Fix decision friction in delegated work.
When work is delegated — across teams, vendors or AI-supported systems — decisions get reopened, over-reviewed, or lose clear ownership as they move. I run team programmes that make the operating rules explicit. Where the problem sits in the structure, I rebuild the workflow itself.
What this looks like from inside
Not a theory of coordination. The things that start showing up in the week:
- Five people now review something that used to need two, and nobody decided to change that
- Two teams leave the same meeting and execute the decision differently
- Managers approve work without knowing whether they are advising or authorising
- AI output gets checked thoroughly by some people and waved through by others
- A vendor escalates around the person who supposedly owns the account
- The same handover comes back for clarification every time, and everyone has stopped remarking on it
- Senior people have become the bottleneck for routine exceptions
Teams read these as workload problems, or personality problems, or something the new system will fix. Underneath, the operating rules were never made explicit, or they were and the work has since moved on. So each person works out the gap locally, sensibly, and lands somewhere slightly different from the person next to them.
Team programmes
Three programmes, three situations. Each stands alone. Each can be followed by a workflow intervention when the problem turns out to live in the structure, not the skills.
On-site or live online. Available directly or through training partners. Delivered in Dutch, English or German — including in rooms where most people work in their second or third language.
The workflow intervention
For when the problem is structural. The workflow routes decisions to the wrong place, and no amount of shared vocabulary fixes a broken escalation path. We take the workflow costing you the most time and rebuild how decisions travel through it. One at a time, on purpose. What we install in the first becomes the pattern for the next.
Map the actual path
Follow a real case from arrival to closure. Mark every point where somebody decides, and every loop that sends it back.
Specify the handover
Write down what has to travel with a piece of work so the receiver can act without phoning you back. Same discipline whether the receiver is a colleague, a vendor, or a model.
Set authority and escalation
One accountable role per stage, with a named case owner where the work needs one. Each decision classed as do it, propose it, or refer it. Each escalation given a trigger, a destination and a response time.
The full process, scope and outputs →
Background
Before this practice, I spent seventeen years in international business development in the software industry and five in talent development at KPMG — a career of commitments made across company, language and country borders, and of watching what happened to them on the way. One phenomenon kept returning: every transfer of work quietly changes the work itself.
Teams do not behave the way they behave because they believe in it. They behave that way because the setup rewards it, and they would be foolish to do otherwise. Handing work to a team three time zones away, to a vendor, or to a model produces the same trouble faster, with less room to recover.
AI has not created this problem. It has made it impossible to ignore. As organisations rely on machines to draft, summarise and coordinate, more decisions pass through systems that return fluent, complete-seeming output with the context quietly stripped out — and no amount of permissions, logging or audit trails compensates for unclear authority, a weak handover, or a review threshold nobody ever set.
Practice based in the Netherlands. Delivered in Dutch, English and German.
Research and essays
These essays develop the ideas behind the programmes and the intervention: how decisions, meaning and responsibility change as work moves between people, organisations and machines.
AI Changes Work Design, Not Just Productivity
Three people reviewed the document. Nobody reviewed the judgment.
When Decisions Leave Their Origin
A date survives the transfer. The reason it was chosen does not. Why that happens, and when it matters.
The Belle of the Ball and the Hinge
A person says something vague, a machine picks one reading, and nobody marked where responsibility transferred.
All essays · the instrument and the framework
Discuss a programme
Tell me the team, the situation, and what keeps happening. I will tell you whether this is the right kind of problem for me — and whether a programme or a workflow intervention fits it.