But however you do it, the key is to ensure that people have no ambiguity about their deadlines, that they are committed to meeting them, and that you have a culture where missing deadlines is simply not an option. And that, in turn, means you need people who have the discipline to refuse to commit to deadlines that they cannot hit. If deadline slippage becomes routine, then deadlines do more harm than good.

There is a crucial yet hard-to-understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.

Like the river making its way from Everest to the ocean, your organization will have to constantly navigate obstacles and take a step back (or pause) every once in a while.

Important as they are, conversations about bottlenecks shouldn’t be allowed to drift into problem-solving. It’s okay if somebody wants to reply to a “stuck” by saying, “Call so-and-so,” or, “I’ll get on that right away” (if he or she is the “stuck”!), but take anything more than that offline. Remember: The daily meeting needs to be kept short.

Another effective rule I’ve seen is that if you wouldn’t move something out of your schedule in the next two days for it, just say no.