The Chair

Every wind-down plan has a scope line, and on the first day everybody reads it the same way: this is about the site. It takes a while to notice that a scope line has no edge that excludes the person drawing it.

The plan is orderly, because a good one is. Equipment tagged, a resource risk list by role, a sequence built to protect the last delivery. The list has a column for critical competence: who cannot be lost before the end, and what happens if they go anyway. Somewhere in the middle of it, in the same handwriting as everything else, is a line for the person managing the wind-down.

Courage has nothing to do with it. The discipline is simply applied without an exception, and the exception is the thing that would break it. A closure runs on trust that the sequence is honest, and everyone can see whether the person asking them to stay until the last day has written themselves an early exit. Once the list has a hole shaped like its author, nobody believes the rest of it.

The bill is personal, and that is the point. At one site the role being wound down was my own, and it went onto the list in its place, in the order the method put it. The plan held. So did the deliveries, to the last day.

So when a wind-down plan is presented there is a quiet way to test it: who does it still have on site on the last day? The part that looks like a project is over months before the end. What remains decides whether the customer is still there afterwards, and it is what people stop watching. A plan that is finished before the last delivery is not a plan. It is a schedule for the easy half.

Where this shows up: Factory closure — winding down a site without losing the last delivery.