John Cutler · 13 min read · Product Teams
TBM 422: Exception, Presence, Delegation
Read the original on cutlefish.substack.com →
TBM 422 explores a triad of leadership motions—Exception, Presence, and Delegation—and asks how they hold up in today’s fatigue-filled, AI-influenced workplaces. It explains how these motions interact, cites examples (WBR, SPC, Gemba) to illustrate learning and tacit knowledge transfer, and challenges traditional playbooks that feel out of sync. The piece invites back-to-basics thinking about how to balance command, presence, and empowerment in real teams.
Key Takeaways
- Three fundamental management motions—Exception-based, Presence-based, and Delegation-based—serve as core levers that interact and adapt to context.
- Exception-based systems (e.g., SPC, WBR, MBE) create a learning mechanism by building a shared causal model of the business.
- Presence-based work (genchi genbutsu, Gemba walks, MBWA, side-by-side pairing) helps transfer tacit knowledge and build practical intuition that reports alone can’t provide.
- Delegation pushes authority to those closest to the work, aligning on outcomes and trusting them to figure out the how (embodied in concepts like MBO, mission command, and servant leadership).
Excerpt
Side note, I have a live talk up on YouTube that I’m proud of called Single Player to Multiplayer: AI, Context, and Collaboration if watching/listening is more your thing. Like a lot of leaders and practitioners I talk to, I’m trying to wrap my head around what I see happening in companies right now. The fatigue is real, the pressure is coming from many directions, and it’s impacting people in often very different ways. I hosted a small TBM meetup in SF recently, and it felt so refreshing to be chatting in person, without the weight of optics, hype, dancing…