Mechanism One · build this first
The Protected Window
Operationalises Criscuolo, Salter & ter Wal · delayed assessment
Duration
6weeks
Starting value
Spend cap
€500
Starting value
Closing cost
0
Not a dial — a condition
Bootleg effort raises innovative performance, and the explanation is delayed assessment — not avoided assessment, delayed. An idea in week one cannot survive a gate review, and the reason is not that it is bad. It is that it is young, and there is no path from the first version to the approvable version that runs through a meeting.
Which means the thing people are hiding to obtain was never permission to build. It is permission not to be judged yet. No organisation offers that, so they take it by concealment. The window is the legitimate version of what they are currently stealing.
A manager grants an idea a fixed period with a hard cap on spend, and one condition: closing it costs nothing except the time already spent. In exchange, the idea is exempt from assessment for the duration.
What it suspends
- Business case
- Gate review, steering committee
- Status updates, reporting line
- Alignment against running programmes
What it requires
- One conversation at the end
- What was learned, honestly
- It doesn't work is a complete answer
It gives the person the single thing concealment was buying them, at a price the organisation can afford to pay openly. It converts hidden work into visible work without applying the judgement that caused the hiding in the first place.
Open questions
- Six weeks may be wrong in either direction. Long enough to reach a defensible version, short enough to grant without asking anybody — those two constraints may not overlap everywhere.
- The end of a successful window is where this is most likely to fail. The idea now has to enter the normal world, which is exactly the machinery the window was built to defer.
- Renewal may quietly reintroduce what the window was avoiding.
- Nothing stops this becoming a programme with an application form. It dies on the day it acquires one.
- Should a window be logged at all? A record creates visibility, and visibility invites the assessment the whole thing exists to defer. There is no clean answer to this one.
Mechanism Two
The Answer Guarantee
Operationalises Chapter 9 · futility outlasts fear
Response within
10working days
Starting value
Includes
No
Not a dial — the point
Futility does more damage than fear, lasts longer, and is harder to reverse. Silence from a manager's side reads as futility from the other, regardless of what was actually happening.
So: every idea raised gets a response inside a fixed number of days. The response is the deliverable rather than the decision, and it includes no. A no with a reason attached preserves the relationship and the person's willingness to raise the next one, both of which are usually worth more than the idea was. Nothing at all teaches a lesson that lasts a career.
Reliability matters more than speed, which is why fifteen days kept beats five days promised. An unkept guarantee is worse than no guarantee, because it demonstrates the thing it was built to disprove, to exactly the people who were willing to test it.
Open questions
- Who owns the response when an idea travels upward past the first manager — which is where most of them are lost.
- How to track it without building a system that becomes its own small bureaucracy.
Mechanism Three
The Reversible Router
Operationalises Chapter 5 · one-way and two-way doors
Threshold
Set locally
No default — see below
Questions asked
2
Before any process engages
Two questions, asked before any approval process engages. Is this reversible? Is it under the threshold? Both yes, and it skips the process entirely.
The router's only job is to stop two-way doors receiving one-way-door treatment. It is triage rather than evaluation — it does not ask whether the idea is good, which is the question that has no useful answer in month zero anyway.
The only version that is defensible is a written standing statement, not a check somebody performs. A form to fill in proving that something is reversible is a gate, and a slower one than the gate it replaced.
Open questions
- Who sets the threshold, and at what level does it stop being credible? There is deliberately no default here — a number set centrally is the failure mode.
- The router can defeat itself faster than either of the others, by acquiring the process it exists to bypass.