Count what is already in flight

Go and count every piece of work currently in progress that has a person's name against it and is expected to finish. Not the roadmap. Not what was approved. What is actually moving.

Almost nobody knows this number before they count it, and almost everybody guesses low. The gap between the guess and the count is one of the most reliable measurements available to an operator, and it costs an afternoon.

The count is useful three ways. It tells you the real denominator for any capacity conversation, which is usually the reason those conversations go in circles. It surfaces the work that is in flight without ever having been decided, which accumulates quietly in every organisation. And compared against the causal lines from part one, it tells you what share of the organisation's actual effort is pointed at the stated destination.

That last comparison is the one that ends arguments. An operation with eleven things in flight, of which four have causal lines, is not under-resourced. It is spending most of itself on work nobody can connect to where it says it is going, and the fix is not more people.

Recount quarterly. The number drifts, and the direction it drifts in is a better health signal than most of what is on the dashboard.