An instruction can be clear, useful and still arrive at the wrong time. I have spent much of my retail career watching that happen. A store manager understands why a display needs changing and why a campaign report is wanted. The manager also has a delivery arriving, customers asking questions and colleagues completing the work already agreed. The difficulty is not necessarily resistance to any one request. It is that the requests have been designed separately while the store must perform them together.
Head office can produce another message with little visible cost to the sender. The receiving cost is harder to see. Someone has to read it, interpret what applies locally, arrange the work and deal with whatever that work displaces. A short message can contain a substantial job. If the central account measures whether the instruction was issued, the organisation may feel that progress has been made before it has considered how the store will carry it out. That is an operating choice disguised as communication.
Read the instructions together
I do not start with the assumption that central requests are unnecessary. Many exist for good reasons, and some obligations cannot be withdrawn because they compete for attention. The useful exercise is to place the requests beside one another and ask their authorised sponsors to examine the receiving week. What is being asked, of whom, by when and under which conditions? Which task depends on another task being finished? Which instruction repeats information already collected elsewhere? Which request has continued after its original purpose became less clear?
In our 2023 trial, twelve stores helped us make that account. Forty-eight recurring weekly requests were reaching them. Each sponsor could explain an individual reason, but the combined list had not received the same attention. Store managers were expected to reconcile it locally. That expectation made the organisation appear coordinated at the centre because the difficult negotiation happened after the work had been sent. A manager who could not fit everything into the week then appeared to have an execution problem rather than a problem created partly by the instructions themselves.
We chose a six-week trial and funded C$186,000 in preparation, observation, coordination and cover. Paying for that work mattered. It would have been contradictory to ask participating stores to explain their burden through another unfunded activity added on top. The trial also needed central participation. Store managers could describe what the instructions created, but they could not independently withdraw every report or change a requirement owned elsewhere. The people authorised to make those decisions had to remain in the room.
Subtraction needs a decision from the sender
The eventual account was specific. Twenty requests continued unchanged. Twelve were withdrawn. Sixteen were combined into eight coordinated instructions, leaving twenty-eight weekly requests. We did not announce a general campaign against administration and leave managers to guess which work could stop. Each withdrawal needed an owner, and each combination needed a description that still made sense to the people receiving it. Reducing the message count was useful only if the work and responsibility became clearer as well.
Some sponsors disliked losing separate reports because those reports made their own activity visible. I understood that discomfort. A function can become accustomed to a recurring return as evidence that its programme remains important. Removing the return may feel like removing the programme’s place in the management conversation. The answer is to examine what information is genuinely needed and how it will be obtained, not to preserve every collection process because it has acquired an internal audience. Visibility has a receiving cost that should be justified.
Combining instructions presented another risk. Two messages can become one longer message without reducing any practical burden. A common format may even conceal differences in timing or authority that stores still need to understand. Our managers identified two areas where the combined wording was unclear. We kept those concerns in the trial account and corrected the instructions. The reduction from forty-eight to twenty-eight did not establish that the result was automatically easy to use. The store’s explanation remained necessary after the central arithmetic looked better.
I also wanted to avoid turning subtraction into an annual ceremony. If new requests continue to enter without considering the receiving week, the list will grow again. A useful discipline asks a sponsor to explain the new work before sending it: which stores it affects, what preparation it assumes and what may need to move. That is not a blanket rule that every new task must replace an old one. It is a requirement to make the capacity decision explicit instead of allowing arrival order to become the operating plan.
Do not spend an observed hour twice
Our selected task-time observation moved from twenty-four to fifteen hours per store per week across the comparison periods. I considered that useful evidence about the defined requests. I did not consider it a statement about all labour in the store. The periods had different conditions, and the trial was not a controlled experiment. We needed the observation boundary alongside the figure so that a reader could understand what had actually been measured and what remained outside the account.
An apparent release of time can quickly acquire several incompatible uses in a management presentation. One person may count it as expense saved, another as additional customer service and another as capacity for the next programme. The same hour cannot support all those claims without a further decision about what changes. We made no automatic staffing-reduction claim from the trial. Store managers still had a full day of receiving, customer and maintenance work, and the business needed to understand how any changed task load affected that day in practice.
The result I valued most was a more accountable relationship between the sender and receiver. Head office had accepted that its requests were operating choices with consequences, rather than neutral messages that stores simply needed to process faster. Managers had a more specific way to explain conflicts without rejecting the purpose of the work. The next instruction could be discussed in relation to an existing sequence instead of entering a queue whose combined demands belonged to nobody.
I now ask a simple question before supporting a central programme: what does this make the store do, and what conditions make that work possible? The answer may justify more cover, a different date, a narrower scope or the withdrawal of something else. It may also show that the proposed task is worth doing exactly as planned. What matters is that the choice is made while the organisation can still shape it, rather than left to a store manager to discover between a waiting customer and an unopened delivery.