Leadership Nudge® 387 – An Example of Redwork and Bluework

Leaders use bluework to keep projects moving in the right direction. The bluework will put the project pieces in logical order so the redwork can be done more effectively. Here’s David with an example.

I live in Florida. And I’m here at a friend’s yard who has a big deficiency because they have no swimming pool. So we’re in Florida. So they are putting in a swimming pool – spa and lap pool. How’s the work going?  

Well, it’s about five days of work spread out over five months, because a bulldozer will show up, scrape off all the sod and then nothing happens for three weeks. And then an excavator comes in with a team of eight people. And they dig this hole and put this framing in, in one day, in an eight-hour period. Since then, there’s been two weeks of non-activity. Why? We’re waiting on the inspector. 

Then what happens? Then we’re gonna wait on the concrete truck.  

Then what happens? Then we’re gonna wait on the tiling person. 

So the gap, gap, gap, gap, gap – that’s the redwork. The job of the blueworkers is to close the seam on the redwork to minimize those unnecessary interdependencies. And to just close those seams up. 

Beating on the people digging this hole to go faster will have zero impact on whether the pool gets put in faster. It’s about saying, “Okay, let’s line up these things in order and go from A to B to C to D with minimum gaps.”  

So it’s not the redwork that’s holding us up. It’s the bluework. But because it’s a lot easier to just yell at the person digging the hole and say dig it faster – that’s too, too much the leadership behavior that we see. The job of leaders is to be smart on closing the seams on the redwork, not beating on the people doing the redwork to do it, like 0.2% faster.  

I’m David Marquet. That’s your Leadership Nudge. Hopefully this thing will be eventually done for my friend.