Detail of Sericulture (The Process of Making Silk) by Attributed to Liang Kai. Workers raise silkworms and process silk through a sequence of tasks in open buildings.

Learn enough to judge the result

Do not delegate a mystery and then expect to recognize excellent work.

Founders often keep familiar tasks and hand unfamiliar ones to someone else. This feels comfortable. It can leave the least understood work with the weakest oversight.

Learn enough to define useful performance. Understand the important decisions, constraints, and common failures. You do not need to remain the best specialist, but you need to ask relevant questions.

Then find someone who can perform the work better than you. Delegating a familiar task releases time to understand another area. Repeating this process expands the company’s capability and your view of the whole business.

Do not turn understanding into a demand to master every detail before anyone can help. The purpose is informed responsibility. Use specialists while you build the knowledge required to evaluate their contribution.

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