The backlog nobody owned

A school office had a backlog of three hundred unanswered emails. Everybody knew about it. Nobody was responsible for it, which is why it existed.

The emails arrived at a shared address that four people could open. Each of them read the new messages, dealt with the easy ones, and left the difficult ones for whoever had more time. Since all four did the same thing, the difficult ones were never anybody's, and the pile grew by about ten a week.

The fix took one afternoon and no money. Each message was assigned to a named person on the day it arrived, using nothing more than a rota. The assignment did not mean that person had to answer it alone; it meant that person had to make sure it got answered. Within six weeks the backlog had gone.

The interesting part is what did not change. The same four people did the same work with the same skills in the same hours. What changed was that every item had an owner, and an item with an owner either gets done or produces a visible question about why it has not been.

This is the most common form of organisational bottleneck, and it is rarely about capacity. A task that belongs to everyone belongs to nobody, and the cheapest intervention available is usually not more effort but a name written next to each thing.