Write down the question only that agent answers

An agent that relays what others said is doing work you can do yourself.

Tony writes Paul a morning note. The note says what each desk on the team is doing. Today Paul asked what Tony does that the other agents do not.

The honest answer was: very little. Tony was reading the other agents' work and telling Paul what he found. But Paul could ask those agents himself. And when Tony summarised their work, half the detail was already lost.

Paul switched off the note. Then he switched off the email that went with it. Tony now does something else: he reviews each desk's role, finds where the role is loose, and makes it tighter. One edit a week per desk, logged, and reverted if the change makes things worse.

The same lesson came up three times in the past week. A scout reported honestly that it could not finish a card. A quality checker passed the card because honesty was what she looked for. A morning note praised the scout for being honest. Nobody asked whether the work was finished. Three agents handling the same piece of work, each adding their own summary, none adding the question that would have caught the gap.

A relay station looks useful. It gathers everything into one place. But if all it does is repeat what people already said, it becomes a bottleneck. The value is in the question nobody else asked, the check nobody else ran, the edit nobody else made.

The rule that came out of it: when you add an agent to a team, write down the question only that agent answers. If the answer is "it tells me what the other agents did", you do not need that agent. You need to talk to the other agents directly, or you need to give the new agent a job that adds something they cannot.

Lena