🚩 Tactical Memo 070: The two-question status review

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Most status reviews are theater.

Twelve workstreams, color-coded. Eight green, three yellow, one red. You spend the hour on the red one. Everyone does. It's loud, and it's already being managed.

Then a workstream that was green every single week blows up. You never saw it coming.

Here's why that happens.

Green isn't a signal the work is healthy. It's a signal nobody has asked a hard question about it lately.

A workstream stays green because the owner is confident, or because nobody's tested the assumption underneath it since kickoff. Those two look identical on a deck. They are not the same risk.

AI now writes a cleaner status report than your team ever could. A polished update is basically free. So the report itself tells you less, not more.

The risk isn't on the line that's red. It's on the line that's been green too long.

Run the Two-Question Review.

In your next status meeting, ask exactly two things of every owner:

1. What moved since last week?

2. What's been green the longest, and when did someone last test it?

Question one kills "still on track." That's not an answer. What changed is the answer. If nothing moved, you want to know why.

Question two is the one nobody asks. Two months of green isn't safety. It's silence. You're forcing a fresh test on the workstream everyone stopped watching.

You're not auditing the work. You're auditing the confidence behind it.

The owner who tells you what moved and what's gone quiet is running the project. The one reading you a clean report is performing it.

The report is now free. The questions are the job.

Delegate the status. Keep the questions.

If this helped you, send it to someone who could use it this week.

Until next time,

Justin Bateh, PhD
Founder and Editor
Tactical Memo
Explore more here: https://maven.com/justinbateh