Ideally, people do only what's needed before it's needed without being asked. Which management behavior evolves the organization in that direction? That's an

Ideally, people do only what's needed before it's needed without being asked. Which management behavior evolves the organization in that direction? That's an optimizing function with a range of five variables (delegator and delegate, subject matter and issue, and context) and a domain with multiple cost and quality scales. There are times when the "imprecise ask" is right, but most situations call for adverse bias (i.e., considering it a management smell). Jean-Louis Gassee famously tamed disputes between engineering heads by saying he's going to do the thing neither one wanted, so they had to get together to overcome him. Intelligence and decision-making depend mostly on focus: knowing what to ignore. If you're the delegate, it's your job to manage all that is being ignored (and only hoist it in the degenerate case that it cannot be ignored). But business context is the local valuation function: if you're in QA or doing medical software or your organization is highly politicized, then yes, adopt a defensive posture. But mostly if you have faith in yourself and others, you can get the temperature right.