12 minutes
Capacity or demand? Learn to tell whether a difficulty is in the person's capacity or in what the process demands, and why the answer changes the response.
What you’ll be able to do Distinguish a capacity limitation from an executive demand imposed by a process, and identify the demand a given step places on a person. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: What is the most useful contribution? Document a next step for Capacity or demand?: Take one process you use and list the executive demand of each step. The same difficulty, two readings A person who cannot complete a renewal on their own may have a capacity limitation: their working memory or initiation is affected and no amount of process redesign changes that. Or they may be facing an executive demand: the process requires them to initiate, sequence, track and finish on their own, and it is the requirement, not the person, that can be changed. In practice it is almost always both, and the useful question is which one you can act on.
Capacity is slow to build and belongs to the person. Demand is fast to reduce and belongs to the process. A step that no longer requires the person to remember a reference number helps the person whose memory is affected, and everyone else, immediately. This is why demand review, rather than capacity building, is the first move.
Capacity limitation or executive demand? The person's working memory holds two items reliably and loses the third.
Choose a category Capacity limitation Executive demand The process requires holding a reference number, a date and a phone extension across a call.
Choose a category Capacity limitation Executive demand The person cannot initiate an unfamiliar task without a prompt.
Choose a category Capacity limitation Executive demand The letter says to call to schedule, without a time, a name or a number to call.
Choose a category Capacity limitation Executive demand The person cannot reliably estimate how long a task takes.
Choose a category Capacity limitation Executive demand The deadline is thirty days from a date printed on page two.
Choose a category Capacity limitation Executive demand Check matches Reset One process, six demands Notice and read Gather documents Call to schedule Attend Follow up if nothing happens The stack
Demand: Self-monitoring and initiation. The person must notice a letter among others, open it, and read to the action. Reduce it: A call or text that names the action in the first sentence.
Demand: Planning, sequencing, working memory. Three documents from three places, remembered and assembled. Reduce it: Send what is already on file; ask only for what is new.
Demand: Initiation, time management, working memory. Choose a time in business hours, make the call, hold the outcome. Reduce it: Offer a time. Let the person confirm or change it.
Demand: Time management, planning. Get there, on the day, with the documents. Reduce it: A reminder the day before, and a phone or home option.
Demand: Self-monitoring, initiation. Notice the absence of a response, decide it has been long enough, and start a call. Reduce it: Make the follow-up the office's task.
Each demand alone loses some people. Stacked, they lose the people with the most going on, and the lapse gets recorded as theirs.
Change the demand before the person What you can change You control whether a lapse rate is treated as a training need for people or a design finding for the process. The second is faster, cheaper and reaches everyone.
What to watch for Do not send people to skills classes so that a process can stay as it is. The class reaches a few; the redesign reaches all.
Your next step Pick the heaviest step in one process and propose how the office absorbs it.
Carry this forward A capacity limitation is something the person cannot currently do; an executive demand is something the process requires them to do on their own. The same difficulty can be either, depending on the step.
Most service processes stack demands: initiate a call, hold a reference number, sequence documents, track a deadline, and notice when something is missing. Each one is a place to fail.
Reducing the demand is almost always cheaper and faster than building the capacity, and it helps everyone who enters the process.
A sort separating capacity from demand, a tabs walk through a common process, a scenario decision and a knowledge check.
Take one process you use and list the executive demand of each step.
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Previous lesson Next lesson Carry this into practice What executive function is, why a process that assumes it fails specific people predictably, how to read behavior as information about the demand rather than the person, and how to design support around what someone does well.
Return to the experience: What did you notice or try, whose perspective informed it, and what would you keep or adjust?
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
