REROLE

Reassign what functional job an entity is actually doing (gatekeeper, sensor, bottleneck, translator) instead of what its title says.

There's a colleague whose job title says "project coordinator," and by title she's mid-level, easy to overlook. Yet every important piece of information in your department passes through her, and when she took vacation, three projects stalled. The org chart describes her rank. It says nothing about her function, and you keep designing processes around titles instead of functions.

REROLE means reassigning what functional job an entity is actually doing, regardless of what it's called. The cue: a person or component is defined by its title rather than by what it contributes to the mechanism. Run through the functional roles: producer, consumer, gatekeeper, sensor, memory, bottleneck, translator, coordinator, verifier, beneficiary. Ask which ones she's really performing: she's the department's memory (she knows why decisions were made), its translator (she converts executive vagueness into tasks), and its bottleneck (everything routes through her). Pick the role assignment that best predicts interfaces and failure modes, because "she's our single point of failure for institutional memory" tells you exactly what breaks and what to build. It works when the new role changes responsibilities, information flows, or design. The safeguard: don't reduce a person to one instrumental role, and don't adopt a metaphorical label that changes nothing operationally.