Lunching out – please don’t

We get it. You volunteer to do a task, with good intentions.  But then it is more complex than you thought (planning fallacy etc)

Or life happens – kids get sick, computers die, “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

And we know it is embarrassing to have to go back to someone and say “you know that thing I said I was going to do – sorry, I can’t.”

And so often we (and all of us have done this), just don’t do the task, and hope that the people who are relying on the task to be done either won’t mind, or will find someone else at short notice, or will work out that you can’t do it through telepathy.

This not telling that you are not going to do an agreed task by the agreed deadline / to the agreed standard / at all is known within CEM as “lunching out.”

It is IMMENSELY destructive of morale, trust and co-ordinative capacity.

We really really don’t like being lunched out. Please do not do this. 

If you can’t do a job you’ve taken on, please tell us as soon as you find out that you can’t.

Then we can either re-arrange our plans, or find someone else to do the job.  But if we don’t know about it until it’s too late, well, our morale takes a hit. And we don’t think our morale can take too many hits. The abyss is staring into us, hungry for our souls, after all.