What is Rework Risk?

Why partial closures resurface

A partial closure is a decision where convergence happened but execution scaffolding didn't. The group agreed on something. Nobody's name went on it. No next step was defined. No deadline was set. In the moment, it feels like progress — the question was resolved. In the two weeks that follow, it drifts. The person who was implicitly expected to own it had a different understanding of their role. The timeline that everyone assumed was never stated. When a related decision comes up in the next meeting, the earlier one gets revisited — because nobody is confident it was actually handled. That is a rework event. It was predictable from the moment the closure was partial.

What Rework Risk counts and why alignment closures are excluded

Rework Risk counts partial closures on decisions (conclusions reached about direction), actions (tasks assigned to specific outputs), deferrals (items consciously set aside for a later forum), and escalations (items agreed to route upward). Alignment closures — where the group acknowledged a shared understanding without producing a decision or action — are excluded. Alignment closures reflect the quality of the facilitation, not the execution risk. Whether a group reached alignment cleanly is a coordination quality signal. Whether a decision will resurface as rework is an execution risk signal. Combining them would conflate two different problems.

Rework Risk as a leading indicator

Most coordination metrics are lagging: they tell you that something failed after it has already failed. Rework Risk is leading. It flags the specific items — by name, not in aggregate — that are likely to come back before they come back. This is the window for intervention. A rework event that happens in a future meeting costs the full time of everyone in that meeting. The same intervention, made immediately after the current meeting while context is fresh, costs a message or a two-minute conversation. The leverage is enormous. Rework Risk tells you exactly where to apply it.

The difference between Rework Risk and Recurring Coordination Debt

Rework Risk is forward-looking: these are the partial closures from this meeting that will likely resurface. Recurring Coordination Debt is backward-looking: these are the topics that already resurfaced in this meeting after being parked or escalated in a prior one. They are the two ends of the same failure cycle. High Rework Risk in one meeting, if not addressed, becomes Recurring Coordination Debt in the next. Tracking both shows whether the cycle is being broken or compounding.

Why the pattern compounds in remote and distributed settings

Research on distributed team coordination consistently identifies a "post-meeting gap" — the window immediately after a meeting closes where ambiguous items are most recoverable. In co-located settings, hallway follow-up and ambient proximity allow informal clarification to happen naturally. In remote and hybrid contexts, that ambient channel doesn't exist. A partial closure from a Thursday standup sits in that state until the next scheduled touchpoint, which might be a week away. The structural gap doesn't close itself. Rework Risk exists to make that gap visible while there is still time to close it cheaply — a short message or a five-minute call rather than a full agenda item in next week's meeting.

The pseudo-solution mechanism

Sam Kaner, in Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (Jossey-Bass, 2007), describes what he calls a "pseudo-solution" — an outcome that feels complete in the room but has no structural guarantees of survival. Kaner identifies the core failure: when groups don't explicitly document what needs to be done, who will do it, by when, and with what resources, they've created a decision that exists only as a shared memory. Shared memories degrade. Different participants reconstruct the conclusion differently. Nobody is confident enough to act unilaterally, so nobody acts. The item resurfaces in the next meeting not because the group was incompetent, but because the conclusion was never anchored to execution infrastructure.

This is precisely what Rework Risk flags: closures where that execution infrastructure — owner, next step, deadline — is absent. The score is not an evaluation of the group's intelligence or commitment. It is a structural reading of whether the decisions produced have any mechanism for surviving the end of the meeting.

Where the score has limits

The score counts structural gaps. It does not read alignment. A decision can have a clear owner, a next step, and a deadline, and still fail — if the person assigned genuinely disagrees with the direction and said nothing in the meeting. Patrick Lencioni calls this "the kiss of yes": public agreement that masks private resistance. Rework Risk will not catch this. A structurally complete decision given to a misaligned owner is a different problem, traceable through Coordination Quality signals rather than Rework Risk.

There is also a domain-specific limit. David Snowden's Cynefin framework identifies a Complex domain — environments where cause and effect are only coherent in retrospect, and where imposing a rigid next step and deadline can itself cause harm by forcing premature convergence. In genuinely complex situations, the appropriate "next step" may be a safe-to-fail experiment without a fixed deliverable or timeline. In those contexts, a partial closure by standard criteria might be the right output, not a structural failure. Teams working in complex environments should calibrate their Rework Risk interpretation accordingly.

What to do when Rework Risk is high

The most useful frame is what Kaner calls the "Decision Point" — the boundary between the world of ideas and the world of action. A group can spend as long as it needs in the world of ideas: exploring, debating, refining. But crossing the Decision Point requires a different kind of output. The decision doesn't just need to exist; it needs to be executable. Owner named. Next step concrete. Deadline stated or trigger defined.

When Rework Risk is high immediately after a meeting, the intervention is a language swap before context fades. Replace "Why hasn't this moved?" with "We didn't define the owner before we adjourned — let's do that now." The first framing invites defensiveness. The second identifies the structural gap and closes it. A brief decision log entry — one line per flagged item — does the same work at scale. This takes minutes while the meeting is still fresh. It takes significantly longer two weeks later when memories have diverged and someone has already started in the wrong direction.

Sources

Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S., & Berger, D. (2007). Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76. (Cynefin framework; Complex domain.)

Lencioni, P. (2005). Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Jossey-Bass. (Artificial harmony; "kiss of yes.")