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Do not hand off what you cannot pick up — LessWrong

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Context: Memo #2 in my sequence of publishing Lightcone Infrastructure internal team memos about our organizational principles Delegation is good! Delegation is the foundation of civilization! But in the depths of delegation madness breeds and evil rises. In my experience, there are three ways in which delegation goes off the rails: 1. You delegate without knowing what good performance on a task looks like If you do not know how to evaluate performance on a task, you are going to have a really hard time delegating it to someone. Most likely, you will choose someone incompetent for the task at hand. But even if you manage to avoid that specific error mode, it is most likely that your delegee will notice that you do not have a standard, and so will use this opportunity to be lazy and do bad work, which they know you won't be able to notice. Or even worse, in an attempt to make sure your delegee puts in proper effort, you set an impossibly high standard, to which the delegee can only resp

x Do not hand off what you cannot pick up — LessWrong The Lightcone Principles Organizational Culture & Design Practical Frontpage 2025 Top Fifty: 13 % 145 Do not hand off what you cannot pick up by habryka 12th Nov 2025 5 min read 24 145 Context: Memo #2 in my sequence of publishing Lightcone Infrastructure internal team memos about our organizational principles Delegation is good! Delegation is the foundation of civilization! But in the depths of delegation madness breeds and evil rises. In my experience, there are three ways in which delegation goes off the rails: 1. You delegate without kn

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