Distribution Across People and Time

Check how gains and losses land across people and time instead of trusting the total.

The launch shipped on time and the retro slide says "team win." Look closer: two engineers worked every weekend for a month, the on-call rotation absorbed the aftermath, and the customer-facing folks who promised the date bore none of it. The total came out fine. The distribution is the story the total buried.

Distribution Across People and Time inspects how gains and losses actually land across people and across time, instead of trusting aggregates. The cue: any plan or result justified by a sum, an average, or "net positive," especially when different people or different years foot different bills. Run it in three steps. First, ask the move question: who gains now, who pays later, and what do averages hide? Second, sketch a small grid, people down one side, near-term and long-term across the top, and fill in who gets what. Third, check for concentrations: one person carrying most of the cost, or the future paying for the present. What changes when it works: hidden subsidies become negotiable, deadlines get repriced with their true overtime cost visible, and "we won" gets an honest asterisk. The spec's boundary: distributional analysis informs legitimacy; it doesn't mechanically settle every conflict, so use it to see clearly, then still decide.