The decision system for leaders who are tired of busywork.
Make better calls. Do less pointless work.
Most bad decisions come from skipping the thinking, and most wasted weeks come from doing work nobody needed. Lead, Manage, Coach, the method at its core, fixes the first. The four lazy moves fix the second.
By Dane Ellison
The method: Lead, Manage, Coach
Every decision has three jobs
Lead
Set direction. Where are we going, and why? Commit to an outcome someone new could repeat.
Manage
Run the results. Which number says it's working? Find the variance, fix the cause, watch the side effects.
Coach
Develop a person. Is it a skill, will or clarity gap? Own what's yours, and let them own what's theirs.
Pick the discipline, answer five critical questions, and say how sure you are about each answer. What you only believe gets challenged before it costs you.
The Laziness Theory
“‘Work smart’ is advice. Laziness is the motive that makes people follow it.”
Effort is not the same as value. Most organizations reward visible effort, so they build busywork. The lazy person isn't avoiding work. They're refusing to do pointless work, and they come in four types.
The Questioner
Stop it. Should this work exist at all?
The Automator
Automate it. Let a system do the repeat work.
The Delegator
Delegate it. The right person owns it, not the bottleneck.
The Simplifier
Simplify it. Fewer steps to the same result.
Lazy about the how. Never the what. Hold the outcome constant. Same result with less effort is laziness working. A worse result is cutting corners. Work that only moved to someone else is false laziness, and it comes back larger.
Free · 12 pages
Get the Laziness Theory booklet
The idea, the four types, the guardrail, a story of the theory at work, and a worksheet to run it on one of your own tasks.
For coaches and consultants
Give your clients a method they use between sessions.
Your clients make their biggest calls when you're not in the room. Lead, Manage, Coach gives them the same five questions every time, and a shared decision log shows you what they decided, how sure they were, and what happened next. Your sessions start from real decisions instead of recollections.
See the facilitator licenseHow to go further
- FreeThe quiz and the Laziness Theory booklet.
- BookThe Laziness Theory: the book and workbookComing soon
- AppThe decision app.
- LicenseFacilitator license for coaches and consultants.