafley and Martin (2013) call the 'strategy choice cascade,' adapted from corporate strategy to organizational design: the discipline of articulating the problem, the root cause, the proposed intervention, the expected outcome, and the implementation steps on a single page forces clarity and prevents the over-engineering that occurs when design thinking is unconstrained. Research by Ries (2011) on the 'build-measure-learn' cycle in lean startup methodology demonstrates that the design-build-measure cycle produces faster and more effective improvement than either pure planned design (building everything before measuring) or pure reactive improvement (measuring without deliberate design), because the cycle combines the rigor of deliberate design with the empirical validation of measured outcomes.