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Continuing our famous mystery topic, I want to talk about hidden work.
What’s hidden work, you may ask.
Quite unsurprisingly, it’s work that’s being done, but is happening “under the radar”.
Things that happen invisibly are usually a bad thing in an organisation, because they can’t be planned.
And, as I’m sure your mother told you, unplanned work is the root of all evil.
Unplanned work messes up your estimates, your work pipelines, threatens your success at creating a product: instead of doing the thing you ought to be doing, you spend time on something else.
So – hidden work is bad. Here’s the thing though: if you have branches of your organisation hidden in your shadow org chart, I guarantee that there’s also hidden work going on.
And I guarantee it’s dragging you down.