A Neuroscience-Informed Field Guide for Self-Organization (Part 3 of n)
It’s been a few weeks since Part 2 of this series, where we explored tending to our inner landscapes. During that break, I found myself living the very lesson I’m about to share. Faced with the chaos of a cross-country move and a few other life transitions, I said no to my original publishing schedule (“Must maintain two posts per week…”) and yes to settling into a new chapter.
That personal “no” revealed something crucial: the same prediction patterns that drive individual overcommitment scale up to sabotage entire teams. The inner work that lives in the personal (I) quadrant, that we explored in Part 2? It’s essential, but incomplete.
In the world of continuous improvement, we talk about removing waste—muda in the lean tradition. Time is our most precious non-renewable resource, yet we let it be stolen by systemic dysfunctions we’ve inadvertently invited in. These “thieves of time,” as Dominica DeGrandis calls them in Making Work Visible, don’t break into our systems. We hand them the keys every time we say yes when we should say no.
In this post, we move from the inner landscape to the collective terrain—exploring how a “Yes Habit” creates the very conditions that prevent flow, the smooth and predictable delivery of value.
We’ll meet five particular thieves that not only ransack our capacity for meaningful work, but trap us in a vicious cycle where the harder we try to be productive, the less we actually accomplish.
Let’s dive in and discover how a simple two-letter word might be the most powerful kaizen you and your teams can practice.
The Anatomy of Yes
Picture this: Your next planning meeting. The team’s already carrying technical debt from last quarter, everyone worked late to hit last week’s release, and two critical bugs emerged yesterday. Someone, a product owner/team lead, fill in the blank with your context, enters with “just one more urgent request from leadership.”
The room (virtual or IRL) fills with that particular silence—the one where everyone’s internal alarms are screaming but no one speaks. A few shifted glances. Someone sighs (did they fail to mute?). The curse of organizational silence strikes again—everyone sees the problem, no one names it. Then, inevitably: “Sure, we’ll make it work.”
Sound familiar?
Adaptive brains just made a prediction: “Saying no equals conflict equals danger.” This isn’t a character flaw—it’s a prediction machine running outdated software, constructing a threat response based on old data from times when one had less agency. But now, the team is learning to be self-organizing; they are, after all, closest to the issue, the ones with the greatest knowledge. (See A Paradox of Leadership: Self-Organizing, Adaptive Teams and Organizations)
The Yes Habit
This inner teleprompter operates across all four quadrants of team experience:
- In the Personal (I) quadrant, fear drives the yes—fear of missing opportunities (FOMO), of appearing uncooperative, of damaging relationships that feel essential to survival in the organizational ecosystem.
- The Relational (We) dimension adds normative conformity. When everyone else works weekends, saying no to overtime feels like betrayal. Your mirror neurons, designed to help you fit in, now help you fit into dysfunction.
- In Practices (It), missing boundaries and unclear processes make yes the path of least resistance. Without explicit WIP limits or clear prioritization frameworks, every request feels equally valid.
- The Environment (Its) often rewards the very behaviors that destroy sustainable pace. Organizations celebrate heroes who “do whatever it takes” while ignoring the wreckage of burnout left in their wake.
Here’s where our gremlins work becomes relevant: The Yes Habit is itself a gremlin—one that whispers, “If you say no, terrible things will happen.” But what if we could transform this anxious gremlin into a protective gargoyle? One that guards capacity with wisdom rather than surrendering due to fear? The transformation requires the use of a simple and complete sentence: “No” (A less binary variation is “Not now.”)
Meet the Five Thieves
So how does the Yes Habit actually steal our time? It invites into our system five particular thieves that systematically destroy flow. These thieves don’t break into your system—we hand them the keys, one misguided yes at a time. Let me introduce the gang:
- Too Much Work in Progress (WIP), the ringleader, arrives when you’re juggling seven things simultaneously, none getting full attention. That sinking feeling when someone asks about progress and you realize you’ve been busy all week but nothing’s actually done? That’s this thief at work.
- Unknown Dependencies emerge mid-sprint like a horror movie villain. “Oh, we need the infrastructure team to configure that environment first? And they have a three-week backlog?” This thief thrives on assumptions and unclear communication.
- Unplanned Work slides in through “Can you just quickly…” requests. It’s the production issue that derails today’s plan, the “small favor” that consumes an afternoon, the scope creep that turns a right-sized story into a two-week saga.
- Conflicting Priorities shows up when everything is Priority One. Three different stakeholders, three “most important” initiatives, one confused team playing priority whack-a-mole. This thief feeds on the absence of a clear organizational strategy.
- Neglected Work accumulates in shadows—the technical debt you’ll “address next quarter,” the documentation everyone knows needs updating, the refactoring that gets pushed week after week. This thief plays the long game, growing more dangerous with time.
The Doom Loop
The thieves don’t work alone—they form a vicious cycle known as the Doom Loop.
Any one thief alone sets up conditions ripe for unfinished work. Unfinished work creates queues, context switching, and wait times. While waiting, our brains predict “I should be productive,” so we start something new. More work in progress means context switching and longer queues. Round and round we go.
Here’s the neuroscience kicker: Our brains literally cannot multitask complex cognitive work. When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually rapidly switching contexts, and the switching cost is devastating. Gerald Weinberg’s research shows that with five concurrent tasks, we lose 80% of our capacity to context-switching overhead.
Eighty percent. Lost. To switching.
Your adaptive brain, trying to help you feel productive, actually makes everything worse. It’s like being trapped in quicksand—the harder you struggle to be productive, the deeper you sink into dysfunction.
This isn’t a process problem—it’s a prediction problem. Your brain predicts that starting new work will relieve the discomfort of waiting. But that prediction, based on industrial-era models where utilization equaled productivity, fails catastrophically in creative knowledge work.
Revealing the System to Itself
The first step in catching these thieves? Making them visible. This is where the scan practice from our adaptive framework (Scan, Predict, Experiment, Reflect, Share) becomes essential. You can’t fight what you can’t see.
To shine a spotlight on the Five Thieves, create a shared language among the team and the stakeholders. If you want, give them knicknames (the thieves, not the stakeholders…).
To help you get started, here’s a link to a retrospective exercise that you can make your own: https://www.andycleff.com/2021/01/thieves-of-time-retrospective/
Quick overview: invite the team to identify where they see each thief operating. Folks can keep a personal log for a week, then collate data. Tick marks or sticky notes with details. No blame, no judgment—just observation.
Feedback Loops
To set the stage for the experimentation step, enhance (or start!) qualitative and quantitative feedback loops. Four key flow metrics will reveal the thieves’ impact:
- Work in Progress (WIP): How many items have started but aren’t done? This leading indicator puts a spotlight on the ringleader.
- Work Item Age: How long have current items been in progress? Another leading metric; this one reveals that work is getting stuck.
- Cycle Time: How long from start to finish? This lagging indicator shows the impact of context switching.
- Throughput: How many items finish per week? Another lagging indicator that measures whether the team is getting better (or worse) at delivery.
For a deeper dive into the above metrics, see Flow Metrics for Enhancing Organizational Agility.
What might you see? One team I worked with discovered they were carrying 47 items in progress for 6 people. Forty-seven. The moment they saw that number, the room went quiet. Then someone said, “No wonder we’re drowning.”
Their brains had been seeing the FUBAR situation as normal—just how work gets done around here. Seeing the ever-increasing WIP numbers, combined with growing work item age, disrupted their “it’s ok to keep taking on more work” habit. It became clear that continuing to say yes was making things worse. Only then could they begin to update their mental models.
Don’t hide the numbers. Display them in a shared dashboard, put them on a wall, highlight them during sprint reviews, when stakeholders are present. Once you have named the thieves and are watching them closely, you’ll be able to predict their impact.
The power of shared language can’t be overstated. When someone can say, “I see Conflicting Priorities trying to sneak in,” the whole team understands immediately. It’s not personal—it’s pattern recognition.
Seeing the system this way is powerful. But awareness alone won’t stop the thieves. You need new responses when they try to enter.
Breaking the Pattern
Let’s return to that planning meeting, where another priority gets added to an overloaded team. Imagine an alternative ending:
“Before we add this urgent request,” someone says, “what should we remove from our current near-term plan?” The room goes quiet—not the uncomfortable silence of suppressed objections, but the thoughtful pause of genuine consideration. “If everything’s priority one,” the speaker continues, “nothing is. Help us understand where this fits relative to our other commitments.”
That’s the Yes Habit gremlin transforming into a capacity-protecting gargoyle. Not reactive, not aggressive—just clear about the reality of constraints and trade-offs.
Your mission this week: Scan for the thieves. Which one is taking a lead role in ransacking your team’s capacity, their sanity? Name it. Measure it. Share what you find with your team.
Revealing the system to itself is the first step toward reclaiming your time from the thieves who’ve been stealing it, one unnecessary yes at a time.
Next in the series: The Mathematics of No: Why Slack Time Enables Smooth Flow and the Predictable Delivery of Value
