Glossary | Prodability

Time blocking — A planning technique that gives every activity of the day a dedicated block of time on the calendar, treating each block as an appointment with yourself.

Planning fallacy — A systematic tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete an activity, which persists even in people who have done the task many times.

Daily agenda — A tool, on paper or digital, used to record commitments, deadlines and blocks of activity and to decide what to spend time on in the next twenty-four hours.

Procedure update — A targeted change to the form or content of an existing procedure that does not alter the operating logic of the process, distinct from a revision or a redesign.

Procedure versioning — A formal system for tracking changes to an operating document according to the major.minor principle, which separates substantive changes from targeted updates.

Andragogy — A theoretical framework that describes the principles of adult learning, as opposed to pedagogy (how children learn).

Protected practice — The space between one training session and the next in which the employee applies what they learned under real conditions but with limited risk.

Structured shadowing — A training method in which a learning employee observes and practices alongside an experienced colleague, with explicit criteria, guiding questions and a colleague prepared to explain the reasons behind their choices.

Distributed microlearning — A training method based on short sessions (15-30 minutes), held regularly (weekly or every two weeks), each focused on a single concept or behavior and linked to the others.

Digitization — Moving into digital format what used to be on paper or done by hand, without this implying that human action is replaced.

Scalable business — An organization whose revenue can grow significantly faster than its costs and organizational complexity.

Business budget — The document in which a company translates its expectations for revenue, costs, investments and cash into orderly numbers over a one-year horizon.

Business forecast — An updated projection made during the year when material information changes, without rewriting the original budget.

Long-term business plan — A document that describes long-term choices on production capacity, products, markets and structural investments, distinct from the annual budget.

Operational checklist — A structured list of checks or actions in a specific order within a recurring process, which separates what requires judgment from what requires only memory.

DO-CONFIRM checklist — A checklist format for experienced operators: the process is carried out independently, then the checklist verifies that the critical steps have been completed.

READ-DO checklist — A checklist format for operators who are still learning: each item is read before carrying out the corresponding action, one at a time, guiding the sequence without assuming prior knowledge.

Hiring — An organizational decision that ties a labor need to a specific person through an employment relationship, with consequences for costs, organization and internal culture.

Behavioral interview — An interview technique that asks questions about real past situations (STAR format) to predict future behavior, reducing rehearsed answers and emotional decisions.

SBI model (Situation, Behavior, Impact) — A three-step framework for structuring effective feedback: anchor it to a specific situation, describe the observable behavior and spell out its impact.

Delegation — Transferring to another person not only the execution, but also the decision and the responsibility for the result, within a clear perimeter.

Business plan — A document that translates an idea or a strategic choice into numbers, timelines and resource requirements, serving to test whether the business model holds up numerically.

Financial accounting — A recording system that produces documents for tax and financial statement purposes to meet regulatory requirements, distinct from management control in purpose, timing and audience.

Management reporting — A management control tool that periodically compares actual figures with the budget to guide the decisions of the following period.

Scaling — A mode of rapid growth — typically digital — achieved by replicating an already validated model, with revenue growth not proportional to the increase in costs.

Company culture — The set of shared assumptions, values and behaviors that shape the way an organization works, decides and relates to customers and suppliers.

Organizational climate — The temperature an organization perceives at a given moment, varying with recent events and distinct from culture, which is the deep structure.

Denison model — A framework that measures four cultural traits (mission, consistency, involvement, adaptability) and correlates them with indicators of organizational effectiveness, supported by peer-reviewed meta-analysis.

Deep work — An organizational setup that protects windows of deep cognitive work through a structured three-level protocol.

Focus — A momentary mental quality of attention focused on the task at hand; it differs from deep work because it describes an internal state, not an organizational system.

Flow state — A subjective psychological experience of total immersion in an activity in which a person's abilities are fully engaged by the challenge and the perception of time is altered.

Monastic protocol — An approach to deep work based on extended periods of total isolation devoted to a single complex project.

Bimodal protocol — An approach to deep work that alternates distinct periods of total concentration (weeks or months) with normal operational periods, with planned switching.

Rhythmic protocol — An approach to deep work that protects fixed daily windows early in the morning, while keeping full operations for the rest of the day.

Journalistic protocol — An approach to deep work that uses any available window in the day to quickly enter a state of deep concentration, with no fixed hours.

Delegation scope — The bounded set of decisions and resources handed over to the delegate, defined by four written elements: subject, boundaries, resources, duration.

Effective delegation — A management practice through which a manager transfers to a team member a task, a level of authority consistent with the task and measurable responsibility for the result.

RACI matrix — A tool for clarifying decision-making roles that assigns to each activity in a process the letters R (Responsible), A (Accountable), C (Consulted), I (Informed).

Phantom delegation — A form of delegation failure in which the delegator says a task has been handed over but keeps intervening on the method, asking for unplanned updates or changing the delegate's decisions.

Execution control — Oversight of the operating methods a team member uses to carry out a delegated task, exercised through unplanned interruptions and regardless of result criteria.

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) — The ISO/IEC 19510 standard notation for modeling complex business processes, with more than a hundred symbols supporting events, conditional gateways and integration with IT systems.

Operational efficiency — The ratio between useful output produced and resources consumed, a lever for recovering margin by removing activities that produce no value for the customer.

Lean waste (muda) — Any activity that consumes resources without adding value as perceived by the customer. The Lean tradition classifies it into 7+1 recurring categories that can be adapted to services.

Employer branding — The external representation of a company's organizational identity as an employer, built over the medium term to lower the cost of hiring.

EVP (employee value proposition) — A summary of what a company actually offers the people who work there: type of work, autonomy, growth, pay and benefits, quality of relationships.

Employee training — Any structured action an organization puts in place — internal or external — to develop transferable skills in its people.

Task training — Instruction on a specific task, tied to a tool, a procedure or a machine (in Italian: addestramento): it fixes a specific skill gap but does not transfer skills that apply in other contexts.

Upskilling — Strengthening skills already present in the current role, raising their level without changing the team member's role.

Reskilling — Retraining a team member for a different role by building new skills, not by strengthening existing ones.

70-20-10 model — A rough estimate that splits adult learning at work into three shares: 70% from direct experience, 20% from interactions with colleagues and mentors, 10% from formal training.

Management training — A structured path through which technical team members acquire the skills to lead, manage other people's work and decide under uncertainty.

Technical training — A training path that updates the operational skills tied to "doing" in a specific discipline or procedure.

One-on-one coaching — A personalized one-on-one path that works on a person's specific traits, as distinct from structured training shared with other managers.

Leadership development — A path that develops the ability to influence choices and visions beyond your direct reports, an advanced specialization of management training.

Business management — The system of decisions, processes and tools through which a company plans its activities, organizes its resources and measures its results.

Job description — A document that, for each role in the company, specifies expected objectives, recurring activities, permitted autonomous decisions, performance indicators and interfaces with other roles.

Organizational change — A discontinuous intervention on one part of the system or on its entire architecture, with a start, a peak of effort and a consolidation phase.

Disagreement — A difference of opinion on a specific issue, without persistent relational tension: it differs from conflict because the substance can be separated from the interpersonal dynamic.

Organizational arbitration — A decision made by a third party with authority after hearing the parties in conflict: faster than mediation, but it can leave lingering dissatisfaction.

Commitment (operational definition) — A promise of a result to a counterpart, with a recognizable outcome and an identifiable deadline; it differs from an appointment, an activity and a task because it carries explicit accountability.

Appointment (vs. commitment) — A commitment with a rigid constraint of time, place and counterpart that goes into the calendar as a fixed slot; unlike a generic commitment, its placement in time is not flexible.

Eisenhower matrix — A scheme for classifying commitments on two independent axes (urgency and importance) that produces four operational quadrants (Q1–Q4), each with its own actions.

Skills matrix — A team mapping tool that shows, for each team member, the level they hold in every skill the business needs, making gaps, concentrations and redundancies visible.

Actual DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) — A measure of the actual average number of days it takes to collect payment, calculated on observed data, as distinct from the nominal contractual payment terms.

Information flow — A system of four components — entry points, filter, decision, archive — that governs how inputs move through the working day.

Perceived overload — A condition in which the volume of inputs feels unsustainable regardless of the actual volume, because the flow lacks a filter and a decision step.

Attention residue — A phenomenon in which part of your attention stays hooked on the previous task even after you switch to a new request, slowing down and degrading work on the next task.

MoSCoW method — A classification framework that ranks projects by level of necessity in four categories: Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have — including an explicit category for what will not be done in the current period.

Business innovation — The introduction, by a company, of products, processes, organizational or business models that are significantly new or improved compared with those in use, applied and producing observable value.

Entrepreneurial leadership — The ability to steer choices and people toward measurable results, grounded in observable behaviors rather than in a formal role.

Leadership vs. management — A conceptual separation between two organizational functions: management coordinates toward known goals; leadership steers toward new or uncertain directions.

Transformational leadership — A leadership approach that explicitly sets out a medium-term direction and invests in one-on-one coaching; effective in phases of growth or rebuilding.

Transactional leadership — A leadership approach based on clear exchange agreements between goals and consequences; effective for repetitive work and in contexts where predictability is the priority.

Situational leadership — A leadership meta-competence: the ability to adapt your style to the autonomy level of each team member and to the type of task.

Job posting — A condensed version of the job description aimed at external candidates, used in recruiting ads.

Functional chart — A map of the functions of the whole company that lists the aggregated tasks of each business function.

Decision rights — The section of the job description that specifies which decisions the role can make on its own and which require approval from above.

Standard work — The everyday operating baseline that describes the current way of working, not an archive of the past — every standard is the basis for the next improvement.

Document findability — The property of a document system that lets anyone looking for a piece of information find it in under five minutes, through an analytical index, keywords for each section and explicit cross-references.

Urgency — A subjective perception of immediate need, fueled by external pressure, anxiety or other people's requests, as distinct from an objective deadline.

Task importance — A strategic assessment of an activity's contribution to medium- to long-term goals, as distinct from contextual relevance.

Deadline — An objective, verifiable time variable: a date after which concrete, identifiable and measurable consequences occur, as distinct from perceived urgency.

Quadrant 2 — The quadrant of the Eisenhower matrix that holds important but not urgent activities: the plan that changes your trajectory over the medium term but is systematically sacrificed.

Channel-priority separation — The operating principle that gives each communication channel an explicit function and sets a single channel dedicated to emergencies, making all the others asynchronous with declared response times.

Continuous improvement — The collective habit of reviewing processes, tools and work practices in small recurring steps to reduce waste and errors and increase effectiveness.

Kaizen — A Japanese continuous improvement method based on small daily steps practiced by everyone who does the work, with an emphasis on collective participation and on progressive training before technical tools.

Lean — A management system aimed at eliminating waste (muda) along the value stream, which identifies 7 categories of waste and provides structured tools for reducing them systematically.

5S method — A method in five sequential phases for removing clutter from physical and digital workstations: Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain.

Kanban — A visual management tool for workflow that shows the progress of activities through columns (To do / In progress / Done), making waste and work-in-progress visible without status meetings.

KPI — The single quantitative indicator that measures the performance of an area against a goal set in advance; a component of the system, not the system itself.

Balanced Scorecard — A performance measurement framework that links company strategy to four balanced perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, learning and growth.

Performance Prism — A measurement framework that starts from the satisfaction and contribution of stakeholders — not only shareholders — to derive strategy, processes and organizational capabilities.

Functional structure — An organizational model that groups people by homogeneous function with vertical coordination: in Italy, the most common model in companies with up to fifty to one hundred employees.

Divisional structure — An organizational model that groups people by business unit, product, geographic area or customer segment, with each division having its own functions and operational autonomy.

Matrix structure — An organizational model that combines a functional structure with a project structure, creating a dual reporting line: each person reports both to the function manager and to the project manager.

Employee engagement — The investment of energy, attention and initiative in your own work, distinct from motivation as a drive and from satisfaction as a retrospective assessment.

Decision-making autonomy — The explicit and stable perimeter within which a team member can decide and act without asking the manager for confirmation.

Explicit recognition — The manager's act of specifically naming a team member's behavior or result, close to the moment it happened and calibrated to the context (private or public).

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) — A method for setting and reviewing goals that ties a qualitative objective to a small number of measurable key results, over windows that are typically quarterly.

Objective — A qualitative sentence that describes a desired state of the company at the end of the quarter, worded so that it is memorable and verifiable.

Key result — A measurable outcome indicator that, when reached, signals that the objective has been achieved; it requires a baseline, a target value and an owner responsible for the measurement.

Stretch goal — The level of ambition of a key result at which reaching 70 percent counts as a good result, because the wording requires real change to reach 100 percent.

Employee onboarding — The structured system through which a company takes a new team member from signing the contract to full operational autonomy.

Preboarding — The phase of the new-hire integration process that takes place before the person joins the company, between signing the contract and the first day of work.

New hire orientation — The initial, formal phase of joining a company: signatures, official introductions, activation of access. A bounded phase of onboarding, not a synonym for it.

Onboarding buddy — A peer-level colleague explicitly designated as the informal point of reference for a newcomer: they answer the questions people don't ask their boss; they don't provide technical training.

Organizational chart — A graphic representation of a company's organizational structure: it shows how people are grouped, who reports to whom and where responsibilities lie.

Deep work block — A non-negotiable, protected time slot dedicated to work that requires sustained concentration, analytical or strategic thinking, or the production of complex content.

Reactive block — A time window dedicated exclusively to handling email, messages, phone calls, micro-decisions and follow-ups, concentrated at set times instead of spread freely across the day.

Business organization — The system that distributes work, coordinates people and measures results, making it possible to operate even when the founder is not in the room.

Integrated productivity — An explicit, deliberate choice of your own point on the segmentation-integration continuum that optimizes both the production of professional results and presence in your personal life.

Focus time — The share of time in the day dedicated to activities that require continuous, uninterrupted blocks of attention, distinct from mandatory-attendance time and quick-decision time.

Fixed-attendance commitment — A category of commitment that requires physical or synchronous presence at a set time but not deep concentration; its cost is low if it is scheduled in advance.

Management succession — The transfer of operational leadership alone to an internal or external manager, while ownership stays in the family.

Daily planning — A 10-15 minute decision protocol that sets what goes on the calendar for the next 8-10 hours through three micro-decisions: selecting priority tasks, assigning them to a time block and keeping a reaction margin.

Weekly planning — A structured sequence of three actions (mapping commitments, balancing workloads across roles and a closing review) carried out in a fixed time slot before the week begins.

Weekly review — A structured 15-20 minute session on Friday afternoon that closes the past week and prepares the next one through three operational questions.

Strategic planning — A process that translates the long-term vision into measurable objectives, priority initiatives and review cadences.

Testable vision — A concrete and dated description of the company's future state, specific enough to guide hiring, investment and exit decisions.

PDCA — An iterative continuous improvement method with four cyclical phases: Plan, Do, Check, Act.

A3 report — A format for condensed analysis and communication on a single physical sheet, structured in 8 sections, developed at Toyota.

8 Disciplines (8D) — A structured 8-phase method for serious problems with an impact on customers or safety, with immediate containment of the damage before cause analysis.

5 Whys — A root cause analysis technique that repeatedly asks "why?" until it reaches a structural cause that leads to an action different from the initial one.

Business procedure — A documented and accessible description of how a recurring activity is carried out, with inputs, expected outputs and quality criteria.

Process owner — The single person responsible for updating a specific procedure and keeping it correct, identified by name and role in the document.

Work instruction — The most granular level of operational documentation: a single elementary activity carried out by one role with a single sequence of actions.

Procrastination — Voluntarily putting off a planned activity while knowing the delay will make things worse, as a short-term emotional regulation mechanism.

Active procrastination — Conscious, deliberate postponement of a task to focus on more urgent priorities, with a defined alternative plan — distinct from passive procrastination because of the presence of awareness and control.

Personal productivity — The set of practices through which an individual professional organizes time, attention and energy to achieve results consistent with their own goals.

Cognitive recovery — Restoration of attentional and memory resources through sleep, with consolidation of procedural memory during REM sleep.

Project management — A discipline that organizes a temporary initiative with defined objectives, time and budget constraints and responsibilities, setting it apart from recurring work.

Project — A temporary initiative with explicit constraints on deadline, budget and scope, which produces a unique result that is not replicated.

Project charter — A one-page document that sets out in writing a project's objective, constraints, scope and owners before kickoff.

Scope creep — The progressive, unauthorized expansion of a project's scope during execution, which erodes budget and time invisibly.

Waterfall method — A sequential approach to project management in which phases follow one another in a fixed order, each after the previous one is closed.

Agile — A family of iterative approaches to project management that cycles rapidly between planning, execution and review, accepting that requirements evolve.

Scrum — A lightweight Agile framework, not prescriptive about tools, that structures work into fixed-length sprints with three roles, five recurring events and defined artifacts.

Decision-making meeting — A type of meeting designed to choose between options, approve or deliberate, with few participants who hold authority, pre-read materials and a written output.

Generative meeting — A type of meeting designed to generate ideas or explore problems through structured brainstorming, with divergence before convergence.

Retrospective meeting — A type of meeting designed to review a period or a project in order to improve processes, structured as what went well / what didn't work / what we change.

Stand-up meeting — A short rhythmic synchronization format (10-15 minutes, fixed structure, non-decision-making) whose function is the team's daily coordination.

Decision rule — An explicit criterion — consensus, majority vote or consultative decision — that must be declared before the group discussion to avoid incompatible expectations.

Consultative decision-making — A decision mode in which the person in charge listens to the group's perspectives and then decides on their own — to be declared explicitly at the start so that participants do not feel consulted but not considered.

Business systemization — An ongoing practice that designs a company's recurring operations so they do not depend on the presence or memory of a single person, acting on four interdependent dimensions.

Telework — A form of employment with a fixed workstation outside company premises, rigid working hours and certified equipment. The place changes; the format of the work stays identical to the office.

Smart working (agile work) — An output-oriented model that removes fixed constraints of place and working hours, based on a written individual agreement. Accountability shifts from monitoring attendance to checking output.

Hybrid work — An organizational configuration that mixes on-site presence and remote work. It describes where the work happens, not how: it is a configuration of place, not a contractual model.

Fully remote work — A way of working mostly or entirely away from company premises, with no requirement to be physically present in the office. It describes the prevailing place of work, regardless of the management model.

Active listening — A communication behavior that does not interrupt, asks clarifying questions and summarizes before responding, in order to produce informed decisions.

Default leadership style — The leadership pattern that switches on automatically under pressure or when no explicit choice is made, revealing the leader's unconscious way of leading.

Business strategy — A coherent set of choices that determines where to compete and how to compete, used as a grid for operational decisions.

Timeframe-metric-controllability triad — A three-dimension operating criterion that qualifies a strategic goal as useful: a date by which to reach it, a measurable quantity, variables under the company's control.

Business succession — The set of legal, corporate and tax choices that govern the transfer of a company's ownership from one generation to the next.

Business contribution — The act by which the founder contributes the sole proprietorship or their shares to a newly formed company, receiving shares in that company in return.

Pomodoro Technique — A method that structures work into protected 25-minute blocks separated by short breaks, using a timer to enforce the boundary between work and break.

Task batching — A technique that groups tasks of the same kind into a single block of time to reduce the number of cognitive transitions during the day.

Multitasking — The apparent practice of performing several cognitive tasks at once, which in reality produces rapid task switching with measurable performance costs.

Time audit — A structured diagnosis of how working time is used, carried out over a short period with a fixed grid of categories, that produces a quantitative snapshot of how hours are distributed.

Time-use diary — A time-use survey methodology adopted by statistical agencies such as ISTAT (Italy) and Eurostat, based on systematically recording activities at set intervals.

Time compression — A cognitive bias of memory that leads you to overestimate how long past tasks took: emotionally salient activities seem longer, while routine ones are compressed in memory.

Bullet Journal — An analog note-taking system kept in a notebook, with a coded notation (rapid logging) organized on three time levels and a daily migration of unfinished items that filters out false priorities.

1-3-5 method — A fixed-number structure for the daily to-do list: 1 big item + 3 medium + 5 small = a non-negotiable maximum of 9 items. It stops the list from swelling through a structural constraint, not through personal discipline.

Employee turnover — The flow of staff entries and exits in a given period; it becomes a signal when it affects key people, concentrates in specific functions or accelerates with no visible cause.

Dysfunctional turnover — The share of exits that involves key people and high-value profiles; it calls for immediate diagnosis because it causes a loss of critical skills and significant hidden costs.

Functional turnover — The share of exits that involves low performers or roles that need redesigning; it is manageable and does not call for emergency action.

Attrition — The share of natural staff exits — retirement, end of a project, end of a contract — as distinct from turnover, which also includes voluntary resignations and early terminations.

Internal mobility — The movement of people between roles or functions within the same company; healthy internal mobility reduces external turnover, weak internal mobility feeds it.

Riskiest assumption — An untested belief that, if wrong, brings down the entire business model — to be told apart from assumptions with little bearing on whether the idea fails.

Kill criteria — Conditions defined in advance that, if not met after a set number of tests, lead to shutting down the idea with no further adjustments.

Core value — A stable criterion that guides observable behavior at the moments when it would be legitimate to act differently.

Procedure obsolescence — The process by which a company procedure stops matching operational reality, in a noisy form (visible errors) and a silent form (tacit abandonment).

Apply-reflect-reframe cycle — A three-phase cyclical process that turns the experience of applying a behavior into structured skill, tailored to the team member's context.

Map-simplify-standardize sequence — A preparatory mechanism in three consecutive phases that turns an existing process into a process ready for automation, producing an SOP as the functional specification for the system.

Failed delegation — The process by which a formally assigned delegation comes back to the person who delegated it sooner than planned, because at least one of the structural nodes is missing.

Training needs — The gap between the skills a role requires and the skills actually held, identified by cross-referencing business objectives, signals from department managers and team members' perceptions.

Operational delegation — A management process that assigns a task by specifying the expected result, the perimeter of autonomy and the reporting point, without imposing the method.

Structured delegation — A process for transferring responsibility that includes five elements: expected result, perimeter of autonomy, available resources, scheduled check-ins and measurable quality criteria.

Decision fatigue — A phenomenon in which making decision after decision over the day progressively lowers the quality of later choices, draining the cognitive resources available for weighing options.

Structured onboarding — An onboarding process organized over three horizons (30/60/90 days), each with written objectives and two-way feedback moments set in advance.

RICE scoring — A comparative scoring framework for projects that combines four variables (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) into a relative score, to compare alternatives on identical explicit criteria.

Task switching — High-frequency switching between different tasks, application windows or people that produces a cumulative cognitive cost.

Decision bottleneck — An organizational pattern in which the founder remains the decision-making hub for every operational issue, even after building a middle layer of management.

Asymmetric communication — A pattern in which the founder receives a lot of information from the team but gives little back, generating informal rumors and making the direction hard to read.

Strategy cascade — A process in three descending levels through which strategic objectives are translated into performance areas and then into operational indicators, never the other way around.

Organizational layering — A process in which an organizational model emerges without an explicit choice, through an accumulation of past decisions that have built up over time without a deliberate design.

Chronotype — A biological disposition that determines at what time of day a person performs best on demanding cognitive tasks, with individual variability documented by circadian research.

Segmentation-integration continuum — A theoretical axis describing the positions a person can take in managing the boundaries between work and personal life, from sharp separation (segmentation) to complete overlap (integration).

Founder-successor overlap — A multi-year phase in which founder and successor work together while responsibilities are progressively transferred.

Spaced training — A way of delivering training that spreads short, frequent sessions over the year instead of concentrating them in long events, causing less interference with production and better consolidation of learning.

Proceduralization — A process that turns an activity performed in a variable, informal way into a documented activity with standard steps and assigned responsibilities.

Implementation intentions — Plans in a when-then format that shift control of behavior from conscious intention to automatic activation by context, removing the need for a new deliberate decision at the moment of action.

Shared meeting agenda — A structural meeting tool that must be shared at least 24 hours in advance, with each item labeled by function (decision / information / discussion).

Deliberate practice — A skill development process that chooses specific situations with a stated goal and contained risk, fed by a systematic cycle of observation and feedback.

Structured observer feedback — An external feedback mechanism from an observer with an explicit mandate, which corrects the unreliability of self-perception as an indicator of change.

Adaptive leadership — An approach to leading that selects the style best suited to the situation by applying four criteria (the team member's maturity, the type of decision, the team's stage, time resources) and always makes the criterion explicit to the team.

Decision fatigue — A phenomenon whereby the quality of choices declines progressively after many consecutive decisions, because making decisions consumes a limited cognitive resource.

Zeigarnik effect — A cognitive phenomenon whereby the mind tends to return insistently to open tasks, creating persistent cognitive interference on working memory that fades once a written plan is formulated.

Backlog — A non-sequential reservoir of ideas, future tasks and intentions that you draw from to fill the operational to-do list. It is not worked through in order and has no immediate deadline.

Learning transfer — The process by which a skill acquired in a training setting is applied in real work autonomously and consistently, through three progressive states: declarative knowledge, skill applied in protected conditions, skill consolidated in natural conditions.

Commitment hierarchy — An increasing scale of reliability of customer signals: from "I'd be interested" (stated intention) to "here is my email address" (low-cost action) to "here is the payment" (significant-cost action).

Structured problem solving — A process in sequential phases that separates the analysis phase from the solution phase in a company's operational problems.

Root cause analysis — A family of techniques dedicated to identifying the structural origin of a problem: it carries out the analysis phase of problem solving, distinct from the solution phase.

Ishikawa diagram — A structured brainstorming tool that collects the possible causes of a problem into 6 categories (6M) to prevent premature convergence on a single hypothesis.

Problem triage — A selection process that distinguishes the problems that deserve structured analysis from those that can be handled with a direct response, using 4 criteria: recurrence, impact, spread, cost of not intervening.

Solution implementation — The problem-solving phase that turns the chosen solution into verifiable action: a small-scale pilot, a predefined metric, follow-up with owners and dates.

Corporate strategy — The level of business strategy that decides which businesses to keep in the portfolio: which line to back, which to keep as it is and which to divest.

Problem finding — The practice of noticing that a problem exists before it shows up as damage, without yet measuring it or explaining its causes.

Problem setting — The practice of giving shape to a problem already found — scope, measure, who suffers from it — so that it becomes analyzable before it is analyzed.

DMAIC — The Six Sigma improvement cycle in five phases (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control), with a formal measurement phase that PDCA does not separate out.

Assessment (structured evaluation) — A structured evaluation that in current usage refers to two distinct objects, people or risks, and is improperly extended to organizational diagnosis.

4M-6M categories — The families of causes that label the branches of an Ishikawa diagram: four, five or six, each with a guiding question and with the words of the place where the effect occurs.

Organizational problem — An issue that keeps recurring because the way the work is designed makes it likely, whoever does the work: you recognize it by its repetition, not by its severity.

Decision matrix — A table that compares several alternatives on weighted criteria, set before you look at the alternatives, and gives each one a total from which a reasoned ranking emerges.

Weighted criterion — A decision criterion assigned a stated weight, set before the scores, which establishes its influence on the total relative to the other criteria in the same grid.

Multi-criteria analysis — A family of methods that compare alternatives on several criteria that cannot be reduced to a single unit of measure; the weighted matrix is its simplest member.

Improvement suggestion — An idea from the person who carries out an activity to change one detail of it, written with a name on it, evaluated with declared criteria and closed by an answer by a set date.

Root cause — The most upstream condition of a problem which, once corrected, prevents it from coming back, and which is under management's control, not a person's.

Contributing factor — A condition that increases the probability of an undesired event without generating it on its own, and that is corrected after the root cause, not instead of it.

Nonconformance — Non-fulfillment of an agreed requirement — a measurement, a date, a document — found within the company and recorded as a row with date, source and extent.

Corrective action — An action that removes the cause of a nonconformance that has occurred, distinct from the correction that acts on the item: it is opened on recurrence, cost or downstream risk and carries an owner, a date and an indicator.

Weak signals — Small facts, already known to someone, that announce a problem before it produces a complaint or shows up in an indicator.

Countermeasure — An action chosen to counter a cause already established, which carries an owner, a threshold and a date on which the starting figure is checked again.

Time slot — A time interval dedicated to a single activity of the day, assigned in advance instead of simply listing commitments.

Eisenhower method — The process that keeps the four-quadrant matrix working — setting the criteria, classifying, deciding the action, redoing the classification at regular intervals.
Glossary
Definitions of the business organization, productivity and leadership concepts and methods cited in the articles, with the terms not to confuse them with.