3.3 The middle 80 percent: the worker plans and executes

In everyday life. A friend is cooking dinner for you. If you stand over the stove and keep changing the heat, you end up cooking it yourself, only slower. You stay nearby in case they ask where the salt is.

In the middle 80 percent the worker owns the steps. It reads the inputs, decides the order of work and chooses its tools. It checks its own intermediate results and gathers the evidence the review contract asked for. On a delegated task this happens on the worker's own machine, often while you are in a meeting or asleep (Chapter 1).

The human still has a job in the middle. It is small and specific.

• Stay reachable. A good brief makes the worker stop and ask when a stop rule applies. Answer quickly, and answer the question asked.
• Approve what the authority level requires, and only that. If the brief says the worker drafts, there is nothing to approve until the final 10. If a product asks you to confirm a step, read it. Do not click through it without thinking.
• Watch if you like, but do not steer. A progress view is for noticing that something is badly wrong, such as the wrong files or the wrong month. It is not for redirecting each step.

Interrupt when a stop condition appears: you learn something that changes the intent, you see the wrong inputs, the worker acts beyond its authority, or its behavior looks suspicious. For a change of intent, stop the run and fix the first 10 percent. Changing the brief mid-run, one message at a time, leaves no clear record of what the worker was asked to do.

Why hold back? Because every interruption moves work from the worker back to you, and that work is the reason you delegated. Maria approved each step and fed the worker one invoice at a time. She did the planning herself and paid for the worker as well. Holding back is also what makes parallel work possible. You cannot steer three tasks at once, but you can brief three well and check three sets of evidence.

Trust in the middle is earned per kind of task, not given once. A new task type, or a task that touches money, may run with the worker asking before each important step. A task with a clean record can run with less. Chapter 7 turns that judgment into the autonomy ladder.