Three Stooges Model

Three Stooges Model compresses a messy business into a few moving parts. The compression loses detail and gains sight.

The model's real service is conversation. It gives a group of people the same picture to point at. Half of management is just getting everyone to look at the same wall.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Tomorrow will provide the test. It always does.