Our own model · Principle
Cutting corners is a master's privilege.
The expression comes from a master painter who taught on the painting programme at upper secondary school, and it has nothing to do with being sloppy, it's about the shortcut having to be earned. First you do the work the long way, enough times to understand why every step is there. Once you have, you can also see which steps can actually be skipped, and what it costs you the time it doesn't work.
What it doesn’t mean
Cutting a corner here means skipping a step, not deceiving anyone, and the difference lies in who carries the risk.
Someone who shortens a step and stands for the consequence themselves if it goes wrong is using their privilege. Someone who shortens a step and lets the customer or a colleague carry the consequence is cheating in the ordinary sense of the word, and that has nothing to do with skill.
Which is also why the privilege isn’t something you can quietly hand yourself. You can see it in whether you can explain afterwards what you skipped and why, and in whether the explanation holds.
Why this is about the company and not just the person
A company that grows writes processes, and that’s entirely right, because the structure is there to make it easy to do the right thing for someone who is new. The problem shows up when the same structure ties down the person who has done it a hundred times, because that’s when the skilled ones start to find the work heavy going.
If there’s no way to earn an exception, the exceptions will be taken anyway, quietly and without anyone learning anything from them. That’s the expensive version. The cheap one is to say out loud what it takes to be allowed to deviate, and to let the deviation be visible when it’s made.
Something to try
Take a process you have and ask two questions. Who here is allowed to deviate from it, and does that person know it. If the answer is that nobody is allowed to, do check whether it happens anyway. If the answer is that everyone is, then it isn’t a process.
Then ask the most skilled person what they actually skip. That answer is worth writing down, because that’s where the tacit knowledge sits, and it leaves the company the day that person does.
In practice
The expression is useful when someone wants to introduce more structure to solve a problem that’s really about experience, and just as useful when someone wants to lean on experience where the structure genuinely is needed. It’s the same question seen from two directions: who has earned the right to skip, and what the skip costs if it’s taken too early.
Principle
Operations
Bollplanket