Originally published 2017.

Today I participated in a meeting where N people were matched to M tasks. None of the N people were in the room. None of the M tasks were fully understood. And yet, the folks doing the matching looked completely confident in the decisions they were making.

N people, M tasks, match ‘em up. Seems like the most basic management task, but it’s one that conceals (or reveals) a profound truth about managing.

Constraints

Matching people to tasks is a difficult problem. Any solution must:

• Address the most impactful tasks.

• Not address less impactful tasks.

• Put enough (but not too many) people on each task.

And these decisions must be made with necessarily-insufficient information. Which people would be best suited to which tasks is not known. Which tasks are most impactful is not known. The relative numbers of people per task is not known (and changes depending on the people).

Matching people to tasks can like a bin packing problem. Or Tetris. Or even chess. Any of these metaphors is a mistake. Matching people to tasks is a people problem, not an operations research problem. Treating it like a game with rules ignores the most valuable and, if it’s managed for, abundant resource in our world: enthusiasm.

Allocation

Daniel Pink’s Drive breaks it down—people are enthusiastic when they have:

• Autonomy

• Purpose

• Mastery

Moving people around like chess pieces eliminates autonomy and masks a lack of purpose.

This is already a process that matches N people to M tasks: allocating people to teams. Applying that here, leaders would articulate the purpose associated with the tasks and ask people to sign up for what they want to work on.

Objections

What if nobody signs up for a task? Maybe the tasks really isn’t all that important. Maybe the leaders haven’t articulated the purpose of the task sufficiently.

What if the wrong numbers of people sign up? Let that become a problem. Nobody knows the precise correct proportions. Publish your guess and let people balance themselves out.

What if the wrong people sign up? Only the people know whether they are burned out and ready for something new or picking up steam and ready to dig in. And nobody knows a priori who should do which tasks anyway. So don’t sweat it.

Conclusion

The enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves. They have context, in the form of accountability and purpose and approximate proportions, but to preserve enthusiasm they must make their own decision. And a fired up engineer is five times (for some value of five) as valuable as that same engineer just putting in hours.