“I don’t know if I’m allowed to”
A colleague once gave me an answer that I still think about.
She was well trained, intelligent and in a position where she could initiate real improvement. I had arranged for her to attend Toyota Kata training, and the company had paid for it. Coaching was part of the training and part of the practice.
In this context, coaching does not mean personal counselling or offering unsolicited advice. A Kata coach helps a colleague work towards a concrete improvement goal, examine the next obstacle and learn from the next step.
Her manager at the time had taken part in the training as well. She liked Kata, used it herself and had given my colleague a clear mandate to apply it. Shortly afterwards, she moved to another position. My colleague did not know what her new manager thought about her taking on the Kata-coach role.
About six months later, I asked whether she was still using Kata to support colleagues in their improvement work.
She said she had found the training excellent. She even used the Kata questions with friends in her private life. But she did not use them to support improvement work in the company.
Why not?
“I don’t know if I’m allowed to.”
I was speechless.
She had not asked and been told no. She had expected the answer to be no, so she had not asked at all.
I later spoke to her new manager and asked whether he had any objection to her supporting colleagues with Kata. His answer was clear: no. She still does not take on that role today.
Kata met the organisation
That answer bothered me for another reason. In Toyota Kata, one of the coaching questions asks:
When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?
The exact wording can vary, but the logic is always the same: because we do not yet know what will happen, we take a step and compare the outcome with what we expected.
My colleague did not dare to take the step that would have told her whether she was allowed to act as a Kata coach at work.
She had learned a routine for moving through uncertainty by experimenting. Then she returned to an organisation in which the uncertainty about permission stopped the first experiment before it began.
Of course, she could have asked. That was my first thought. But stopping there would have been too comfortable, especially for me. I had initiated the training, yet we had not made sure that her mandate survived the change in leadership.
The training had worked well enough for her to use the practice outside work. Inside the company, something else was stronger.
The expected answer is part of the system
We tend to look for decisions we can observe: a proposal is accepted or rejected, permission is granted or withheld. These events leave traces in an inbox or an approval process.
An expected rejection leaves no such trace.
People form an idea of what will happen before they raise a subject. They know how managers respond when someone crosses a departmental boundary. They have seen what happens when an initiative consumes time but does not immediately produce a result. A change of manager can make even a previously legitimate role uncertain again.
None of this needs to appear in a policy. It still shapes action.
Her new manager’s actual answer did not support her expectation. It did not matter. Nobody had made that answer available to her. She acted on the answer she anticipated, and the real answer was never tested in the work.
This is where the Permission Queue begins. Not with a request awaiting approval, but with an idea that never reaches the person who could approve it.
We paid for capability and left it unused
The purpose of the training, at least from my perspective, was not to improve her conversations with friends. We wanted her to use the practice in the business.
Yet sending someone on a course does not change the system to which they return.
Training can build competence, and a manager can provide a mandate. Neither guarantees that the mandate will remain usable when responsibilities change. The organisation has to make the role and its backing durable.
That gap is often hidden by positive course evaluations. If participants enjoyed the training, understood the method and would recommend the instructor, the intervention looks successful on paper even when daily work has not changed.
But what changed in the work?
The loss was larger than the cost of the course. A person who could have helped colleagues work through real obstacles kept that capability outside the factory gate.
That is Capacity Tax in a very practical form. The organisation invests in judgement and then receives less of it than it paid for.
This was a governance problem
Supporting colleagues in their improvement work may sound harmless. Inside an organisation, however, it can raise legitimate questions.
Was Kata coaching part of her role now? Could she support colleagues outside her own reporting line? Would their managers welcome that, or regard it as interference? Which work should give way when this support required time?
I do not know which of these questions she had in mind. I do know that we had left enough unanswered for her to stop.
Her new manager’s “no objection” did not close that gap. It described his position when I asked him, but it did not make the existing mandate usable again. Her former manager had shared the training experience and explicitly supported the work. The new manager inherited the team, but not the conversation around her role. A mandate that had once been clear became uncertain without ever being withdrawn.
Calling for more courage would not have resolved that. Neither would a broad statement that everyone was “empowered”. She needed clarity about the space in which she could act and confidence that we would support responsible action within it.
This is why I see the incident as a matter of governance. A mandate that has to be guessed again after every leadership change is not a durable decision space. People need to know where they can act and whether that backing survives a change of manager.
Without that backing, the safest interpretation of almost any role is the narrowest one.
Initiative becomes real when it causes friction
Most organisations say they want initiative. That statement only becomes interesting when an initiative creates friction.
Someone spends time on an experiment whose result is uncertain, or a colleague from another function asks why this person is getting involved. The organisation now has to show what its invitation was worth.
Leaders do not have to approve every idea. A reasoned no can create more clarity than vague encouragement. What matters is whether people can bring forward a proposal without having to calculate a hidden personal cost first.
Research into employee voice describes this well. People carry assumptions about when speaking up is inappropriate or risky, even when leaders sincerely believe they are open to suggestions. The same mechanism applies to action. If an experiment is likely to leave someone exposed, avoiding it can be a perfectly rational response.
What I would do differently
Today, I would not end the process when the training ends.
Before the participant returns to normal work, I would agree where the new capability should first be used. We would choose a real case and make clear whose support is available if the work crosses an organisational boundary. Then we would set a date to look at what happened.
I would also treat that agreement as something the organisation owns, not as an informal understanding with one manager. If the manager changes, the mandate has to be discussed again and handed over deliberately. Otherwise, a change in the organisation quietly resets permission to zero.
This would continue the Kata rather than leave it in the classroom. The first step would not have to prove the entire approach. It would give us information from reality.
I would also ask a different question after a few weeks. Not whether the training was good, but where the person hesitated to apply it. The hesitation may reveal more about the organisation than another completed coaching cycle.
If the answer is “I wasn’t sure I was allowed to”, the first response should not be “Why didn’t you ask?”
The useful question is: What made you expect a no?
An empty inbox proves very little
My colleague could have asked. Her former manager could have handed over the mandate. Her new manager could have made his lack of objection visible to her. I could have closed that loop when I initiated the training. None of us did.
She had the competence and she had been given the mandate. Her new manager did not oppose it. Yet the work still stopped because the mandate had remained attached to one relationship instead of becoming a durable part of her role.
No request reached an inbox, and no manager had to say no. Daily work simply continued without the improvement support we had paid to develop.
That is the Permission Queue I want to understand: not only decisions waiting for a manager, but improvement work that disappears between two managers because nobody carries the mandate across the handover. An authority that has to be guessed again after every leadership change is not an authority people can reliably use.
Further reading
Toyota Kata by Mike Rother
Mike Rother’s work provides the foundation for the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata used in this story. This example from the Lean Enterprise Institute shows how the coaching questions support the learner’s thinking rather than supplying the answer. That distinction matters here: the routine creates learning only when the organisation allows a real next step.
“Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-for-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work” by James R. Detert and Amy C. Edmondson
Detert and Edmondson examine the unwritten beliefs people use when deciding whether it is safe or appropriate to speak up. Their work helps explain why a formal invitation is not enough. Employees act on what they expect the organisation to do, including when nobody has explicitly told them to remain silent.
Explore more in The Shift series
The Hero Reflex
The Permission Queue can grow when leaders answer every difficult question themselves. This article examines how useful intervention gradually teaches capable people to wait.
The Capacity Tax
Unused capability is one of the costs conventional accounting does not show. The Capacity Tax makes the delays and dependencies created by control visible as an operating cost.