Failure demand

And so we're trying to build systems that allow teams to predictably deliver a known quantity of work when they say they're going to do it.

And that way, you don't wind up with this other problem, right? And I think when you talk about the intake person being overwhelmed or anywhere in your practice being overwhelmed, there's this kind of interesting concept in the agile world that we refer to as failure demand, right? And failure demand is loosely defined as anything that is taking up your finite time and attention, right, your finite capacity as a result of some failure in the system upstream of where this demand came in.

So the classic form of failure demand is clients calling or emailing or otherwise bugging you and going, where's my stuff? What's going on with

this case?

What's the status of my matter? And a team that has built communication and information into their structures isn't going to get that form of demand, which means that they're not going to have to turn their finite time and attention to answering a question that isn't doing anything to actually solve that client's legal problem.

Those status updates, especially when they come in an unpredictable way, which failure demand almost always does, they're literally just taking you away from doing something productive.

100%.

Yeah, that's so interesting.