When It Is Wrong Three Times
A pattern of poor work is what an employer handles with development and a buyer handles with a decision, and the decision is taken later than it should be.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. Correction is commercial here, and it is slower and blunter than the thing it replaces.
A pattern of substandard work is the situation an employer handles with development and a buyer handles with a decision. The decision is almost always taken later than it should be, and the delay is where the damage accumulates.
The practical issue in “When It Is Wrong Three Times” becomes clearer when expectations and evidence are visible to both sides. Used for getting teams to meet deadlines, read the official workflow summary can add time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential interpretation receives human review.
This article is about the point at which rejecting individual deliverables has stopped being the right response.
Teams documenting “When It Is Wrong Three Times” can also review Zapier project-management guidance. Record which ideas fit the engagement and which still need confirmation from the contract owner or local adviser.
The point itself
Roughly: when the problem has recurred enough that you can describe it as a pattern rather than as a series of incidents, and when specifying more precisely has already been tried.
Three is a convention rather than a rule. What matters is that the same failure has happened after you did the thing that should have fixed it.
Ruling out your own side first
Before concluding anything about the supplier, three questions, and the answers are frequently uncomfortable:
- Was what we asked for written down, clearly, each time?
- Did we change it after they started?
- Did we tell them, at the time, that the previous one was wrong?
A business that cannot answer yes to all three has not yet established that the supplier is the problem, and acting as though it has will cost it a supplier who was doing their best with nothing.
The supplier who was never told
Extremely common. Work comes back below standard, somebody fixes it internally because it is quicker, nobody says anything, and this repeats for five months.
From the supplier's side the engagement has been going fine. Ending it at that point is both unfair and expensive, and it produces exactly the response you would expect.
What trying harder looks like
Before deciding, there is usually one honest attempt left: restate the specification in writing, say plainly that the last three did not meet it, and agree what the next one has to be.
That is not a warning and it should not be dressed as one. It is a buyer being precise about the product after being imprecise about it, and it resolves a meaningful proportion of these situations.
The decision, when it comes
Binary. Continue or stop. There is no third option, and businesses that invent one — reduce the work, move them to easier tasks, give it another quarter — are usually avoiding a conversation at the cost of another six months.
Reducing somebody's work without saying why is also, in its own way, a sanction applied informally, which is the one thing worse than applying it openly.
Stopping well
Covered properly in the next article. The thing relevant here is that a decision taken on the evidence of a pattern, after the pattern was raised, is a straightforward commercial ending.
A decision taken abruptly after months of silence looks like something else entirely, and it is the version most likely to produce an argument about what the arrangement really was.
What it costs to continue
More than most businesses count. The internal time spent fixing work, the deliveries that went out below standard, the effect on the people who have to work around it, and the opportunity cost of not having engaged somebody who could do it.
Set against that, the cost of finding a replacement is usually smaller than it feels in the moment, and the moment is when the decision gets deferred.
Keeping the record straight while you decide
Whatever happens, the useful record is the same: what was specified, what was delivered, what was said about it and when.
Four columns, filled in as it happens. If the engagement ends and anybody asks questions afterwards, that record answers them. If it continues and improves, the record is why you know it improved.
The supplier who is good at some of it
The genuinely difficult case. They are excellent at one part of the work and consistently poor at another.
The commercial answer is to narrow the engagement to the part they are good at and buy the rest elsewhere. That is available, it is honest, and it is quite different from quietly giving them less work while being dissatisfied, which is what usually happens instead.
What this cannot do
None of the above improves anybody. A supplier who leaves your engagement after a pattern of poor work leaves with exactly the capability they arrived with.
Businesses find this genuinely uncomfortable, particularly managers who are good at developing people. It is the clearest expression of what this arrangement is: you select, you specify, you accept or reject, and you stop. Everything beyond that belongs to a different relationship.