The concept that keeps coming up in conversations around LLM output is “taste” but I think that’s still not quite right. The things my mind keeps coming back to over and over are resolution and fidelity……it might be weird to talk about language through art and music terms, particularly since I just abdicated a role in that conversation, but they have been very useful to me as I’ve experimented with this technology, using it for myself and seeing where things have worked and where things have fallen far short of what I expected.

Fidelity entered my analysis fairly early in working with these systems. One of my first tests was to see how an LLM handled my own ideas. Multiple iterations of “but that’s not what I said” output or “why do you (the LLM) keep flattening these complex things into mushy versions of them” responses from my brain, led to me throwing a temper tantrum via research paper. I know that’s a weird way to throw a tantrum, nonetheless there’s not a better description for that meltdown. An LLM works through compression. Compression, by its very nature, requires one to choose what to keep and what to discard. One of the most incredible experiences of my life was hearing Pink Floyd’s The Wall in high definition audio on speakers that cost more than a Ferrari, in a million dollar room set up to let you hear EVERYTHING on a recording. There were sounds in that song that I had literally never heard. Fidelity is how to true to reality the song was. In that room, with that setup I heard the song very very close to how I would have heard it if Pink Floyd were directly in front of me playing the song. The fidelity of an .mp3 ripped from a cd in the late 90’s distributed through Napster is NOT that because it has been compressed. You lose sounds, you lose breaths, you lose meaning. The same is true of ideas fed through the compression of an LLM.

The other area compression shows up in my personal life is in photography. If you take a picture in a .raw format with skill and a very expensive camera setup you get a photo that is as true to life as a photo gets. Think the photography of Thomas Mangelson or Peter Lik or Ansel Adams. As soon as you save that photo as a .jpg, the photo is compressed. Pixels are discarded, gradients are shortened, some colors are lost entirely. You also see this with logos. If you took a screenshot of a logo on a website and tried to scale it up to a 8.5 x 11 and print it on a piece of paper you will get a pixelated mess. Compression destroys resolution. And if you make a copy of a copy of a copy, you also destroy resolution with each copy.

I thought lowered fidelity was the only problem with LLM output, but resolution has also been a problem. If you’ve worked with LLMs for a while, you may have noticed that the language output lately feels worse even while the models have supposedly become smarter with tasks. I think partly this is because we stopped feeding them originals. Long conversations get compressed to fit, so you are working off a summary of your idea, rather than the idea itself. Output gets pasted into the next tool, and the next.……in short, lower fidelity and lower resolution copies. And at this point it’s become common to work with copies of copies of copies. You can see how resolution becomes a problem. It’s like that sad blurry purplish copied coloring page that a childhood in the 80’s would make you instantly recognize. You can almost smell it……

Experience

Have you ever stood outside, looking at the full moon when it’s close, when it fills the whole sky, while crickets chirp, the breeze blows a bit hotter than you wish it would and the smell of Linden trees fills the air? Okay the Linden thing is a bit Denver…….so you might need to insert your own smell memory there. But I bet you can picture yourself in a similar moment.

In that moment did you ever try to capture a piece of that feeling? Take out your phone, take a picture that you could send to your husband, your mom, your sister, your bestie? And the picture just looked nothing at all like what you were experiencing. You looked in annoyance at the little white dot on the screen surrounded by a sky that somehow flattened and lost all of its majesty.

That feeling - that feeling of flattened, wait, THAT’S not what I saw. Is how I often feel when I read writing now. It’s not that it’s formulaic, after all most of us were taught a five paragraph essay and when I’m still trying to make sure I’m getting my points in a reasonable order and making an effective argument I still default back to that structure. It’s not that there’s a zillion and seven unnecessary adverbs, sprinkled around like the way my grandmother used to oversalt her mashed potatoes. It’s not the em dashes, the ‘here’s the thing’ tics, the it’s not x it’s y, the series of threes…..they annoy me, but they’re not what makes the weird slippery texture that my brain just slides right past.

Working with the Limitations of an LLM

I should probably back up and state that I do not have a problem with people using an LLM to write. I’ve done it, in fact I’ll probably run a sentence or two of this through one by the time I’m done writing it. I might even use an ENTIRE PARAGRAPH that comes straight from the output. But that paragraph will go through the same rigor I’m advising below because like most people who have been using this tech for a little while, I’ve learned where it can be trusted (not many places) and where it falls far short of the glorious tech bro promises. I’ll also have it do a coherence check. Did I include within the essay everything I promised at the beginning. This is the single greatest weakness in my writing. I ramble. I meander my way through verdant pastures of ideas and pick little thought daisies and chain them together and often forget to include at all what I started with. Working with an LLM has helped me catch it better. If this were an essay where I was talking about something outside of my direct realm of experience I would ask for suggestions on what else to read or what other fields might have an alternative perspective. There are a multitude of use cases. Again, I do not object to even someone who takes content wholesale that the LLM has given them…..

I object to the same things that I have objected to when grading essays or reading emails or listening to inspiring but empty town hall speeches. So my advice is the same. When the LLM gives you the output - for the love of all that’s holy, read every single sentence. If you fail to do this and fail to assess for the following things, don’t be surprised if people’s reaction is closer to an eye roll than applause. Look and see if the sentence is even SAYING ANYTHING or if it just sounds clever.

LLM output overuses pronouns like a seventh grader discovering that they can be quicker if they just say “it” in every sentence - and there doesn’t seem to be any guardrail that gets the LLM to assess whether that “it” has a single referent or if the pronoun is in fact referring to three different things it’s collapsed together. If you read every single sentence, if you can identify exactly what the “it” or “they” refers to and it hasn’t been three or ten sentences between the last time anything concrete was specified then your paragraph is probably legible to someone who is not you and who has not just spent however long refining their idea with a machine that has absolutely zero problem slipping in a reference to something you thought you refined past seven iterations ago.

Check the metaphors. I’m the queen of mixing metaphors (although my crown seems to have been lost somewhere…..). But humans do NOT mix metaphors the same way LLMs do. Is your metaphor even physically possible? The metaphors that tend to be used are things about costs, running (lots and lots of software metaphors in the mix) and structures. If those are not metaphors you would ordinarily reach for, then don’t use them. Chances are your readers aren’t going to understand that sentence either. Ask the LLM what that sentence was supposed to mean.

If you CAN’T read every single sentence, that is one of the signals that there’s something wrong. That’s that weird, slippery, WRONG texture that itches at our brains. Most people can’t tell you why it itches, they just know it does. It’s like the difference between standing in the presence of the moon and looking at that pathetic flattened picture of the moon.

Without a definition, taste is the wrong argument and the way it’s been used in the conversation on AI and LLM output is incredibly difficult to test against. Taste for whom, in what instance, in what context. But resolution and fidelity are more objective and they are reminders of what the outputs of a machine built around compression will always need to be checked for. You can GET a nicer picture of the moon - but it requires skill, equipment, patience, luck and it will still always be an imitation. But you can calibrate how realistic you need the picture to be for your purposes. You know the limitations of the technology. For an LLM, you can get a coherent output, you can get sentences that make sense - but it’s not going to be the first draft, you can’t fix it with “sound more human” and it’s going to require some of those same skill and patience elements. When you know the limitations of the technology, you know how to calibrate the output and where you need different equipment.

The Slop Conversation

In my head I imagine the industrial revolution prompted all sorts of conversations about craft vs scale and what was legitimate work vs what was slop. I have firm opinions that too many companies have swung too far on the side of scale and the ongoing “enshittification” of products and services could just as easily be labeled slop. Companies that do not produce a product that is high quality and expect consumers to deal with the cost of their defects do not deserve the respect afforded to quality output, even if the IDEA of their product is in fact a good idea. If someone uses only pre-industrial tools to craft a bed that breaks and pokes you in the back at night, a purse that leaks your quarters and dimes, or a mug that dissolves when you add tea to it, that is also not quality output.

I also believe that the use of an LLM without any care for the loss of fidelity and resolution, without any care for the work your reader has to do to make their way through what you’ve produced deserves that same scrutiny. If you create a product, in this case your ideas that educate people, that make people think, feel, or do differently without putting the burden on them to push their way through the weird slippery texture and the metaphors that don’t make sense and the feeling that they’re missing something, then I do not care what machines you used to make it. That is a quality product. If you create an essay (your product) that may have a good idea embedded within, and that essay requires your reader to hold onto hope and sift through it like they’re panning for gold, then whether you used an LLM or you wrote it yourself, that is still not a quality product.

Companies are expecting consumers to absorb the cost of enshittification and content producers are expecting consumers to absorb the cost of slop. And because we’ve hidden both behind abstract concepts like efficiency and scale, most companies and content creators aren’t even conscious of the fact that they are shifting this work. Consumers, meanwhile, are entirely over absorbing the costs of much of anything.

It’s interesting because the conversation that I do NOT think they had to have during the industrial revolution is whether the recipient of the product did more of the work. Factories made things easier, quicker, and cheaper to produce and people benefitted because of greater availability of goods. The thing that is different here is that LLM output, at least of the written word, has often shifted the work from the author to the reader and I think that is where a great deal of the resentment arises. LinkedIn and TikTok are FULL of stories of managers who send an AI generated email to their team that doesn’t actually say anything and then it turns out the manager didn’t even read it. People are using LLMs to reply to LLM generated emails and engaging in the THEATER of communication without actually engaging in the ACT of communicating. The work has to live somewhere, but LLM use seems to have shifted the work from the person who BENEFITS from the work to the person who is meant to pay the benefit of the work. That’s a bit dense. What I mean is that an author expects their ideas to receive engagement - agreement, disagreement, praise…..in short attention. The audience is meant to PAY attention. But you’ve given your audience something that costs them more than usual. When the work of refining ideas and navigating metaphors that have not been pre-vetted by the author is shifted to the audience, it should not be a surprise when the audience responds with “no” and in fact gets annoyed that the demand was made.

Slop, therefore, is output that has pushed the work of interpreting and refining, of DEFINING the ideas from the author onto the reader. It does not matter if it comes from an LLM, but if it does you get to call it “AI slop” instead of just regular slop. Also can we pause for a moment and just appreciate how yucky that word is……

Which brings me back to taste. If we are going to talk about taste, we are going to have to do the work to define taste. The closest analog I can think of (probably because I have some friends doing this) is sommelier training. I like this wine, I don’t like this wine is irrelevant in that vocabulary of taste. There are specific attributes such as tannin, structure, acid, sugars, aromas, balance and finish. There are reference standards and tasting grids, as well as a shocking amount of information on history, soil and climate. This is the work of defining taste. This is not work that has been done for LLMs no matter how much the word taste has been thrown around. In order to define taste we are going to have to start with the objective and then work our way out otherwise we will keep having the same arguments. Resolution and Fidelity are two places to start, but I know there will be many more to come.

Taste, Quality, Whatever…..

We have spent too much energy on the means of production and not enough on the quality of the output. I blame this, to some degree, on the fact that we have been forced to ignore terrible output from companies for quite some time now as they all race to figure out how they can charge us a subscription fee for breathing the air that they are also poisoning. But our responsibility is to define taste, create reference standards, and hold the line on what requires oversight to avoid shifting the work to the recipient of the product. We need to look around, to come to an agreement on what is quality and what is not. On what level of fidelity and resolution is acceptable at each level of stakes, and on whom the work should land. The squabble over who uses an LLM and who does not, what counts as authorship and what does not is just a rehash of the “whose ideas matter” argument we’ve been having forever. I’ve put forth my definition of “slop” I would love to hear what other people think.

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At first our obsession with measuring is innocent and even a bit charming. How tall is that tree? How fast is that car? How many patients did we see today? We’re curious creatures doing curious things, and that’s lovely.

Then something happens. We begin to place judgment on the measurements and before you know it, measurement stops being about curiosity and begins to be about control, scale, and in the ultimate expression of why we can’t have nice things…..money. The logic went like this: if something matters, we must turn it into a number. Once it’s a number, we can connect it with other numbers. Once it’s connected to other numbers, we can manage it, optimize it, and if we’re feeling ambitious drive it. Of course we often fail to truly define optimize as anything more than “make more of it” but that’s a different article.

This control feels powerful, and when it’s tied to our security like money is, it feels rational. It produces very impressive dashboards that make us feel knowledgable and like the whole world around us is wonderfully predictable…..aaaaand it contains, buried like a termite colony in your walls, a problem so fundamental that once you see it you can never look at a KPI meeting the same way again.

Yummy! Measurement Eats What It Measures

I hated physics, it was literally one of my least favorite classes, which makes its perpetual usefulness at describing complex systems incredibly annoying. One of the things I liked in physics was cats…..or one specific cat. Schrödinger’s cat. In my head it’s a tuxedo cat and it is perpetually in a state of both having caught and having not caught Tweety Bird. In my science class it was a cat stuck in a box that was both alive and dead until you looked at it and then it became one or the other. It was the possibilities until you observed it, and then the possibilities collapse into alive or dead.

Measurement of the complexity of human and social realities is a bit like opening that box with that poor cat. Before you measure a workplace, a team, or a person what you actually have in front of you is complex: many dimensions (emotions, relationships, tacit knowledge, potential, trust, the ability to somehow make a task take twice as long as it should, smelly feet, and excellent taste in chocolate), many possible states those dimension can exist in, and many patterns of relationships between the dimensions. When you choose a metric like “productivity,” “engagement,” “output,” you project that rich, high-dimension reality down to a low dimension number. You lose most of the texture. A number, definitionally, is less than the thing it’s describing.

Also, those quotes around the metrics, that’s not just my inherent snark showing up (if my snark had a number it would be a v high number, just sayin’)….those quotes are because each of those metrics are themselves multidimensional constructs that we have inherently shrunk down to something less than the full reality through the way we choose to define them.

Heisenberg did NOT have a cat (which might be why there are fewer lay person physics books with his name in them). But he does have a useful priniciple from quantum mechanics (the most annoying of all the physics disciplines, but also stubbornly useful). There are certain pairs of properties - position and momentum are the two we mostly remember - that you cannot measure simultaneously with equal precision. The more precisely you know one, the less precisely you can know the other. It’s not a problem of your measurement instruments, it’s a structural feature of reality.

For complex human systems, there is an analogous dynamic The more precisely you focus measurement on one dimension - say, short term output or quarterly revenue - the more you necessarily neglect or blur others like long-term learning, institutional knowledge, relationships, innovation, etc. Attention, time, and organizational capacity are finite. Sharpening resolution on one variable inherently reduces resolution on the rest of them. Choosing what to measure is also, always, choosing what to stop seeing. The metric is not a window, it a camera with a fixed focal length pointed at one thing while the rest of the frame goes fuzzy.

So we begin with something that is inherently incomplete. And then we start acting on those numbers. Promotions, bonuses, penalties, investments, performance improvement plans, proud LinkedIn posts where we are pleased to announce our continued commitment to improvement after the 40% efficiency gains from our new program.

Measurement is not a neutral act. It is a choice to collapse richness into a simplified representation, and then let that simplified representation reshape the underlying reality. The metric was meant to describe the system, but inevitably the system begins to perform for the metric and rather than being a representation, the metric is now a target. This means you are no longer measuring what you thought you were measuring, you’re now measuring how good people get at moving that number, independent of what else must be sacrificed within the system.

Your Gorgeous Dashboard Can’t Drive Your Car

I could have called this “the guy who figured out why your dashboard is lying to you” but that’s even longer. But let’s introduce you to him. W. Ross Ashby - a British cybernetician, which surprisingly does not mean a combination of James Bond and the guy who invented Terminator. It’s a real word for a person who studies how systems regulate themselves…..and I can only imagine the weird looks he must have received if he ever introduced himself by that title to his seat mate on an airplane. In 1956 he introduced what he called the Law of Requisite Variety and if you ever heard of Stafford Beer, his entire Viable Systems Model was built on cybernetics…..but that is well outside the mainstream MBA curriculum, which mostly does not want to tell people exactly how impossibly naive their desire to control each and every variable actually is.

Ashby’s law stated in words (because the math is intense) states: To successfully regulate a system facing many possible disturbances, the regulator must have at least as much variety in its responses as the environment has in its disturbances.

In plain English: if the world can surprise you in 100 different ways and your control system only has 10 kinds of response, you are not actually in control. You must have at least 100 different kinds of response, otherwise you are in the feeling of control - and as any parent of a toddler can tell you, that is not actually control at all.

Now connect this to measurement. People, organizations, teams, and markets have enormous variety - many possible configurations, many possible disturbances, many possible ways to be surprising and inconvenient on a stormy Thursday afternoon. Our measurement and control systems compress that variety into a comparatively small set of indicators and levers. Centralization and standardization compress it further. The result is a fundamental mismatch: a high-variety environment being regulated by a low-variety regulator.

Complex systems. Simple dashboards. Ashby’s law predicts the outcome, and looking around it’s honestly hard to understand how the man has come back as a ghost to dance in the middle of every Gartner summit and just pop up in front of people gloating and handing out “told you so” ectoplasm. As predicted, the environment will outmaneuver the regulator, repeatedly, in ways the regulator cannot anticipate because it’s already focused on a specific metric and we already covered why the metric itself is inherently flawed.

But our friend Ashby has so much more to rub in our faces. In conjunction with Roger C. Conant, they also derived the Good Regulator Theorem….which has the energy of a doctor delivering news you were sort of expecting, but were really hoping wouldn’t be true.

Every good regulator must be a model of that system.

This is the part where your people who only know the system by the dashboard start to sweat.

Decoding that theorem: a regulator that successfully controls a system has to genuinely embody - not merely observe from a quarterly business review - a reasonably faithful model of how that system actually behaves. That is, if you want to control something well, you have to understand it from the inside, not just stare at charts about it. A regulator that works has an internal map that actually mirrors how the thing it’s regulating behaves, that feels the constraints, anticipates the quirks.

Your gorgeous dashboard? It’s not a model of how your people think, how consumers adapt, how teams route around policies they perceive as dumb. It’s a model of what your data warehouse happens to collect on a good day when nobody forgets to fill in a field and everyone spells customers’ names correctly. That’s the irony at the heart of the theorem:

• If your “regulator” is a set of dials, you end up regulating the dials.

• If your “model” of the company lives in a dashboard, you will end up running the dashboard, not the company.

This is a problem for centralization specifically. As an organization gets large, the people making decisions get further from the local realities they’re governing. Their models live in headquarters, in frameworks assembled from things that were true, somewhere, once, fed by the compressed and loss prone metrics we just finished discussing. A regulator built this way cannot be good in any deep sense, per the theorem. It may produce short-term numerical improvements, but it will miss, distort, or damage the parts of the system it cannot see. The dashboard is not showing you the system, just as a dashboard in a vehicle does not show you every decision that goes into driving.

What’s The Name of This Game?

Charles Goodhart was a British economist (those Brits are really messing with our ability to feel in control today!) who observed something so obvious that in retrospect it’s almost offensive it needs to be written down. It’s even more offensive that we still don’t seem to have learned it.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

That’s it, that’s the whole thing. I could have started with that, but you wouldn’t have believed me and I know you wouldn’t have because it’s been around since 1975 and we still have whole fields dedicated to creating accountability around metrics that are routinely destroying the quality of our healthcare and causing us to get text message from the service manager pressuring us to answer positively on the surveys from the dealership that follow the text message that then asks us about our theoretical positive response to the survey the car manufacturer will be sending us and a note that if we can’t rate our service a 10, to please contact the service manager so they can fix things and keep our rep from getting in trouble.

Side note, Goodhart said it in a much clunkier way, that easier to read version is actually from Marilyn Strathern in 1997.

Let’s dig in. Annoying rant about car dealership surveys aside, the implications of this observation are everywhere and backed up repeatedly by research. Once people are rewarded or punished on the basis of a metric, they reorganize their behavior to move that metric. This is true even when that behavior shift harms the underlying reality the metric was supposed to represent. The metric was the shadow the tree was casting, you started optimizing the shadow, the tree starved of sunlight and died and nobody noticed because the shadow was all we were watching.

Teaching the test raises the score, deeper learning disappears. Hospital throughput metrics improve the billing revenue while exhausting staff and nudging administrators to incentivize discharging patients when they’re nearly ready instead of actually ready. GDP grows while ecosystems degrade, unpaid care work goes uncounted and inequality compounds in ways that don’t show up until they disrupt in social revolt. In every case the mistake is identical. The map is treated as the full landscape, the representation is treated as reality and the complex system full of humans with bills to pay and performance reviews to survive figures out how to produce the metric without bothering with the underlying reality.

The fact that this is a completely rational response to the incentive structures is exactly what makes it so hard to fix.

Why “Just Measure Better” Keeps Not Working

The reasonable response to everything above is: fine, we’ll keep measuring, but we’ll do it with more humility. Hold the metrics loosely. Remember they’re partial. Preserve room for judgment. Use them as signals rather than verdicts.

This is excellent advice that modern organizational and policy environments make essentially structurally impossible.

Metrics are tied directly to money — bonuses, valuations, budgets, funding decisions, performance ratings that determine whether someone gets to keep their job. They provide the numerical justification that decisions now require even when the thing being decided about is inherently non-numerical. And critically, things that resist measurement get treated as lesser. We call them soft, subjective and treat those like dirty words that make them all optional and cuttable when the spreadsheet needs to balance.

So even when individuals can see that a metric is inadequate (and many can, and many quietly say so in hallways and exit interviews, and some of us shout about it on substack and LinkedIn)….even then, the system they’re operating inside provides no mechanism for acting on that knowledge. You cannot put “this number is a lossy proxy for a complex reality” in a budget proposal. You also probably shouldn’t because execs don’t like it when you use science words at them. You can only put a different number. So that is what happens, repeatedly, across organizations and industries and decades, while the gap between what we’re measuring and what we actually care about gets carved into the grand canyon.

The invitation at the end of all this is genuinely a large ask. It requires accepting that some things that matter cannot be reduced to numbers without losing the thing that made them matter. It requires preserving live, contextual judgment inside the systems being measured — not just above them on a dashboard. It requires treating the unmeasured as real rather than as unproven.

Your Takeaway

I hope you know I’m not suggesting you blow up everything you know about business and hope your organization staggers out of the rubble wiser and more humane and also wildly successful even if there’s no dashboard that says why. You can keep your dashboards. You can keep your tape measures. You just have to stop asking them to be something they are not. Here are a few practical moves that don’t require joining a commune or overthrowing GAAP.

1. Split “metrics for learning” from “metrics for reward.” The real damage in metrics starts when numbers decide who gets paid, promoted, or fired. Once a metric controls consequences, it’s no longer trustworthy. Make a structural distinction where most metrics are in a learning channel, used to see patterns, ask what’s going on, and steer experiments. Any reward metrics should be treated as delicately as live explosives. They must be watched for gaming, periodically redesigned, and never allowed to be the only story about someone’s worth.

2. Diversify what “good” looks like. Instead of one master KPI, use a small basket of indicators that pull in different directions. If you care about output, pair it with error rates and rework. If you care about speed, pair it with quality and burnout risk. If you care about revenue per head, pair it with retention, learning and customer trust.

3. Design metrics with the people who live inside them. Metrics designed far from work are almost guaranteed to create perverse incentives. Frontline staff can often tell you in less than five minutes how they would hit a metric without actually changing the underlying system or what they would need to sacrifice to hit it.

4. Tag some numbers as “canaries, not targets.” Similar to the learning channel metrics, these are not tied to performance or compensation but are explicitly monitored as an indicator of where you may have problems building or systems that require redesign.

5. Make retiring a metric a normal maintenance task. Metrics age, they get gamed, they stop meaning what they used to mean. Even precisely defining what you mean and how what you’re measuring matches what you mean is a valuable practice. Intentional retirement and redesign is a critical safeguard. Making it a standard practice keeps it in everyone’s line of sight.

6. Keep live judgment inside the system, not just above it. You cannot outsource all judgment to dashboards. You need human regulators whose “model of the system” comes from actually living in it. Teams need autonomy to override the metric when reality clearly disagrees and to treat that as a signal to inspect the metric, not punish the team. In performance and planning conversations, ask “what does the number miss” and make sure the answer actually affects decisions.

You don’t have to choose between “all vibes, no data” and “all data, no brain.” Data plus people who are allowed to say when the data is lying or incomplete is the mature version of this. Once you stop treating numbers as reality and start treating them as imperfect tools that require supervision and revision, it becomes much simpler to treat metrics with humility and avoid the trap of data blindness.

You may or may not even understand the words, but something in you recognizes that the word is attached to an important idea, that it’s like the ribbon attached to a super cool balloon, and if you just pull on it you’ll be delighted. You can feel the importance before you can explain it. Your brain basically sits up straighter and says “oooooh, more, say MORE!”

I remember the first time I heard the word differentiated used in reference to employee experience. Not a product, or a brand or a market position…..an employee experience. To be precise, I was very familiar with the word in those contexts, it was just the first time I heard it applied to something I actually cared about……and I was almost immediately disappointed.

Because I could see what was happening. HR had gone shopping in marketing’s vocabulary again. This is, by the way, something HR does with remarkable confidence. It “borrows” a word that means something very specific somewhere else, brings it home, implements all of the language and almost none of the underlying logic, and then stands there looking pleased with itself for being “strategic.” (Remind me sometime to tell you the horrors of what I’ve seen HR do to Agile…..you’ll get a good giggle.)

Okay, moment of fairness - Marketing had already stripped most of the meaning out of “differentiated” long before HR got its hands on the term. And Marketing does the same thing in reverse with regularity. If you ever want to watch a good idea get dressed up, misunderstood, and sent out into the world to bother people, just wait long enough and one of those two departments will get hold of it. This is the obvious outcome of having departments dedicated to human psychology put in the hands of people whose aim is to make money and extract value. Phew better avoid that one.

The point…..the point…..is that differentiation is one of those words that has made its way through the corporate machine, been stripped of all meaning, all friction, all substance and is now one of the phantoms of good ideas past that are occasionally trotted out like a new seasonal wardrobe that’s supposed to make us all feel invested in and cared for, but mostly just makes us feel exhausted. In Inside Out terms, Joy got kicked to the curb and Ennui has been running the dashboard of corporate emotions for the past decade plus.

But the original idea of differentiation was not stupid, or bad, or any other word that fits in that category of “meh, better not.” It was an idea that was smart in front of the wrong people. When an idea is smart, it gets carried around everywhere, whipped out and put on display, and talked about in increasingly simpler terms until eventually it begins its sad little decline into useless jargon.

But we, today, are going to rescue this idea. We are going to drag it off of the terrible slide decks branded in perfectly acceptable beige and black and Helvetica (poor Helvetica, you too used to be avant garden) and we are going to show what it would take to build companies that can keep the promises of Marketing and also now HR to actually BE differentiated…..because differentiated truly is a worthy thing to be, and may in fact be what helps organizations survive in a future of overwhelming sameness and mediocrity.

Differentiation?

Differentiation was a concept coined by an economist in the 1930’s to explain why real markets don’t behave like the “perfect competition” model that classical economics assumed (all products identical, price is the only variable). He observed that most markets are actually populated by products that are slightly different, and those differences (real or perceived) give sellers some degree of pricing power. It didn’t make its way into marketing jargon until the 1980’s via an argument that everything is differentiable (note: I REALLY want this word to be differentiatable but alas spell check continues to disagree with me).

This idea was pulled into the popular consciousness via Michael Porter …. of Porter’s Five Forces framework fame. Yes people are famous for very boring things in business. Anyhow for those of you who don’t remember it for any number of reasons, the basic idea is every industry has structural conditions that dictate how difficult it will be for a firm in that industry to make profit. In response to those forces (there are five, hence the revolutionary name) firms can either become the lowest cost producer, or become meaningfully distinct (differentiated) enough that buyers prefer your product and will pay a premium.

Every market, left to its own devices, over time tends towards commoditization (this word will come back to haunt you in a bit short definition - products converge, features get copied, everything looks overwhelmingly the exact same), and in a commoditized market pricing becomes the dominant decision variable and margins compress towards zero. However, if your product is meaningfully and sustainably distinct in ways that matter to buyers….it has some combo of features, quality, experience, reliability, and/or identity, that difference then creates a meaningful advantage for the firm in the form of pricing power and competitive protection.

Genuine differentiation is not a slogan…..or at least not sustainably a slogan. What do you do differentiate your product/service/location/thing you’re selling which I will just call a product from now on, requires you to make choices both about what you are and what you are not. Which means you are also making choices about who you are for, and who you are not for. Differentiation is a strategic position that comes from making trade-offs: choosing to be excellent in certain dimensions by deliberately accepting inferiority in others. A low-cost carrier is not a full-service airline that got lazy. It is a different machine, built around different choices, optimized for a different promise. A luxury brand whose luxury promise includes attention to detail, handcrafted, artisanal quality with premium materials does not take advantage of the scale and speed provided by factory manufacturing.

So where did it go wrong?

Today we treat differentiation primary as a perceptual problem, rather than a structural one. If the goal is to occupy a distinct position in the customer’s mind, and if that position can be created through messaging, branding, and storytelling as much as through actual product decisions, then eventually the temptation is to reach for the story before doing the hard work of building the substance. Most advice about differentiation at this point, sadly, is advice about messaging. Find a sharper position, own a word, tell a cleaner story, tighten the brand, clarify the value proposition. In less business-y words it boils down to “wave your arms with more confidence and act proud of what you say makes you different while doing nothing at all ACTUALLY more different because doing different would also be doing something risky and risk is a big big no-no.

I should probably say now that I’m not against messaging, there truly is a place for that. But customers do not care about your messaging when it does not match their reality. Whatever your words may say, those customers actually live with your systems, the trade-offs you made, what happens when resources get tight and competing priorities collide. The language is written with largesse and plenty in mind, but those promises are kept or broken in times of scarcity. And even if it takes a while, eventually those customers are smart enough to see when your words are just words, and when they represent true experience. And when they’ve been promised one thing and handed something else entirely, they’re also likely to be resentful and angry. Humans gonna human after all.

Okay But What Is HR Doing Playing About With Economics Ideas

Come on, we’re a super strategic function, and we all resent that question! But also, fair. The insight that motivated the idea of a differentiated employee experience was actually not off course: the same logic that makes customers prefer some companies should (and does) apply to employees choosing where to work, how hard to try, and whether to stay. If an organization is a genuinely better place to work, or a place more aligned with an employee’s values, or doing some sort of social good in the world, it should command preference in the labor market, generate more engagement and discretionary effort, and retain people who would otherwise leave. Research backs that up too, so far so good.

The HR version of commoditization is the organization that cannot distinguish itself as an employer, has to compete on compensation alone, and gets the workforce that is willing to be there for the salary but is not especially committed to any other aspect of the work. HR, looking about for a strategic answer to commoditization and ALSO being tested on Porter’s Five Forces in all the various certification exams very quickly learned about differentiation. And they took the version that had been watered down after decades of underinvestment and brought it into a function that gets far less investment, resources, or attention than marketing. Because people may be “our greatest resource” but we are surely treating them like our greatest cost center. So the branding, messaging, bespoke programs, cute icons, paintings on the wall, posters, mousepads, and website “About Us” and “Our Culture” pages proliferate. So so many words, so few policies, processes, systems or actual day to day experienced reality.

And so, here we are, in the moment in time where HR and Marketing have made ALOT of promises, and the organization has very little ability or will to keep any of them. And differentiated now means all the companies have very different color and font choices (why yes, in fact oatmeal and beige ARE different colors thank you very much) and very identical products and they’re all relying on belief as if belief grows on trees and can be harvested daily to guard agains the imminent collapse into commoditization.

Make Differentiation Different Again

When differentiation works as a strategy (remember it must be both meaningful and sustainable difference) the distinction is real, not just manufactured in a comms campaign. It exists in how the product/experience etc is actually made, delivered, staffed, designed, and experienced. The story is accurate and the branding reflects reality. A real difference, not a rhetorical difference. And those differences have existed in multiple companies in our history…..and they routinely slide back to average. Regression to the mean, eating away at differentiation. But I have an idea…..and this is part of where I’ve been building with all the work I’m doing on defaults.

You see, if you want to have non-average results, if you want to be truly DIFFERENTIATED you must also have non-average systems and processes……which means you cannot have default systems and processes. You cannot expect to do the same thing everybody else does and get different results. The end result of learning to see the defaults in your system, of learning where and how to design with deliberation, is differentiation that sticks, that does not regress to the average way everybody else does everything. Default literacy is the capability that unlocks radical differentiation.

Radical differentiation is not a branding exercise, it is a production decision. And by production decision, I do not just mean factories, machines, and men in safety glasses staring meaningfully into the middle distance with partially rolled up plans held in their hands and soaring music playing in the background. I mean every single piece of the work that goes into making the differentiation real.

Building Beyond Messaging

I just told you differentiation is a production problem not a messaging problem and despite my long rambling “no not factories” paragraph I just KNOW you’re sitting there imagining an assembly line. So what the heck do I mean? The decisions that determine whether differentiation is real or rhetorical fall into four layers, and they exist in every organization regardless of what it makes or sells.

The first layer is experiential and operational - everything a customer, employee, patient, person of any sort at all can actually perceive: the physical environment, the people, the time allocated to each interaction, the tools, the processes, the handoffs, the information they receive, the incentives of people serving them, and whether feedback about any of it changes anything at all. This is the layer most organizations think of when they think about operations, and it’s still where most of the obvious promise-breaking happens.

The second layer is cognitive and epistemic - the sense-making infrastructure that shapes what even gets recognized as a decision. What language and categories does the organization use to describe its customers, its problems, its failures? Who counts as a legitimate stakeholder? What kind of evidence is treated as real vs dismissed as ‘just an anecdote’? What does the organization choose to measure, what does it choose not to see? The tell is usually a category someone uses without noticing it’s a choice: calling patients ‘cases', calling employees ‘headcount', calling customers ‘users.’ The language was decided somewhere, by someone, and it’s shaping experience subconsciously and without deliberation. The question is not “does my organization have a sense-making layer,” it’s whether you chose or inherited it and whether anybody inside can even see the assumptions anymore.

The third layer is structural and constraint-setting - where most convergence with competitors is determined, often long before anyone thinks of differentiation at all. Ownership structure, investor expectations, time horizons, which functions hold political power, which parts of the promises have been outsourced to partners, what the foundational tech stack makes possible or impossible…these decisions set the ceiling on what differentiation can be achieved in layers one and two, regardless of how good the intentions are.

The fourth layer is ethical and moral - what the organization will not do, even when it is legal and profitable. This is the layer that separates organizations with good systems from organizations with genuine character. Most organizations have preferences as part of their values, far fewer have refusals.

There is no question or doubt whether these decisions have been and continue to be made, the primary question is whether they were made deliberately, with whatever the differentiating promise is in mind…..or whether they accumulated from habit, convenience, inheritance, familiarity and perceived safety, and the path of least resistance.

Those are the systems that drive the ability to deliver the product, and the ability to deliver the product in any sort of way that may or may not be different from competitors. If the system is generic, the experience will be generic, no matter how many lovely adjectives you put on top of it.

This is also the point where far too many executives find themselves shifting uncomfortably in their seat and saying things like “let’s table this for now” or “that’s an interesting perspective, perhaps we can check in with some SMEs and circle back".” Once differentiation stops being a branding exercise and becomes a systems question, it gets much more expensive, more political and much much harder to fake. Which is precisely why so few organizations actually do it, and why the ones that DO are so recognizable.

To make this concrete, it helps to walk through one example completely - not just gesturing at it, but actually opening it up a bit and looking at every hinge point where the promise is either supported or quietly abandoned. The clearest example, because the promise is so specific, the stakes are so human, and the experience is so universal, is healthcare. We won’t do every category, but we’ll do enough that you get the idea of the ways a promise can be failed across multiple areas of production.

Your Medical Home

“Medical home” is a specific promise. It says “this place knows you, expects you, is organized around your continuity of care, and will feel navigable and humane even on days when you are not your best. You belong here, you are wanted here.” This is not a vague aspiration, and it’s not a small promise. It’s a concrete claim about what a patient’s experience will feel like….comfort when they are at their least comfortable. Every category of production will either support or undermine the promise.

Before walking through the decisions, it’s worth asking an orienting question: which patient was imagined when the system was designed? Because there are at least two versions of the patients who arrive. The first is healthy, alert, English speaking, arriving alone for a routine visit, capable of reading fine print, comfortable in crowds of unknown people, and at ease navigating an unfamiliar building without much difficulty. The second is frightened, possibly in pain, possibly cognitively impaired by illness, medication, or both, possibly accompanied by a caregiver who has their own needs, they may not be a fluent English reader, they may be managing a disability along with whatever brought them in today. Transportation may have been difficult, they may be late or flustered. We could go on. But at this point you can clearly see that these are not the same person. A system designed for the first one will fail the second in multiple ways, and some of those will definitely not make the patient feel safe, welcome, comfortable and like they matter.

The medical home promise implicitly claims to have designed for the harder version, but most systems are built for the easier one, partly because they’re easier and cheaper to design for, partly because it’s easier for us to imagine those we share experiences with and our brains don’t like to contemplate frailty so we shy away from imagining ourselves as that second patient, and partly because they cost less to serve.

That question, which patient did we design for, runs underneath every decision that follows.

Physical Environment. a medical home should feel like somewhere you can find your way. That means the person imagined when designing the signage was not a facilities manager who already knows every corridor. When you are designing for someone who is sick, limited in mobility, distracted, frightened, and not able to follow written instructions decisions for signing, parking, the distance between the entrance and the first human who can help, the number of decision points between the door and the exam room all change. Many hospitals were not built with that person as the explicit reference point. They were built for operational efficiency, expanded through acquisition, and then labeled with a brand that promises something the physical reality was never designed to deliver.

People decisions. A medical home requires people who have enough time, training, and investment in their own wellbeing to actually be present with a patient. A front desk coordinator managing check-ins, phone calls, insurance questions, and scheduling simultaneously is not able to notice that the person in front of them looks confused and frightened and needs thirty extra seconds of orientation or a bathroom. That is not a failure of character. It is a staffing and role design decision. Similarly, a physician with twelve minutes per appointment is practicing a fundamentally different kind of medicine than one with thirty, regardless of how similar their credentials are. The investment in people — how many, in what roles, with what training, with what workload — is a direct expression of what the organization believes the promise actually requires.

Time. This deserves its own category because it is so routinely treated as a financial variable rather than a care variable. Every appointment length, every intake process, every follow-up window is a decision about how much time this interaction is worth. A medical home that routinely books appointments too tightly to allow a patient to ask their second question is not a medical home. It is a medical conveyor belt with a warm color palette. Respect for patient’s time also falls within this realm. Is the patient treated as someone who has a life outside of their time in the hospital or are appointments presented as a surprise that requires rearranging of other commitments?

Technology and tools. Does the electronic health record system allow a physician to see the patient's full history across locations in the same network, or does each acquired clinic run a different system that requires the patient to re-explain their history from scratch? The technology decision made during an acquisition — whether to integrate systems or allow legacy platforms to persist — is a medical home decision. It either supports continuity or systematically destroys it every single visit. The fact that integration is expensive and complicated is true. It is also a description of the cost of the promise, not a reason the promise does not apply.

Information and orientation. A new patient at a medical home should not have to figure anything out. They should receive, before they arrive, a clear explanation of what is about to happen — what to bring, where to go, how long it will take, what the likely next steps are, and who to contact if something is unclear. After the visit, they should receive a plain-language summary of what was discussed and what happens next. Most of this is not exotic. It is just information, delivered at the right time, in a form a non-expert can understand. The gap between what patients need to know and what they are actually told is one of the most consistent and most consequential failures in healthcare delivery…and it is a production decision, not a clinical one.

Culture and informal norms. In a system where staff are overwhelmed, where the intake process is unclear, and where no central checklist exists, staff develop workarounds. They give directions over the phone because the wayfinding doesn't work. They verbally walk new patients through what to expect because there is no written orientation. They compensate, through individual effort and goodwill, for the absence of a designed system. This is admirable and it is also fragile, because it means the quality of the new patient experience depends on whether the person answering the phone today is having a good day and has three spare minutes. Workaround culture can mask a broken system for years, because the patients who get a warm and helpful staff member have a decent experience, and the ones who don't become a retention or satisfaction problem that gets attributed to something else.

Feedback and learning loops. Does the organization have a mechanism that would tell it, reliably and specifically, that a new patient arrived for the first time, could not find the building, waited twenty minutes because the intake form was unclear, saw a physician who had none of their prior records, and left without understanding what the next step was? Most patient satisfaction surveys are too broad, too infrequent, and too retrospective to catch that sequence of failures. And even when they do catch dissatisfaction, the data often travels to a quality team that has limited authority over the clinical, operational, and facilities decisions that produced it. A feedback loop that cannot change the system is not a learning loop. It is a documentation exercise.

These are not problems that live in isolation, they are the same problem expressed in multiple places. The promise was made at the brand level and was never translated into the operational decisions that would make it real. Each individual decision looks defensible in isolation. The appointment length is in line with peers. The technology integration was deferred for cost reasons that made sense at the time. The intake process variation is a legacy of acquisition. The signage meets code. No single decision looks like a betrayal. But the cumulative effect is that the medical home exists on the website and not in the building, and patients feel that gap even when they cannot name it.

What separates a system that actually keeps this promise from one that merely displays it is rarely a single dramatic decision made in a heroic moment. It is more often a series of refusals made in ordinary rooms — the decision not to cut appointment times below what a real conversation requires, not to defer EHR integration one more year, not to let each acquired clinic keep running its own intake process because standardizing it is politically complicated. Those refusals are made by people who had perfectly good financial and operational reasons to decide otherwise. The ones who refused anyway are the ones whose patients actually feel at home.

Ceiling vs Floor

Most organizations say they want excellence, but structurally they’re mostly focused on avoiding embarrassment. They are not reaching for a ceiling, they’re just trying to avoid falling through the floor. A genuinely ceiling oriented organization asks what it looks like to be unusually, recognizably, almost unreasonably good at this thing for these specific people. A floor-oriented organization asks whether it is in line with the category and ideally one small, non-wasteful step above the nearest competitor. The first question produces differentiation, the second produces benchmarking, best practice, and a very comforting dashboard of industry data proving that you are making the exact same decisions as everyone else wearing the exact same blazer from Hugo Boss.

This is why “best practice” is so often a convergence mechanism rather than a path to excellence. By the time something is called best practice, it is usually what the cluster of organizations you’re part of has already agreed to do. That may genuinely be the best among commonly accepted options, but if your ambition is to be radically different in some meaningful way, “what everyone sensible does now” is not always the star by which you want to navigate.

That is what radical differentiation means here. Not novelty for novelty’s sake, or eccentricity as a personality trait. Not a founder insisting on one bizarre preference and calling it vision. It means you’ve made the decision to care about something your peers may have stopped caring about or never cared about at all….and then built your systems so that every production decision supports that care, so that they care survives scaling, budgeting, standardization, investor questions……all those tidy little forces pushing you back towards the middle.

This is why the assumptions and beliefs in your systems must be surfaced. They are the sneaky pieces that will undermine all your best intentions without deliberate design. The hardest part of this work is that the decline in your differentiated stance rarely looks like full betrayal. It looks like reasonableness, safety, a comfortable harbor. A CFO who asks why your margins are lower than your peers, an investor asking whether customer really truly value that extra level of quality enough to justify the cost. It looks like a new HR leader importing a standard engagement survey because it will let you benchmark against the market. It looks like someone in a very tailored, very responsible, very charcoal gray suit, with a kind and slightly disappointed expression saying “I completely understand why we’ve been doing it this way, but as we mature….” and then something specific, expensive, human and vital gets put on the chopping block in the name of being grown-ups with very credentially looking letters after our names. Absolutely nobody says “let’s be more generic” they say “let’s mitigate risk, and focus on our ability to deliver at scale while increasing margins and delivering shareholder value.”

That dynamic can sound abstract until you watch it happen in actual organizations. So let’s look at a few examples, each a bit different, because they illuminate different parts of the same mechanism.

Remember When We Used to Think Different?

For a long, long time, Apple’s greatest trick was not just that it made beautiful things. Plenty of companies can make beautiful things. Apple did something stranger. It built for designers and creative professionals — you know, people who are, by definition, power users — while also insisting that those same tools remain instinctively usable by people who were not power users at all…..in fact, people who were the opposite of power users.

These are not typically considered compatible and most organizations would think you were crazy to try. You get one or the other - professional tools with a learning curve steep enough to require emotional support and a bookshelf full of tomes labelling you a ‘dummy’…..or you get simple consumer tools that are approachable but shallow. Apple’s earlier magic was in trying, often successfully, to hold both at once.

One of the fun side effects of making your name on your differentiating aspect - that lovely promise you made and kept…..for a while - is that once you begin to break the promise people notice and it’s super easy to feel. My mother-in-law is 88. She has a PhD, is bright, capable, has used Apple products for years. She should not need a weekly support line for the act of printing…..but since the UI of the iPhone has now buried printing behind a tiny abstract share icon and a scrolling sheet which isn’t even obviously a scrolling sheet, she now calls me regularly for a reminder.

It’s not a catastrophe, it’s not even significantly more annoying that Samsung…..but since I’ve personally spent years saying the thing that makes it worth sacrificing the incredible camera that comes with a Samsung is the intuitive interface and minimal button pushes to do things on an iPhone…..well you could say I’ve definitely picked up the signals. When it takes three steps and a consultation with the support documentation (or your daughter-in-law) to print then it’s pretty clear that “a normal person can find this instinctively” is no longer acting as a differentiating design constraint for Apple.

That’s not a branding change. It’s a systems change. The center of gravity has shifted. Apple still serves power users, still prioritizes elegance and minimalism and that particular species of design decision beloved by people who describe interfaces as ‘clean’ even when clean really means ‘we shoved everything in a closet and expect you to dig through it and also everything is labeled with abstract symbols that are a fun new foreign language for you to learn.' The old promise - that a five year old or an eighty eight year old could pick up the device and figure it out without a manual or a secret handshake, that’s pretty much gone.

Apple’s differentiation was never just “Think Different.” It was the must less slogan-friendly commitment to making serious tools for serious people without requiring you to sacrifice your personality or requiring ordinary people to become little apprentice computer monks to use them. The brand grew out of that. The story made sense because the system underneath it was making different choices. Now……now you just have the words promising simplicity and accessibility and a frustrated octagenarian who thinks she’s the problem. And don’t get me started on their huge push into the autism community and what some of the recent changes have done to accessibility there.

Okay okay - so Apple shows what it’s like when an existing core constraint weakens but the marketing language keeps making promises like it’s still 2012. Hanna Andersson is the version of this that lives in your kids’ closets. The website still brags about Hanna-me-downs and “made to last.” Hanna’s clothes are still quite a bit better than most children’s clothes on the market - but they have NOTHING on what the quality used to be. My boys are 8 years apart in age. My oldest could wear through the knees of an ordinary pair of pants after just a few times when he was younger. Hanna’s would often last past the time he outgrew the pants. They were that good. Even the pajamas which are thinner than the regular, meant for rough play, pants.

They were so good, they were guaranteed. Seriously, if your kid managed to kill a Hanna, they treated it like a flaw with the universe, not a personal failing in the way you care for clothes. The one and only time he wore through the knees of a pair of pants, I was able to take them back to the store and they gave me store credit. I was astonished and instantly loyal.

Fast forward to my second child - the clothing we kept, totally fine. The clothing we bought new with the updated fabrics and the updated return policy - he wore through the knees of every single one of them in ten wears or less. The magical “we’ll stand behind our clothing when real children do real child things to them” era is over. The about page still talks about the Hanna-Me-Down quality, they’re still “made to play, made to last, made to hand down again and again.”

This is what regression to the mean looks like in real life. They used to be worth the premium (and believe me, they are PREMIUM prices). I doubt anybody sat in a conference room and said “alright folks, it’s time to ruin the pajamas.” What likely happened is someone introduced more synthetics because “stretch” and “value” are good words and then someone else noticed that the thinner fabric was cheaper and faster. But now there’s a spike in customers “abusing the return policy” so someone updates the return policy to be more in line with “industry norms” which is corporate for “you’ll get your money back if it was never actually on a human body, if you didn’t wait too long, lose the receipt, change credit cards…..and also as long as Mercury isn’t in retrograde or transiting Scorpio.” A whole series of sensible, slightly beige, completely ordinary and industry standard decisions….until one day you’re standing in your kitchen holding the fifth pair of pajama pants your child has gone through the knees of in the past month wondering when we all got together and redefined “made to last.”

The differentiated promise, the original belief in quality, durable clothing is still all over the website. The day-to-day product decisions (fiber content, thickness, return rules, definition of ‘defect’) are a far cry from the production that made those words true. A migration away from the ceiling and back to the floor. Good enough, profitable enough, close enough to their peers that no CFO has to explain why the cost-per-unit is out of line with the rest of the industry. Nice clothes still, but no longer absurdly, unbelievably, magically nice. And the magic was the point.

We’ve now watched two examples - in one case a design philosophy and in the other the material itself. Different industries, promises and timelines. Same mechanism. Other examples abound, I bet you thought of at least three while reading through that, but we’re already at 6,000 words and I admire your patience enough not to test it further. Everything described above is pretty easy to see once you know to look for it. Diagnosis is not the hard part. Soooooo…..what does it take to avoid the fade to beige, the slide to the floor, the default to average?

Radical Differentiation

Those forces that eroded Apple’s design constraint and Hanna’s fiber content, every “medical home” that became a medical conveyor belt with a warm color palette, every different, big idea, every single reach for the stars mission…..those forces aren’t going anywhere. They are structural. They have an army of well-dressed advocates armed with spreadsheets, dashboards, MBAs, white papers, briefing notes and market reports. They will arrive in your building making entirely reasonable arguments, and they will be right about the number. They will not say “let’s be average” they will say “let’s be sustainable” and “let’s maximize our margins.”

So what does it take to actually hold differentiation? Not launch it……hold it.

First: Name the promise with enough specificity that it can be broken….and it’s immediately, embarrassingly obvious when it’s broken. “We are patient-centered” sound specific but I can think of fifteen different ways to interpret it and that’s on a tired brain that just wrote this essay. That’s not specific. But “this place knows you, expects, you, is organized around your personalized care, and will feel navigable and humane even on days when you aren’t your best. You can trust us to care for you, even when the care is hard” - now THAT is a specific promise. Even better - break it up. “A new patient can walk from the parking structure to their exam room without needing to ask for directions, but the directions are easily available and obvious to them if they want to.” You will know exactly if and when that is broken. That can be designed for, measured, and protected in a budget meeting. Vague promises are comfortable to make and impossible to truly keep because there is no agreed-upon specific moment at which they have been broken.

Second: know which decisions are load-bearing. Every differentiated promise rests on a small number of specific production decisions (remember big definition of production, not just a factory). If the decision changes, it changes everything else. Appointment length, fiber content, the design constraint of an ordinary person using the product without a manual or support call to their daugher-in-law. These are the load-bearing walls. The problem is they rarely look that important in a budget meeting. They look like line items or inefficiencies. They look like the expensive thing all your competitors stopped doing three years ago without anyone seemingly noticing. Name them explicitly, out loud, including their reason for existence…..before someone with a very reasonable expression and a very thorough slide deck proposes removing them.

Third: your refusals matter more than your values. Well technically your refusals are PROOF of your values. Most organizations have “values.” What they aspire to, display on the wall, include in the onboarding deck and ask candidates about in interviews. Refusals are different. A refusal is what you will not do even when it remains legal, would be profitable, is common practice or is done by your peer companies. Values bend under sufficient financial pressure. Refusals do not - or if they do, you know exactly when the differentiation ended, even if nobody will be brave enough to say so until two years after they leave the organization. The organizations that hold their differentiated promise over time are not the ones with the most inspiring values statements, they’re the ones who said “NO” in a room where yes would have been easier…..and that “no” held firmly, over and over and over again, eventually became part of what the organization understood itself to be.

Fourth: build feedback loops with teeth. Not surveys, NPS, eNPS tracked on dashboards that becomes a report that goes to a committee with no authority over the decisions that produced the data and every incentive to only report positive findings. A feedback loop with teeth (or a learning loop) means the information about whether the promise is being kept travels directly to someone who has the authority, mandate AND incentive to act upon it - and who actually acts. Most organizations have some form of feedback loop, very few have examined where there are incentives to hide bad news, where bad news is blocked from entering the system at all, where bad news might be punished, where definitions themselves hide bad news, and whether the information in the feedback changes anything at all.

Fifth: assess the production decisions as a system, not a list. The four layers aren’t four separate audits, each production decision isn’t its own separate audit. They interact. The decision to shorten appointment length looks operational until you trace it to the investor expectation that drove the margin target that made the staffing model that made the appointment length inevitable. A cognitive default about what counts as evidence determines which feedback ever reaches the people with authority to act on it. When you assess differentiation decision by decision each one can look defensible, but taken as a whole, a system optimizing towards the specific differentiation you are targeting, then you can see whether your system IS optimizing for differentiation or if it’s simply the same watered-down oatmeal but in a very on-brand bowl.

Sixth: recognize regression when it starts, not when it’s finished. The drift doesn’t take out a banner add or schedule a townhall or throw a party where it arrives in a limo and dressed in Versace. It starts with a smart hire who comes from a larger company with “better” processes. It looks like a board member asking a reasonable question about margins. It looks like a new policy that aligns you with industry norms. It looks like maturity and scale. The organizations that hold their differentiations are not the ones that never face these pressures - EVERY organization faces these pressures. They are the ones where someone in the room recognizes the pattern early enough to name it and everyone one in the room cares enough about the differentiation to resist the pressure. It’s not a refusal of all change, but the habit of asking “is this the kind of change that moves us towards the ceiling, or toward the floor?” Helium or lead.

None of this requires heroism. It requires literacy, the ability to see inherited decisions, imported decisions AS decisions, to recognize the moment one of the pillars of your differentiation is being called a cost center, to know the difference between the kind of reasonable that makes you better and the kind of reasonable that makes you average.

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Join the Default Detectives

Default literacy is the capability underneath all of it. It is what makes differentiation sticky rather than seasonal. It is what separates the organizations that are genuinely recognizable - not because they have a clever tagline, or are the only player in a tiny field, but because every single time you or anyone you know interacts with them you can feel that someone, somewhere, made a long series of deliberate and occasionally inconvenient choices to make it feel exactly like this.

That’s not magic, or personality, or brand……it’s production. And the design of that production, is a choice.

Actually, yes, yes I do. But Aerosmith was right, we are living on the edge. We are living on the frayed edges of a paradigm that has lost its ability to explain everything about work, but the new paradigm is not yet fully formed.

Quick vocab check: paradigm - not that thing that the leadership book at the airport told you would revolutionize the way you do work.....or at least, it’s not nearly that easy. Rather, a paradigm is the foundational architecture of assumptions about how the world works, typically applied to a specific field.

To avoid the defensive posturing that happens when we talk about business we’ll use medicine as our example. Today’s paradigm = germ theory. Disease spreads through vectors which are introduced into a host via repositories (non-technical version - your toddler sneezes on your grocery cart handle, the next person gets sick). Old paradigm = miasma theory. Disease comes from bad air. That sounds silly, but they didn’t have microscopes. And it wasn’t wrong entirely - after all people near swamps got malaria, just because it was mosquitoes causing it instead of the stench.....well you work with what you know.

Important to know though is that the paradigm isn’t something you choose, it’s just how reality works and the only way you can really see them is by studying the paradigms that came before and where there are.....anomalies. Little problems that don’t quite have a satisfactory answer (ex: the Broad street pump handle that all a ton of cholera cases in London were concentrated around). Places there are workarounds - we do this thing and we don’t know why it works or we can’t prove it works in a standard measurement, but it works.

Okay back to work. Our current paradigm for work was solidified after the industrial revolution. Inputs, outputs, commensurable units, return on investment. These are the language of business. The reality of business. But that reality was built around factories and carried forward into services and knowledge work and the wear and tear is starting to show.

There is an entire class of organizational phenomena - trust, psychological safety, belonging, relational quality, network effects - that the people who study them can reliably demonstrate with precision, replicate and observe producing measurable outcomes such as discretionary effort, proactive risk identification, innovation in service to collective purpose, loyalty that survives disappointment.....every outcome metric in the dominant framework shows up more positively when those conditions are present. But the conditions themselves don’t work like inputs that produce outputs at a calculable ratio.

We cannot say one unit of psychological safety equals three extra cars produced, or three units of trust equals $7K dollars saved. They work like soil acidity, water availability, the weather. They shift the probability distribution of what the system can produce. They change what’s possible. That is a different causal structure than our paradigm’s measurement architecture is built to capture. So the dominant framework doesn’t have a place to hold those. And efforts that address them get lumped in the ‘nice to have’ category because they don’t fit nicely on a spreadsheet. There is no cell for “changes what’s possible.”

The researchers aren’t failing to make the case…..or at least, not entirely. They’re standing at a paradigm boundary.

The History Lesson - You Know Nothing Dr. Snow

In 1854, physician John Snow mapped cholera deaths in London’s Soho neighborhood and traced them to a single water pump on Broad Street.

The dominant theory of disease at the time was miasma theory. Disease came from bad air - the foul-smelling vapor produced by rotting organic material and sewage. It was a reasonable framework given available instruments and matched observations that disease tended to be more prevalent around sewage and swamps. It explained enough and the things that couldn’t be explained were attributed to things like the patient’s pre-existing weakness or poor moral character.

The Broad street pump wasn’t producing bad air. It was producing contaminated water. Water carrying a pathogen that germ theory would eventually identify once microscopes became commonly available and enough evidence that couldn’t be explained away began to build up that the fraying edges of miasma theory gave way to something new. Dr. Snow had no ability to say WHY the pump was a problem, all he could see was the map clustering deaths around this specific handle and when the handle was removed, the deaths stopped. When it was put back, the deaths resumed.

His answer was correct. The paradigm had no place for it, no way to see the problem. So it was noted as interesting, but not something that mattered.

The constellation of possibility

There are a set of fields that have been circling something real for decades. Organizational psychology, people analytics, organizational development, human factors research, leadership science, systems thinking applied to organizations. Each of these fields have been producing findings the dominant paradigm keeps stopping at the same threshold. Not because the findings are wrong, but because the threshold is a paradigm boundary. The phenomena are true, the explanation makes sense within what we know….but the framework that will be able to integrate this knowledge is not yet adequate to what we need.

These fields aren’t a cohesive movement, there’s no shared branding or in many cases even shared scholars. They are, so far, a scatter of data points. But from a certain angle - if you’ve been collecting anomalies for long enough, if you’ve spent enough time see what happens when this data is ignored after it doesn’t fit the narrative leaders are looking for - you can start to see the scatter has a shape. These data points are point at something….they’re like a constellation.

One of the frustrating things about paradigms is that it’s impossible to see the full paradigm from the inside. You can only find the edges through what came before and what isn’t working. These fields right now are like a constellation. Just like Ursa Major could be a bear, a wagon, a canoe, or a plough (amongst many other possibilities) - what’s coming is only visible as a suggestion of a shape. We may know some of the stars, but we don’t have the vantage point to see the full coherent form.

Paradigm shifts are always predicated on major technological and sociological innovations. Writing and the alphabetic script, the wheel, the printing press, the telescope, the steam engine, electricity, the microscope, the telegraph, the internal combustion engine, radio and wireless communication, the internet……every single one of these have created paradigm disruptions in multiple fields in society. The restructured the conditions of possibility. That is what separates a paradigm shift from simple innovation. The moment where the previously unimaginable becomes the everyday.

I do not know how long it will take, or what innovation will be what ushers in the next paradigm of work. It might be AI, it might not. I do know that the edges of our current paradigm are showing. We are in the period known as the interregnum - when the old is visibly straining but the new is not yet formed.

Default literacy is the ability to look at an organizational system and see what belief conditions are embedded in your operations. It’s the skill of reading those seams, those patched holes and frayed edges while you’re still inside the garment. It is specifically possible, now, in this window because so many of the conditions that have kept the architecture invisible have degraded enough that you can begin to imagine differently.

The people who feel something is wrong - who keep accumulating data points that don’t fit, who keep being told that the problem is their attitude, or their execution, or their change management skills - they aren’t malfunctioning. They are mapping a paradigm that is only now, under these specific conditions, becoming truly mappable.

This capability, this sense of where you are adding a patch to a fabric that doesn’t match, this is going to be necessary as we move into what the future of work looks like. We aren’t going to be able to successfully weave the new into the old. That’s what all the failed implementations and turmoil are showing us. The skill we need to develop is understanding what are we asking people to do that feels wrong because we don’t yet have the tools to see what we need?

Your organization’s transformation effort is asking people inside it to shift their entire belief framework. That is not a communication problem, or a buy-in problem. It is a paradigm problem - you are asking people to act from a framework that does not yet exist. And paradigm problems don’t resolve through better messaging.

You do not need the new paradigm to act. Snow did not need germ theory to remove the handle. He needed a map precise enough to point to a specific intervention, and the willingness to act on pattern evidence the dominant framework couldn’t yet explain.

You have that map. It is built from every field that is producing findings your spreadsheet has no cell for - trust, psychological safety, discretionary effort, loyalty that survives disappointment. The work you are moving into requires all of those things. And your existing paradigm has no mechanism for producing them other than investing in exactly what it cannot measure. That is not a leap of faith. That is pattern evidence point at a specific handle. Remove it.

Stop selling the airplane ride. Sell the vacation.

You’re meant to learn from that advice that nobody cares about your process, they only care about the result. Don’t tell people what you do tell them what they get. It’s clean, memorable, snappy. It’s not even wrong. Which is why I’ve spent longer than I truly want to admit feeling broken because my work doesn’t fit inside it.

When your brain naturally works by scattering in a million directions to pull back information and see how things fit together, you’re quite used to criticism that you aren’t concise. This felt like more of that. Another opportunity to realize that the way I think and communicate isn’t standard, but if I tried hard enough I could make it fit the mold I was being asked for.

Nope. Not this time.

I don’t have a positioning problem. I have a fundamentally different kind of offer. I’m not selling a vacation. I’m not selling “transform your culture by Q3 in 12 easy steps” or “fully booked in 90 days.”

I’m selling hard, foundational, unglamorous work. The kind where you look at systems you’d honestly rather NOT examine, question metrics you’ve personally been rewarded for hitting, and redesign infrastructure nobody’s going to applaud you for touching. The payoff isn’t this quarter. The payoff might not even be visible for years. The people who benefit most might not even work for you yet.

That’s not a Timex or even an Apple Watch. We’re talking Patek Phillipe here. The whole ethos of that fancy watch is that you never really own it, you’re only looking after it for the next generation.

And now I’m going to make it worse. I’m not selling me doing that work…..I’m teaching you to do it yourself. I’m selling a way of seeing and understanding. The ability to look at your own organization and find the defaults that are getting in your way. The inherited metrics that came with a vendor dashboard nobody even wondered about. The policies that have outlived the problems they were built to solve. The approval process someone added during a crisis three years ago that never got revisited. The assumptions about what “professional” looks like that you carried in from your last organization without realizing they came with you, or that they were assumptions at all. The invisible architecture that shapes behavior more powerfully than anything in your mission statement.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

I haven’t watched The Matrix a million times (legally blonde and pirates of the caribbean are more my speed, if we’re being honest.) But that movie stuck with me the way it stuck with everyone. Fight choreography wasn’t the star, it was the choice. Red pill or blue pill. And the tension that Neo’s life got harder after he takes the red pill. He doesn’t wake up on a beach, he wakes up in the middle of a war. Everything is more complicated, more painful, more real. He can see the whole system now, and not only are most people around him still blind, they’ll fight to keep the system in place.

Not a vacation at all……but definitely a vocation.

And yes, it’s lonely. It’s Tuesday morning meetings where you can see the default underneath the conversation and nobody else in the room sees it yet. It’s understanding why something isn’t working while everyone around you is still optimizing inside the broken frame. It’s the particular isolation of seeing the architecture while everyone else rearranges the furniture and debating with yourself whether you say anything at all, or enjoy the activity and connection.

So when I see yet another email or post or infographic with “finish this sentence: I help [who] get [result] in [timeframe]” I can’t. Not because I have a positioning problem, but because you can’t put a 90 day guarantee on a red pill and even if you could it’s not a guarantee anybody would sign up for without explanation.

That’s felt like failure for quite a while. But I can also look at it the way I do everything else: it’s a system, with defaults worth examining.

“Sell the vacation” is brilliant advice for a very specific kind of business.

It’s advice for sharks. And I don’t mean that as an insult. Sharks are magnificent. They’re fast, efficient, apex predators. They move through the water, they feed and they move on. If what you are building is a business designed to make money and move on to the next thing, then selling the vacation is fantastic advice. Package the result, make it shiny, immediate, irresistible and covered in rainbow glittery glory. That is a legitimate strategy for a legitimate kind of business.

If we hold up shark strategy as the only strategy, we build an entire ecosystem optimized for predation……and then we look around and wonder why the reef is dying.

Not everyone is a shark, not everyone should be a shark. An ocean full of nothing but apex predators will soon be an empty ocean, that’s the formula for a collapse, not a thriving ecosystem.

Some of us are building coral. Slow, structural, the thing that actually makes the ecosystem possible, a bit sensitive to having fertilizer dumped in the water in an attempt to force growth. Plenty of slow, structural lasting work is still work that you can sell like a vacation. The promise framed around a short timeline of the shark doesn’t work, but the rest holds. I’ll call those people “pretty coral” in my wonky aquatic metaphor.

I have another problem - I’m not just building coral. I’m building ugly coral. I’m selling something that doesn’t have a destination at all. (by the way, technically I should use “encrusting coral” the flat, craggy stuff that builds the foundational layer pretty coral needs in order to attach to anything. I’m going to stick with ugly though for the rest because it’s shorter and you don’t need any further nature documentary moments.)

If ugly coral tries to follow shark advice, you get coral that feels broken (yes, I know this metaphor is stretching like taffy, stick with me). If ugly coral starts trying to look like pretty coral or worse a shark, if they abandon the slow structural work because nobody puts ugly coral on the front cover of Forbes, the ecosystem gets increasingly fragile.

This is the part where someone usually says “why do you hate money?” My dude. Money is lovely. Money buys food, and security, and Lego. Financial security is meaningful, building something from nothing is a genuine accomplishment, and I’m not here to try to romanticize struggle or pretend that you can pay your mortgage with purpose.

There’s a version of work where the problem you’re solving matters more to you than the revenue you generate and the solution to the problem isn’t glamorous, quick, or anything that anybody would dub a vacation. When that’s the work you’re doing, when you’re coral (ugly or pretty) shark frameworks are built for a different relationship to the work than the one you’re in.

We’re going to leave the ocean and travel to the corn fields of Ohio - don’t tell me I never took you anywhere. The other advice that is prevalent in founder world all amounts to “farm your relationships.” Nurture your audience, cultivate your list, harvest your network. It all sounds so warm….and maybe even vaguely nutritious and wholesome. Until you notice the metaphor. The crop is people and you aren’t optimizing for community, trust, and connection. You’re optimizing for yield.

I don’t want to farm my relationships like mutant corn. I don’t want to grow mutant corn at all. Corn that looks enormous and impressive and requires escalating inputs and poisonous fertilizer just to maintain last season’s numbers while the soil underneath gets more depleted every cycle and everyone who works with or eats the corn gets sick. That’s not a marketing problem I need to solve, it’s a default I need to refuse.

I can’t finish “I help [who] get [result] in [timeframe].” We’ve established that. But maybe there’s a different sentence? An ugly coral, non-mutant tiny but sustainable corn sentence? “I help [who] do [work] so that [larger outcomes].”

Let’s try. I teach leaders to see and redesign their systems:

• so that the companies they build reflect what they believe,

• so that they stop burning out their teams inside processes nobody remembers choosing,

• so that nobody has to be ashamed of the gap between what the organization says and what the organization does

• so that marketing is about the fun way to frame reality not the way to hide it

• so that the people who come after them inherit structure and stability not infrastructure debt

• so that the company can carry on its purpose beyond the people who are there now.

That’s positioning that operates at a different scale. It doesn’t fit in a ten word framework. The unit of value that’s promised isn’t a destination, it’s a capacity and what you do with it is yours.

Phew. What a trip. You all know me. The question I come back to regularly, that I ask leaders and myself in equal measure:

“What do you want to be true? And what are you trying to accomplish?”

If you’re trying to make money - and really that’s it OR you can genuinely promise and deliver a vacation, then sell the vacation. Optimize the funnel, A/B test the landing page. That machinery works. It’s well documented, Hormozi isn’t wrong about how it operates.

But if the meaning has migrated. If the problem itself is what drives you, if you’d still be thinking about this even if nobody paid you. If what you deliver isn’t a vacation, but instead a way of seeing or something that makes things harder for a while but more real - then sell the vacation was never built for you and you shouldn’t feel bad about that. The discomfort you feel isn’t a positioning failure, it’s the clearest signal you have that maybe you’re coral.

So what does coral do instead of farming mutant corn? (lord this one really jumped the shark lol) Coral builds. It shows up, and lives its little coral life and over time an ecosystem forms around it. Not because it ran a fabulous advertising campaign or nailed a funnel, but because it was something real building right where other living things needed exactly that. I just watched Hoppers with my 8 year old, you all are lucky this wasn’t one long giant essay about beavers and keystone species……

So that’s me. Ugly coral. And the people who find my work won’t be responding to a pitch, they’ll be responding to the feeling of recognition they feel when I name a pattern they’ve been living with, and someone reads it and thinks: that’s what I’ve been sensing in every meeting for the last two years but didn’t have words for.

That recognition is the whole conversion. Not a funnel or a touchpoint sequence, or a 90-day guarantee. Just she sees what I see and she has language for it.

The kind of trust sharks can’t and don’t build. The kind that knows the right person finds when they’re ready. Who offers a landing page as a way to stay in touch not a way to drive you insane while trying to extract “lifetime customer value” without ever giving anything back.

The blue pill is easier. Genuinely easier. Nobody would blame you. And there are literally thousands of people willing to sell you the vacation version - the culture engagement survey, the values workshop, the quick-fix retreat that feels great on Friday and evaporates by Wednesday.

I’m not writing for the people who want that.

I’m writing for those who’ve already felt something off in the system and are tired of pretending they haven’t. The ones who don’t need to be convinced that work is nuanced and fixing it will be hard. They need someone to confirm what they’ve been seeing is real, hand them a map, and say you’re not crazy, now let’s build.

It’s a small audience, but it’s my audience. Welcome to the work. And if you DO want to have early book release information, or information on when workshops are launching, go ahead and sign up at the defaults ecosystem site:

Join the Default Detectives

Otherwise, the thinking out loud will continue to live here and I’ll continue to be excited about every single one of you who are following along with this work, no matter which door you come through.

Trusting, stable relationships allow for systemic co-regulation, distributed nervous system stability. Biologically, when the future is uncertain, the human nervous system engages self-protective systems. As cortisol spikes, creativity and flexibility decrease. Risk tolerance decreases. Errors increase.

The combination of technological and socio-political shocks in the prior year alone have required revision or abandonment of long term plans across multiple sectors. A ten year “plan” is more of a wish than a strategy at this point.

When true visibility shrinks to six months or less, most organizations respond with more planning. But the principles of neuroscience shows why that backfires:

• More meetings, dashboards, and metrics = higher cognitive load and depleted attention.

• Constant pivots = chronic prediction error, which the brain reads as threat and can undermine self-efficacy and motivation.

• Fear-based urgency = sympathetic activation, the fight-flight-freeze mechanism.

• Low safety = loss of creativity and collaboration.

The human nervous system was never designed to run on permanent ambiguity. Our brains are prediction machines, they are constantly guessing what will happen next and recalibrating based on the gap between expectation and reality. When that gap widens too far, it doesn’t feel interesting or stimulating, it feels unsafe.

Therefore, the strategic act is not forecasting — it’s regulation.
Reducing cognitive friction, restoring predictability where possible, and building relationship networks that act as distributed regulators. Trust and predictable connection literally help re-engage the social engagement system (ventral vagal state).

Relationship density and quality are the infrastructure that keeps cognition, collaboration, and creativity online when uncertainty rises.

Your autonomic nervous system is the same system that decides whether you can think clearly in a crisis meeting, whether you interpret a colleague’s silence as hostility, and whether your team can still innovate when they aren’t even certain that the work they are doing will matter or exist tomorrow.

If you can’t truly see more than six months ahead, the most strategic thing you can do is stop pretending you can and faking certainty and instead invest in the relationships that will matter whatever the future brings.

When the Compass Matters More Than the Map

The ventral vagal system (what Stephen Porges calls the social engagement network) is the biological foundation for collaboration. Safety cues activate it: a calm tone, a predictable meeting rhythm, a leader who follows through. Threat cues deactivate it: broken promises, volatile priorities, ambiguous expectations.

When the system stays in fight, flight, or freeze too long, people lose access to complex thought and cooperation. That’s why uncertainty without safety kills innovation.

Every broken commitment erodes your team’s ability to predict what comes next. Every “just one more push” moment compounds allostatic load—the body’s cumulative stress debt. You can’t resilience-train your way out of a system that never lets people recover.

If your environment keeps signaling danger, it doesn’t matter how inspiring the all-hands is—your people will still be running emergency scripts in the background of their brains and your organization’s ability to respond to the next change shrinks.

To manage effectively in an environment of constant change, work on creating micro-moments of predictability, clear boundaries, and visible follow-through. A cadence of care that lets people’s nervous systems stop bracing long enough to think again.

When the brain isn’t fighting for survival, it can finally collaborate, innovate, and grow.

That’s what anti-fragility looks like in practice:

• Systems that metabolize uncertainty instead of pretending it isn’t there.

• Leaders who treat clarity as oxygen, not as a bonus perk.

• Teams that move together not because they see the path, but because they trust one another enough to keep walking.

When the horizon shortens, the smartest strategy isn’t to see farther.
It’s to make sure your nervous system (collective and individual) can stay regulated in the dark.

The less we can plan, the more relationships matter.
Not only because they make us feel better, but because they keep our brains online.

If the map runs out, build a compass.
If the plan falls apart, build a rhythm.
If the horizon disappears, build each other.

Because strategy, at its core, is not the art of predicting the future.
It’s the discipline of staying human when the future is foggy.

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Then I spent years inside organizations that repeated it like a Harry Potter spell while designing systems that undermined everything they said they cared about, and I started to feel like Hermione insisting, “It’s levi‑O‑sa, not levi‑o‑SAR.”

At some point, “alignment” stopped meaning the relationship between values, structures, and behavior and started meaning a slide in a deck that lets us pretend those things match.

Or worse, an excuse to put the person brave enough to raise their hand and call out problems on the “no” list because they “aren’t aligned”. But like Bruno, we don’t talk about that.

So if I’m going to keep using the word at all, I have to start with the place where the hypocrisy would be most obvious: my own company. What does it look like to build something where the operating system actually matches the ideas on the wall?

I talk about culture in all its iterations and what it takes to build an authentic culture in multiple ways. I literally named my company Truer Words because I believe so thoroughly in how important alignment is.

When the words on your wall match the people you hire, but the experience you provide does not the result is disillusionment, disengagement and burnout. Fake values do not benefit anyone long term.

So now I’m faced with the question “what does it look like to build a company that treats *its own* ideas as real, worthy, true……as actual good ideas you’re willing to design around?” Like eating your own dog food. (Weird saying, btw)

Pitch Slapped Into Clarity

One of the stranger parts of building Truer Words since July has been the flood of pitches from people who clearly haven’t read a word I’ve written. Not “this isn’t quite a fit” misalignment. Structural misalignment. Products designed to push me toward hyper‑growth by turning my own clients into a dependent revenue stream, delivered in outreach emails that embody every default I’m trying to dismantle. If they had read even one essay, they would know I was going to say no….and not because I’m some super tough negotiator. I’m saying no as a matter of design, as a matter of adherence to my values, as a matter of principle.

Most of us are very good at telling other organizations to align their systems with their values. Be we don’t always have the opportunity for building our own work in a way that would pass our own diagnostics, our own standards.

This is my attempt to name what it feels like to build Truer Words and the Defaults Ecosystem as a company that has to live inside the same ideas it is asking everyone else to adopt.

If you want to see what I mean by “treating ideas as real,” let’s look at one concrete place it shows up in my work.

The EEDM Was About Other People (At First)

When I first wrote about the Employee Experience Dynamics Model (embedded below) a year ago, I thought I was building a decision-making tool for leaders who kept sacrificing culture on the altar of scale. The pattern was familiar: the larger an organization got, the more it defaulted to culture-killing standardization and then acted surprised when everything started to feel generic and brittle. And it was that. But it was also more.

The model was my attempt to say, “you don’t have to do it this way,” to show that you can standardize some parts of employee experience so you can *protect* differentiation where it actually matters. What I didn’t name at the time was that I was already doing defaults work: I was mapping the unspoken assumption that “grown‑up” organizations must trade nuance for scale.

Looking back through The Default Directive lens, I can see the nested defaults I was working against: that efficiency requires uniformity, that personalization is childish, that anything you can’t put in a template doesn’t count as real work. EEDM was my way of refusing that framing, of refuting what we all accepted as “the way it is” and showing that the tradeoff between scale and culture was a design choice, not a law of nature.

Using EEDM in Designing Truer Words

The EEDM splits employee experience into layers: the foundational stability that should be consistent, the growth and performance layer where you blend standardization and differentiation, and the upper layer where belonging and meaning live. It’s a structural argument for not forcing everything through the same mold. It was built for employee experience, but the logic holds for customer journeys too, and I used it to design the journey through my own offering ecosystem.

If you look at the Truer Words site with that model in mind, it’s a blueprint for my own business.

(Note you can’t ACTUALLY look yet. The public version is still in process because, unsurprisingly, I couldn’t just hand this to anyone with a template and call it done, I needed someone who understood what I’m trying to do.)

- Foundational stability lives in artifacts: the Default Directive book, the Starter Course, Seed Sessions, and the Substack essays that make the theory public. These are the things that should scale. Shared language, basic tools, default literacy are distributed and scalable infrastructure so leaders don’t have to wait for a consultant to show up to start seeing their own systems.

- The middle layer is the structured path: Seed Session → Starter Course → Root Workshop → Cultivation Intensive → Greenhouse Cohort. The formats are recognizable and repeatable, but how an organization moves through them depends on their readiness and authority over systems.

- The top layer is deliberately scarce: embedded diagnostic engagements are limited to a handful each year, focused on one knot in one organization’s infrastructure. That work is not meant to scale, and I say that out loud because the whole point is to keep high‑judgment, system‑specific work from getting flattened into “programming.”

In other words: the knowledge scales, the access to me does not. That is not a marketing line, it’s the operating system. And it’s extraordinarily unlikely I’ll ever be 10X’ing anything at all. Hopefully that means I also get to skip the 5 am wake-ups and the ice baths!

Refusing the Default Consulting Model

The default consulting model is tidy. Those who know things get paid to know things. You charge for your time. You give just enough insight that clients want more, but not enough that they stop needing you. You scale by training others in your methods, certifying them, and building a mini‑industry of people who replicate your frameworks under your brand.

You do not give away huge chunks of your thinking on Substack. You write a book that spends four chapters explaining why they need you and a final chapter gesturing at what might be possible with you in the room. You do not design your offers so that someone who will never meet you can still use your tools to change their systems.

I’m building the opposite.

The Default Directive is designed to sit next to a strategy deck and give leaders enough understanding and language to start doing defaults work themselves, without waiting for me. The Substack essays are not teasers; they are field guides and arguments and experiments that can be used immediately. The Starter Course is not a lead magnet; it’s a way to distribute capacity.

If I built Truer Words the way most “future of work” consultancies are built, my own defaults work would stop being true. The company would become a case study in the very problem it’s critiquing.

Oh My Lord, Do You Hate Money? Do You Want Me to Hate Money?

The level of change I’m building into Truer Words is more radical than what I ask from most organizations. I’m designing the all‑in version: a business that tries to align every major choice—offer design, scale, revenue model—with defaults work and models like the Employee Experience Dynamics Model.

I don’t expect leaders to start there. Partly because they’re carrying different risks than I am, and partly because they were never trained to see defaults in the first place.

Most of us were never taught to think about how we think at work. We were trained to operate inside systems, not to notice how those systems think for us.

Leadership development taught strategy and storytelling, not how to map the invisible instructions embedded in performance frameworks, metrics, and approvals. That’s not a personal failing; it’s a design choice our educational and operational institutions made long before we were ever in the room. (If you want the long, nerdy version of why this kind of thinking is so rare, that’s a whole other essay.)

Okay, moving on.

So when I talk about defaults with leaders, I usually start on the surface:

- If you want people studying the cosmos, maybe a rigid 9–5 in a fluorescent office isn’t the only imaginable schedule.

- If you say you’re patient‑first, maybe it matters that all your clinic slots conflict with school pickup and shift work.

- If you claim to value development, maybe it’s relevant that your performance system punishes experimentation.

These are starter examples, not the end state. And even they are surprisingly difficult for people to come up with. They feel weirdly like innovation because we’re just so used to the way things are done “everywhere.”

These surface level characteristics are the visible ripples of much deeper currents—places where the water moves enough that we can point and say, “there, that.” They give us something to grab onto while we build the much rarer skill of noticing how the water itself is shaped.

Their first experiments are smaller on purpose: move clinic hours, redesign a slice of scheduling logic, adjust how performance reviews treat learning, add one metacognitive question to a decision template. My job is to build the lab version out in the open so those moves feel imaginable, not to stand on the shore judging them and ask why they aren’t already swimming in different water.

I’m Lucky And I Know It

I know it is a privilege to be able to choose my work. Many people do not get to. That’s precisely why I refuse to burn that privilege on building yet another extraction machine with slightly better copy. Or maybe worse copy, I’m not a copywriter and it’s lightyears before I’ll have the income to pay for one.

If I’m going to spend my life thinking about defaults and design debt, then my own business becomes the place where I either prove this is possible or reveal that I don’t believe myself. Any scale I care about is in service of distribution, not dominance. I want the ideas to move farther than I personally can. I want people I will never meet to have words for the thing that’s been eating their culture alive. That’s how people can help me. Giving more rooms and platforms and amplifications of the ideas. And that’s one of the primary reasons I’m giving my shortest workshop away free.

I’ve always said I want to be paid to play with ideas all day. This is what that looks like in practice: build artifacts that travel on their own—book, essays, courses, and protect my time by keeping my presence scarce enough that I never have to betray the work to feed the machine.

The Defaults Ecosystem isn’t just one thing for that reason. The book is deep structure. The Substack is ideas in progress, and a place where I will share tools, ideas, and stories. The workshops are where you map your own water with other people in the room.

Underneath all of that is a simple bet: if more leaders get practice in thinking about thinking, about how their systems are teaching people what’s safe, smart, and possible then we don’t need to rock the foundations of every organization. We just need enough people to start treating defaults as designable instead of inevitable. Experiments that press against the boundaries of what we think of as the way things have to be, vs what actually must be true. Innovation through curiosity and reasoning.

That opens up all sorts of possibilities, not just performance reviews that will stop accidentally punishing learning, schedules that will stop contradicting stated values, and “alignment” that will finally start living in infrastructure instead of in magic words on aspirational posters.

The job title is “Vice President, Workforce of the Future” Job ID: 10141869, posted Feb 6, 2026.

All my fellow Cassandra’s can already see the future almost perfectly if they go read the job description. We know, with near mathematical certainty, that the way this role is structured will fail at the thing it’s being sold to do. We also know they’re going to do it anyways.

And because the universe has a sense of humor, the company that literally built Tomorrowland is still treating “the future” as a themed land to tour, not an operating system to rebuild. This isn’t a drag-Disney essay (seriously, I actually think they COULD do this right if they weren’t defaulting to current practice……HUGE kudos to them for even posting the role). The problem is not that the work is illegitimate, but they’re trying to solve a tomorrow problem with a today architecture and they’re far from alone.

Again, to be completely clear, this isn’t because Disney is uniquely clueless. From the outside, they look a lot like every other big company: traditional performance reviews tied to merit increases, selection and development programs, engagement work, and some thoughtful foresight and education bets. It’s a very standard playbook. The problem is that the playbook itself was written for a different era than the one this role is supposed to help them navigate.

What Disney Says Its Hiring

VP, Workforce of the Future….on paper, it’s glorious. The kind of job strategic HR people salivate over.

The posting describes a senior strategic advisor to shape how Disney evolves its talent strategies for the next generation of creativity and innovation. The VP is supposed to:

• Define and refine a multi-year “Workforce of the Future” strategy

• Anticipate future skill needs and recommend how to attract, develop, and retain the talent Disney will need amid changing business models and emerging technologies

• Lead workforce analytics and predictive modeling, connecting people insights to business outcomes

• Partner with People Analytics, Finance, and Strategy, influencing without direct authority across a highly matrixes global enterprise.

The ideal candidate: 10+ years experience in top-tier consulting or strategic HR, deep workforce analytics and scenario-planning experience, understanding of AI/automation/future-of-work trends, and “exceptional communication, storytelling, and executive presence.”

In other words: internal futurist, part McKinsey partner, part people-analytics power user, part storyteller in chief (potentially part ninja-unicorn being hired to do the emotional labor of making an near-impossible mandate sound inspiring.), all with a 348K salary plus incentives and bonuses. In HR we are used to our job descriptions sounding like near-impossible nonsense. Most people won’t even flinch and I guarantee you they have a TON of highly-qualified applicants for the role. So what’s wrong? Why am I using it as an example in a very long essay?

If you scan that list, almost all of the emphasis is on who gets hired and how they’re developed….future skills, talent pipelines, internal mobility, EVP. That’s the classic strategic HR toolkit. What’s almost entirely missing is any mandate to redesign the systems those humans are dropped into: the performance and promotion architecture they’re evaluated under, the scheduling and workload patterns they’ll live inside, or the AI-driven tools that will increasingly mediate their days. In other words, the existing defaults that will dictate whether any of the HR strategy can actually work.

But gosh, it sounds pretty great…..hope, agility, and forward-thinking wrapped up in a job code.

Jonah in the Corporate Whale

The trouble starts when you look at where this role lives and what it’s expected to move. This is framed as an HR role: a VP advising HR leaders and senior executives, serving as a trusted advisor, bringing a “consulting mindset” to diagnose organizational challenges and mobilize change.

It’s a position focused on workforce readiness….of course it belongs in HR. Until you think about what most modern HR architecture was actually built to do. HR systems were designed for compliance, payroll control, and legal defensibility, then repurposed as if they were built for strategy and growth. A pretty new suit on the same old body, and most importantly, no real change to who holds power, authority, or influence.

The VP, Workforce of the Future is Jonah being dropped into that whale. They are charged with naming future skill gaps, structural misalignment, and system contradictions while every major lever they would need to succeed lives inside machinery optimized for cost discipline and plausible deniability.

You can almost hear the whale’s tummy grumbling with the echoes of what Jonah will hear from the execs:

• “We love this vision, can you fit it into our existing performance template?”

• “Great point about skills, let’s add a competency to the model.”

• “Yes, trust matters, but we still need to hit this quarter’s labor cost targets.”

Poor Jonah.

This is what applying a today solution to a tomorrow problem looks like in practice. Tomorrow’s problem is “how do we re-architect work, risk, and learning so humans and machines together can achieve what our old systems weren’t built for?” Today’s solution is “add a senior advisor to the existing HR stack and ask them to influence-without-authority their way around all the old default behaviors.”

The Volcano of Future Readiness

Or where we see exactly how many metaphors I can cram into this thing…..

Executives are standing on the edge of a landscape that feels unstable. AI is reshaping roles faster than universities can update curricula. Layoffs have turned into a rolling weather pattern, RTO mandates clash with employee expectations…..trust has been eroding under the weight of contradictory narratives about care, flexibility, and efficiency.

The anxiety is real, and something must be done about the “future of work.”

Enter the Volcano of Future Readiness: a big, dramatic place where companies offer high-status roles, bold titles, and earnest press releases to signal they are serious about the future…..preferably without touching the infrastructure, disrupting execs or making anyone important too uncomfortable.

A VP of Workforce of the Future would be an excellent sacrifice to toss into the volcano, complete with the magic words “multi-year strategy,” “AI,” “skills,” and “enterprise-wide transformation.” And for a while the gods are appeased.

Inside the organization, the sacrifice has a very specific shape:

• Someone gets a glorious remit that spans all the places the system is fragile

• They are explicitly positioned as an advisor, not an owner, of the systems that create fragility

• Their success is judged on visible artifacts (frameworks, slide decks, initiatives, dashboards) produced, rather than on uncomfortable changes in who has power, how work is designed, or which metrics might need to be retired.

The volcano smokes, the board gets a briefing, the town hall gets a slide. The lava, in the form of legacy metrics and defaults, keeps flowing in the same channels that have already been carved.

This is why I’m saying this is the entire future-of-work paradox in one job post. The organization can see the writing on the wall that what works today will not work tomorrow, and their solution is still being built on systems and assumptions that were never designed for that tomorrow.

A tomorrow mandate running on a today operating system.

Tomorrowland and the Narrow Future

This is where the Tomorrowland becomes ludicrously apt. Disney has been selling versions of “tomorrow” for decades. The company knows how to paint a futuristic skyline, build a ride, and put a rocket on a brochure. Corporate future-of-work talk often looks a lot like a theme park land:

• New signage (AI, skills, hybrid work, digital transformation)

• Shiny attractions (tools, platforms, programs)

• Carefully curated narratives about innovation and belonging

Underneath the ride tracks are still the same:

• Metrics that treat humans as cost centers to be optimized

• Performance systems that flatten nuance into service of budget control

• Decision rights clustered at the top while responsibility for consequences sits at the bottom.

The problem is not a lack of belief in the future. The problem is the version of “future” that keeps getting funded: futuristic signage wrapped around 1960s assumptions about control, metrics, and who gets to decide what counts as real.

You do not get a new era of work by updating the decor. You get it by changing what the ride is built to do.

Poor Jonah Indeed

There is another layer here: the punishment risk for telling the truth from inside the whale. You’ll notice in the job description a desire that the candidate have experience in top-tier consulting firms. When an external firm says, “Your performance system contradicts your values, your metrics are teaching people the opposite of what you say you want, and your leadership bench is being eroded by chronic threat exposure,” it’s packaged as insight.

Executives can respond by nodding seriously, taking the parts that are comfortable, filing the rest under “too ambitious right now” and blaming the consultants if shareholders or the board hate the recommendations. The exorbitant fees paid to the consulting firm buy more than advice, they buy borrowed authority and scapegoat insurance. Jonah gets absolutely none of that in an internal position.

Even for the most expensive consultants there is a ceiling. To fully match the analysis in this essay, a firm would have to say, in plain language, that:

• the core performance and talent architecture is built for rating-to-budget control, not for learning, psychological safety, or system performance.

• Sacred KPIs (EPS, labor-cost ratios, revenue per FTE) are mis-specified for the world the company claims to be designing for.

• Meritocracy and engagement narratives function as epistemic cover for bias, chronic threat exposure and futurism in name only.

This level of critique lands on the operating faiths of the people buying the work. It does not just question a process, it questions the story executives tell themselves about why they deserve to be in charge. Large firms will edge up to the line of that level of feedback and then step sideways.

They scope work as “optimize performance management,” “build a future-of-work strategy,” “create a skills roadmap,” rather than “change what your board treats as real.” Those scopes assume the core beliefs and metrics are basically correct, they treat them as legitimate constraints, not something you could re-decide and design.

Pieces of critique might show up in their decks. What is rare is the move that names the whole cluster for what it is: a machine built so finance and leaders can sort and control people cheaply and everything that setup sacrifices.

Now, imagine, if even the highly respected, highly paid external consultants shy away from that level of truth….how is poor Jonah going to do.

When someone on the inside says even a softened version of the same truths, especially a VP inside HR…..well the only way to make that cognitive dissonance go away is to downgrade the credibility of the person naming it. And so a familiar refrain appears. Jonah is disloyal, naive or not strategic. Jonah doesn’t understand how the real world works. Jonah wasn’t ready for this position. That is epistemic filtering…..the system protects itself by deciding what counts as real knowledge and from whom.

So did you see it coming? The people closest to the work can see the future problem, they can describe it accurately, and the system will still treat their clarity as a failure of credibility. And now Jonah has been renamed Cassandra.

Why This Can’t Succeed in HR as-is

Wow that was depressing. Okay, so is Disney doomed? The point here, after all, is not that Disney is unusually bad. It is that they are a visible, brand-name example of a pattern playing out across large companies: future of work looks like HR work, but most HR architectures were never built to hold it. They’re not doomed, but they are going to have to get less short-sighted and a bit more ambitious.

Future of work stewardship is system architecture. This work is about how the whole machine is wired, not how nice the interface looks, or how well the people inside it are themed to match.

It is not:

• updating competency models

• designing another leadership development program

• adding AI to the performance templates

• running engagement surveys and launching action plans

• letting AI answer employee questions from the knowledge base

• creating a new EVP campaign that is closer to a marketing slogan than objective reality

It is:

• redesigning how work is structured, how risk is distributed, and how time, attention, and credit flow

• changing what gets measured and rewarded

• shifting how the organization decides what work counts, who makes decisions about work, and at what cost.

Don’t let anyone tell you that adding more HR programs, AI-flavored tools, or survey cycles equals “owning the future of work.” The real job is changing the structure, the scorecard, and the definitions of work, workers, and success.

The job posting in our example today takes several defaults for granted:

• “Future of work” is an HR problem that can be addressed with better selection, development and analytics, not an enterprise-level work-design problem that rewires finance, product, and strategy

• Performance is fundamentally an individual metric, not a learning infrastructure

• The system is inherently meritocratic as designed today, the task is to foresee skill gaps and pipelines, not to question how potential is defined, how performance is throttled, or who to believe

• AI and automation are efficiency levers, not governance questions

• Performance and promotion are treated as fixed infrastructure, the work is to fill the pipeline, not redesign the plumbing

Put those together and the outline is clear: this VP is a force-multiplier inside the current scorecard, not a counterweight empowered to redefine what “good” looks like.

Put a person responsible for systems architecture work (without acknowledging it as systems architecture work) inside a function whose tools and norms are built to make performance look measurable and risk look controlled, and the defaults will win every single time. The only way a role like this could possibly succeed in HR is if the organization is explicitly willing to surface and change those defaults, with this VP as co-architect rather than as inspirational commentator.

The Nervous System Cost of Symbolic Futurism

If this were only an org-design puzzle, it would be frustrating to witness but academically interesting. But let’s place this in the midst of our current work context. Trust has become the infrastructure that either supports or collapses everything else. Over the prior few years, workers have lived through rolling layoffs, RTO whiplash, and narrative u-turns on flexibility, belonging, and ‘we’re a family” promises.

Repeated instability without honest acknowledgement keeps nervous systems in chronic vigilance. Chronic vigilance destroys the capabilities companies need: creativity, learning agility, collaboration, and honest sense-making.

As more companies roll other roles like this, big symbolic roles to fix the future, without changing the present and people are going to very quickly learn a clear lesson…..the system is never going to change, simply the story we tell about it. That’s not just cynicism, it’s a physiological adaptation.

Self-protection will have people stop treating leaders’ narratives as information and start treating them as potential threat. We are already seeing this pattern in workforce data. And I’m sorry leaders, but there is no version of a “future-ready workforce” that runs on humans locked in self-protection. Symbolic futurism does more than just waste budget. It corrodes the trust companies are going to need as everything else in the environment continues to become more volatile.

How Do We Fix It?

So if we strip the metaphors away, what’s actually wrong with this job as written? It asks one person to future‑proof the workforce while leaving all the critical machinery firmly anchored in the past. The role sits inside HR, which was historically built to control risk and labor cost, not to renegotiate what counts as performance, value, or acceptable harm. It is scoped as advisory and influence‑only, pointed at “strategy” and “skills,” while the levers that really shape the future of work—performance and pay architecture, scheduling models, AI governance, who gets heard when systems misfire—remain elsewhere and off‑limits.

The posting treats “future of work” as something you can handle with better analytics, narratives, and programs layered on top of the existing scorecard, rather than as a reason to change the scorecard itself. Under those conditions, even a brilliant VP can only decorate the volcano.

Before we go any further, a moment of fairness. From what’s publicly visible - employee accounts, job postings for performance roles, and vendor case studies, Disney looks very much like a company running traditional performance machinery: annual reviews tied to merit increases, numeric scales where 5s are scarce, and formal processes owned in HR that are optimized for managing underperformance and documenting risk. That doesn’t make them uniquely bad; it makes them normal, It also means there’s no clear sign they’ve already done the hard work of redesigning the plumbing this VP will be expected to run the future through.

It’s possible Disney has already done some of that hard system redesign work and this role is the next, logical step. If that’s true, they’re keeping it very quiet. What is visible….foresight projects, talent programs, Aspire, engagement efforts….matches the classic selection/development/analytics playbook, not a fundamental rewiring of performance, promotion, scheduling, or AI governance. So I’m going to take the job description at face value and respond to it. On paper, this is a role asked to future-proof the workforce while the underlying systems still look like yesterday’s ideology and ways of working. That’s the mismatch I’m critiquing. Not the existence of the role, but the mis-scoping of the role. The decision to drop this role into an unchanged architecture and hope influence and optimism can do the rest.

If a company actually wanted this role to make a dent in reality, the description would have to move three things: what it owns, what it can slow or stop, and what changes when the person in the role says “no.”

A future-serious version of this role would still care about attraction, mobility and upskilling of the workforce….but those decisions come after the hard work of redesigning performance, promotion, scheduling, and AI governance. You design the environment first, then you build the pipeline for the environment you actually intend to run.

The VP would own or co-own the design of performance, promotion and selected compensation mechanisms and chair a cross-functional group that sets principles for any workforce-impacting AI and scheduling tools. They would have explicit authority to pause or send back people-system changes and AI deployments that contradict agreed workforce principles instead of being limited to “raising concerns” in the margins,. And finally if this office raises a red flag, decisions would have to move to a higher-stakes form and leaders would either change course or go on record explaining why they’re overriding the principles they claim to care about.

For those leaders who have made it this far, the question isn’t “do we have a future-of-work role yet?” it’s “have we changed the scorecard and the internal architecture enough that a role like this could ever be more than decoration?” And for all the Jonahs and Cassandras in the systems: if you keep feeling like you’re being asked to future-proof a machine no one will let you redesign, you’re not imagining it. That mismatch between what the role is being asked to deliver (structural future readiness) and how it’s positioned is not a fluke. It’s what you get after decades of teaching organizations that HR’s job is to run programs inside constraints set elsewhere, that the real non‑negotiables live in financial and operational scorecards, and that “the future” is something you talk about in slide decks rather than something you rebuild your core systems around.

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I was 12 the summer I first watched Pretty Woman. I was almost 40 when I finally understood the level of depth and nuance that movie contains, and the weird quirk of the movie that had both made me uncomfortable and made me love it.

There’s a fascinating inversion in that movie…..the kind of thing that feels like it was prevalent in the movies of 90’s but has disappeared. The character who is the obvious problem in that movie, at least by traditional standards, is the most moral person in the whole cast. Vivian may be a prostitute, but she has a clearer sense of right and wrong than the people who dress extraction up in suits and call it success.

The wrong person carries the shame in that movie. On the surface the moral conflict looks pretty obvious. Vivian is the problem to solve. Edward is the adult in the room who might be a workaholic but is otherwise superior. She’s a sex worker, he’s a businessman. She’s the one who needs rescuing, who needs a prince to save her, he’s the one whose life is on track.

But look deeper at Edward’s career. At one point, Edward explains his job: he buys companies in trouble, breaks them up, sells the pieces. “I don’t make anything,” he says, “I don’t build anything.” Vivian listens ans ays “So it’s sort of like stealing cars and selling them for parts, right?”

She nails it. She names the mechanism exactly.

The movie treats that like charming naiveté, like she’s adorably unsophisticated for making the comparison. But she isn’t wrong. She’s precise. She sees what he does and calls it what it is. And when you later find out that sometimes those “companies in trouble” are in trouble because of situations Edward and Edward’s company have manufactured…..well, she might have actually been too kind in her assessment.

Meanwhile she’s the one who is supposed to be morally compromised. The one “doing anything for a dollar.” But she’s the one with boundaries. She knows exactly what she’s selling and doesn’t pretend it’s something else She has rules: no kissing on the mouth, clear terms, cash up front. She is transactional, yes, but she’s honest about the transaction.

The story asks us to see him as sophisticated, worldly, a worthy hero who will help raise Vivian out of the morass of her moral failings. To see her assessment of his work as cute but wrong, even though it’s exactly right. That’s the pattern I didn’t have language for at twelve:

The person who names extraction accurately gets dismissed as naive.
The person DOING the extraction gets celebrated as strategic.

Edward isn’t neutral background or a generic hero, he’s a playbook for modern economics. For a long time I treated Edward’s job as vague cinematic wallpaper. He buys companies, he does deals, he goes to meetings and wears suits. Important adult business things happen and the movie doesn’t really ask you to understand the details explicitly. In fact they never even directly name his profession (even though at the time it was known as a corporate raider……a far more honest name that what we call it today.)

Watch it again, with modern, adult eyes. The pattern looks something like this:

• Find a company that’s functioning well enough to survive, but whose owners might be willing to sell given the right incentives

• Use other people’s money and risk tolerance to buy control

• Restructure the company so more cash can be pulled out, faster

• Exit before the long-term costs can fully land on the people who actually depend on the company

The buyer doesn’t invent the underlying product, he doesn’t run the day-to-day work, he doesn’t live in the neighborhoods whose economies are tied to that employer. His skills is knowing exactly where to slide the knife so the spreadsheet lights up and everyone at his altitude can call it a win.

If your scoreboard only cares about how much money the owners can pull out, of course this reads as sophistication, and strategy, and success.

If, however, your scoreboard includes the workers, their families, the town that lives or dies on whether those jobs exist…..well that looks a lot more like harm that we just decided to gloss over with kinder labels.

Edward only works as a plausible, defensible hero within a very specific frame, a core idea that underpins modern economic theory to the point that random kids on TikTok will cite it at you without ever knowing its origin: “a good company is one that increases what its owners can extract over time.” Or in the famous words of Friedman’s shareholder primacy theory, “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” A theory….and one that’s been widely shown to be flawed, but treated like inviolable fact.

Once you accept that frame, how the value gets created is a mere technical detail. Build something new or strip-mine what already exists, they both look the same on the profit chart.

In the late 80’s work like Edward’s was still often called what it was: corporate raiding. The word “raider” carries moral weight. Raiders take, pillage, destroy.

Over the following decades that label got an upgrade. The same basic behaviors were rebranded as “private equity.” A discreet, sophisticated, strategic sounding term that hides the violence, extraction, and harm. A term people could wear with pride…..smiling while they looted our systems.

That’s how legitimacy laundering works. Change the language, repeat it in enough prestigious places, and the behavior goes from morally questionable, to professionally neutral, to admirable. Once it’s taught in business schools and cited in case studies, challenging it doesn’t sound like offering an alternative hypothesis, it sounds like you don’t understand how markets work. Like you’re anti-capitalism.

Edward is a hero of that scoreboard and that storyline. He is doing exactly what that system calls responsible. The movie never has to explicitly say it. Vivian’s work is the one that we all have to wrestle with the morality of. The shame attached to each of their professions doesn’t match the ethics of their work, it matches what kinds of extraction we’ve been trained to treat as respectable.

You don’t have to live in finance for work like Edward’s to matter. That same playbook shows up in everyday places. The restaurants we go to that all taste the same now. The declining quality of the clothing we buy, even though the label matches one that used to be associated with superior craftsmanship. The phones and cars and appliances that fall apart due to shortcuts and planned obsolescence. All the thousands of ways private equity have found to minimize the cost of providing services while maximizing what they extract from customers.

Once you see the pattern, people like Edward stop just being “just a guy who wears expensive suits and does complicated deals.” He becomes a symbol of an entire class that reassigns risk to the public, pushes pain downward and asks us to applaud the cleverness at the top.

The part that’s living rent free in my head right now, that’s itching at my brain and screaming at me anytime I read any article on the economy or read about another M&A deal as companies “grow” through consolidation….

As individuals we are taught, we fundamentally KNOW that borrowing to gamble is irresponsible. If you carry debt or take big risks with borrowed money, you’re reckless and foolish and immoral. You should pay it down, be “debt free,” and stay that way.

In corporate life, we teach almost the exact opposite.

Use debt as “leverage.” Borrow heavily if you can earn more on your capital than you pay in interest. Squeeze the asset, boost the return, move on. It’s even advantageous to carry debt because the profit you pay taxes on is reduced by the interest on that debt, but the interest doesn’t count against you for the metric investors care about, EBITDA. So what if you’re reducing investment into communities. That’s just business.

On paper, the math works……as long as everything goes as planned, leverage amplifies returns. After all, you can always refinance. Therefore the risk looks manageable.

Morally, it’s a different question entirely. Borrow against the future, keep the upside, push much of the downside onto people who never agreed to the bet. Let’s just ignore how we had to bail companies out for this exact behavior in 2008. And now we’re letting them get even bigger.

In private life, taking big risks with borrowed money while someone else eats most of the loss would be understood and labelled as exploitation.

Put it in a suit, and it’s called being a high-performing capitalist.

Pretty Woman had this on screen the whole time…..most of us just didn’t know to look for it. Edward’s behavior is coded as sophisticated precisely because it’s hidden behind obscure rules and terms like “value creation” whereas Vivian’s behavior is a problem precisely because the transaction is too obvious.

That’s the split we live inside. Edward may have had his redemption arc, but the thing that never gets touched in that movie is the scoreboard itself. The definition of value stays intact. More for owners is good. It’s seen as a sacrifice that Edward keeps the company intact. A naive action he does because he’s swept up in a romantic moment.

We are surrounded by systems that make extraction look like successful adulthood, while insisting that naming the harm is childish, naive, or a sign you don’t “get” how business works. Stories like this don’t just entertain us, they train our reflexes.

Our job, is to notice where it’s happening. To notice whose comfort we protect, who we treat as morally superior and if that same behavior would be superior in a different context. Once you do that, you can do something deeply subversive and also beautifully simple…..you can stop treating that frame as truth, as weather, as just something that is and can’t be questioned. Start treating it as a choice somebody made, a definition that can be rewritten.

Start asking, out loud, whose nervous system pays the price for the version of value we are optimizing for.

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I normally start with writing…but today I’m going to start with promises, because this is a looooong one and I recognize the cognitive load I’m asking you to take on.

If you stay with me, I’m going to give you the language for what you’ve been feeling, the “it’s maybe not quite broken, but it’s definitely not working” fog and help you see why it’s not a personal weakness. You’ll walk away with a way to understand your own credibility in a system where “professionalism” is used to shut down truth. You’ll know the difference between a real constraint and something you can redesign. If you’re neurodivergent, or love someone who is, this will make a lot of your/their career make sense. You’ll understand how we got here, why it “suddenly” feels so bad, and what it looks like to keep your organizations from outsourcing their values and retake control over the decisions that are made at work. And you’ll be able to see what’s at stake as AI starts drafting our policies, performance language, and “best practices” for us: not just efficiency, but whether design choices get further hidden and solidified as truth without anyone’s permission.

The cost of NOT seeing these defaults isn’t confusion, it’s the erosion, the slow collapse, of trust, meaning, and self-belief. For leaders, the cost is transformation efforts that continue to lose momentum, decisions made in your name without your knowledge, and visions that never lead anywhere at all.

Mini Recap of My Journey

The first glimpse I had of defaults, as an embodied understanding long before my brain identified a name for them, wasn’t at work. It was at school. Specifically my son’s school. My son has Fragile X Syndrome (yeah you’ll probably have to google it, this essay is long enough). He was trying to exist inside a system built like a fluorescent-lit obstacle course. Schools are loud, rigid, evaluative, “standardized” for imaginary standard humans, weirdly proud of their own discomfort. The environment demands adaptation, contortions to get through the day and for those who aren’t quite twisty enough, well they get identified as a problem to solve. They don’t get treated as people in a mismatch, they get treated AS the mismatch.

IEP meetings are basically a crash course in how power hides. Everything is framed as “support” but the baseline assumption is the same: the system is fine, everything that needs changed is a favor to help your child who is the deviation. The accommodations are the exceptions you have to justify. That’s what defaults do when they’re fully integrated and naturalized: they stop looking like design and start looking like “reality” and “common sense.”

Once you’ve seen it in one place, you start noticing it everywhere. Corporate life has its own version of standardization. We call it “professionalism,” “executive presence,” “being strategic.” Communication norms, pace, meeting culture, unspoken rules about tone and presence are all treated as neutral, universal design and any “non-standard” needs get labeled as deviant or difficult. The system doesn’t have to defend itself, it just has to make “different” sound like “wrong.”

The Choice You Didn’t Know You Had

Defaults don’t just shape behavior, they shape what we’re allowed to call true. Somewhere in your organization is a setting you didn’t know existed.

Not a value or a strategy. Not a big, dramatic “we decided this at an offsite in Peru” kind of choice. A setting.

The kind you only notice when something feels….off. Like when your phone starts autocorrecting “fur” into “fir” as if you’re obsessed with deciduous trees and not talking about how much of a mess brushing your dog made. Or when your car’s lane assist runs up against a repaving project that has new paint layered over old and beeps at you while making the wheel feel like it’s trying to tug you over into a merger with the neighboring vehicle. You didn’t choose it. You don’t remember agreeing to it. You don’t even know where the menu is to change it. But you’re living with it.

That’s what defaults are like. They don’t announce themselves. They’re usually not even as obvious as the lane assist example. There isn’t a pros and cons list. They’re just the background conditions everyone has learned to navigate. Like weather. You don’t debate with weather, you dress for it. You complain about it, you build your day around it, but you don’t question its existence. It just is. A solid, dependable fact of the universe.

Lately defaults have become every closer to weather in our perception and further away from things like the lane assist that we might actually think to try to calibrate. They’re harder to see, harder to name, harder to even understand as chosen.

Why? It would be easy to say we all stopped thinking, got intellectually lazier, too busy, too tired, too overwhelmed by dashboards and Slack channels. But that’s not it. Defaults are harder to see because the decision points are increasingly buried inside black boxes we don’t see the inner workings of.

That black box part matters. That’s the part that steals the memory that this was ever a choice, and once choice disappears so does permission to change it. A default takes on the aura of untouchable fact of life when nobody can point to a human being and say “that was a choice you made.”

Humans adore plausible deniability….almost as much as we like snacks and videos of kittens. Humans are tired, overwhelmed and generally risk averse. And when a decision is buried in a vendor configuration, a benchmark touted by a consulting agency, an “industry standard,” or a policy we inherited from the prior leadership team, it becomes very easy to shrug and just call it reality.

No villain. No author. No accountability. Just…..weather.

When Defaults Recruit Their Own Enforcers

Here’s where it gets particularly nasty. Once a default has been naturalized….absorbed into “how things work”….questioning it isn’t treated as insight. It’s treated as immaturity.

The system doesn’t have to defend itself on the merits. It just has to downgrade the credibility of the person who is willing to name the problems. The conversation shifts from “is this system aligned with our stated values?” to “do you even belong in this conversation?”

That move devastates trust because it turns what should be a design question into a status contest. The person is forced to either back down or assimilate (okay, sure, I see, it’s just business.), or they can keep pushing and then they end up labeled difficult, unrealistic, or not leadership material. Either way, the default wins, and people quickly learn “don’t name what you see unless you’re prepared to carry the social cost of seeing it.”

That’s the silencing mechanism. No overt punishment. Plausible deniability wrapped in “professionalism” wrapped in a suit and an MBA. A soft, respectable way to tell someone “your clarity is inconvenient.”

The Neurodivergent Tax

I almost hesitated to include the section both because this is incredibly long, and also because it prompts immediate defensiveness amongst some of those who most need to understand this. So if you saw this an immediately rolled your eyes, sorry, I’m not the problem here.

If you’re neurodivergent, that “soft, respectable” enforcement doesn’t just feel like a cultural annoyance. I slightly itchy tag on a sweater than you can eventually mostly ignore. It feels like a wool sweater you’re allergic to that’s turning your entire torso into a fiery, itchy rash. But you don’t know you’re allergic or why you’re itchy. It’s a system that is constantly grading you on rules you were never given.

This is where the default story stops being abstract and becomes painfully literal. That same mechanism I described above, where defaults recruit social enforcement, lines up uncannily with what many neurodivergent people describe as masking or camouflaging at work. The daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, meeting-by-meeting, dreaded small talk need to suppress natural traits to be perceived as competent, safe, “easy,” and leadership-ready.

Tone. Eye-contact. Responsiveness. Facial expression. Small talk. The speed at which you reply. The way you structure an idea out loud. The amount of context you give. The amount you hold back. The number of exclamation points you add to prove you’re friendly, and the number you remove to prove you’re serious.

It may be labeled “professionalism” but in practice it’s just a whole slew of neurotypical defaults that never actually got labeled that way. And because they aren’t labeled and they’re accepted as “normal” the cost of maintaining them is individualized. If you can’t perform them naturally enough to pass, the system doesn’t say “oh, perhaps our norms are narrow.” The system says “you lack polish,” “you’re not strategic,” “you’re too intense,” “you’re too blunt,” “you’re not a culture fit,” and that vague damning statement “you don’t have executive presence.”

Lovely, plausible deniability ways of keeping the criticizer comfortable while saying “your way of being a person is inconvenient to our operating system.”

So our neurodivergent colleagues get two jobs. Their actual job. And the job of constantly translating themselves into the default. Smoothing edges, softening truths, performing approachability, calibrating intensity, managing sensory load, navigating rejection sensitivity, and recovering from the sheer cognitive effort of doing all of that while also being competent at their assigned job.

Based on what I disclosed about my son you probably knew immediately why this work mattered to me. But the second reason it matters, and the reason it’s included in here is because there’s a particularly cruel connection between neurodivergence and defaults.

The people who are best equipped to see defaults as constructed rather than natural are the same people most likely to be penalized for pointing at them. The people who notice that the stated value is collaboration but the reward system is individual, that the organization says “speak up” but punishes the WAY people speak. Those who notice when “psychological safety” is being used like a scented candle instead of a design principle.

All the social reinforcement we talked about above, piled on to someone who is already navigating the need to mask constantly. Now they’re not just masking traits. They’re masking perception, clarity and the part of them that screams “this doesn’t make sense” while knowing that raising their hand to ask a clarifying question will prompt an immediate eye-roll and knowing glances amongst the leadership who seem to be saying out loud “ugh, they always have to be the difficult one.”

Quick Recap: The Social Machinery of Defaults

Okay let’s pause for a second and process because your brain deserves a bit of time to chew on that.

Here’s what we know so far: Defaults are design choices that melt into the background, settings nobody remembers were a choice in the first place. Just weather to dress for, not anything you feel like you can change.

Defaults are harder to see now because decision points are buried in black boxes. Vendor configurations, industry standards, policies we inherited, code we can’t read and that makes them feel even more untouchable.

Once a default gets naturalized it recruits social reinforcement. This social reinforcement is particularly brutal for neurodivergent people, who are both more likely to see the default and also more likely to pay a high price socially for pointing it out.

That’s the social machinery. But that’s far from the only trick that makes defaults stick. They stick because we’ve built structural forces that make them feel inevitable. That’s what we will talk about next.

Structural Glue That Makes Defaults Extra Sticky

Defaults don’t just survive through social pressure. They survive because we’ve built an entire architecture around them that makes questioning them look irresponsible. It’s not that these forces are new, it’s that we’ve reached a tipping point where the social, organizational and cultural forces have converged. These aren’t abstract forces, they are concrete operational choices that get layered on top of each other until they form something that feels like bedrock. Like a natural law of physics. Like “just how business works.”

The Metric Spell

At some point we stopped treating measurement as a tool and started treating it as an authority. We ALL know the maxim “what gets measured gets managed. What gets managed gets rewarded.” The fascinating thing about metrics though is that they don’t just describe reality, they edit it. It was that discovery that had me diving gleefully down the rabbit hole of people analytics for a few years.

The minute you choose a metric, you choose a definition of success. The minute you build a dashboard, you solidify a theory of what matters. The minute you adopt a performance rating scale, you choose a philosophy of human worth at work. Those are worldview-level decision, but they’re presented as operational…..and all too often adopted with far less scrutiny than they deserve. This is where best practices and benchmarks and templates are little default petri dishes. But because metrics feel objective, those worldview decisions don’t even register on most people’s radar. And they very quickly stop reading as anyone’s “choice” and adopt a costume of “the truth.” Dashboards, ratings, numbers that teach people day by day what to take seriously.

You say “we value collaboration.” You include it in your job descriptions, you talk about it in town halls, you brag about it in Forbes. But you measure individual output. Then you reward people with the highest personal numbers. Then you find yourself surprised when collaboration becomes a decorative nice-to-have but not at all what happens when things are tense or stressed. Nobody lied. Nobody held an evil meeting. The measurement just taught people what they needed to do to be rewarded.

This is how values die in perfectly reasonable ways. They don’t get attacked. They get outvoted by the mundane, the measurable, the things that fit cleanly into a cell in spreadsheet. The things we have an industry standard formula to calculate.

The Meta-Metrics

Here’s where it gets particularly sneaky. There’s a specific set of metrics that have become a meta-default….that is, a default about what even counts as legitimate work in the first place. Revenue per employee, labor cost as a percentage of revenue, output per hour, utilization rates….these efficiency metrics promise to show who’s being “responsible” with resources and “disciplined” with headcount.

But these metrics that define what work counts are a large part of the reason that work to notice defaults has become even harder to do. Once these numbers become the scoreboard, they’ve redefined what work is real. Time spent closing tickets, shipping features, or generating revenue shows up as productivity. Time spent rethinking a brittle approval path, redesigning a performance framework, or questioning whether a metric is undermining a core value shows up as overhead, but the payoff may never appear in an attributable way on a dashboard at all. Compound that with the fact that those payroll dollars will inevitably hit operating expenses and impact EBITDA and it becomes extremely obvious why this work isn’t talked about.

Inside that world “do more with less” stops being a slogan and becomes a full on epistemic framework. The work that improves the efficiency metrics is treated as real. The work that questions the defaults underneath those inputs, that focuses on long-term stability instead of short-term quarterly growth is treated as optional, risky, or indulgent……or in modern parlance, wasteful.

This is why default redesign never makes it onto a priority list. The very metrics leaders rely on to prove they’re responsible and to justify their bonuses, are the same metrics that make it look irresponsible to pause and invest in changing the systems…..even when those systems are making choices in their name and even when those systems often get in the way of extremely expensive transformation projects.

Automation and Black Boxes

A lot of defaults shaping organizational life are now embedded in technology. Scheduling, work allocation, performance flags, eligibility logic, workflow nudges, approval hierarchies, hiring filters, productivity scoring….these are not neutral pipes though. They encode a worldview just like the metric choices.

When a policy lives in a binder its a bit easier to argue with. When it lives in code, you may not even know WHY you’re required to do something, and changing it feels significantly more difficult. Even when you know it exists, you may not be able to see how it works so you feel the consequences, without being able to locate the logic.

Now you have a new kind of authority deferral. “It’s not me, it’s the system” becomes both a shield and a confession. Platforms feel inevitable, tools feel neutral, and the defaults embedded in them have a much easier time masquerading as reality.

You can negotiate with a policy, even if it eats up social capital. You can’t negotiate with a black box. (Side note, if you’re looking for a fantastic, incredibly dense but worth it, read, Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine is one to add to your list.)

Procurement as Philosophy: Defaults Arrive Pre-blessed as “Standard”

We import so much of our organizational life now. Tools, templates, best practices, vendor configurations, consultant frameworks, it’s endless. In doing so we import assumptions about people. Assumptions about what motivates them, what fairness means, what risk looks like, what performance is, what is good work. And we rarely notice it as ideology. It arrives wearing the package of convenience, efficiency…..as “not reinventing the wheel.” But industry standard is not neutral, it’s a worldview with a purchase order.

This is another way you get organizations who claim to value growth but run a performance system designed for risk control. You get cultures that claim to value psychological safety but operate through surveillance logic. You get leaders who sincerely want something better, but whose machinery teaches something else.

Your systems and processes are how you keep your promises. If you outsource your systems without interrogating the worldview they encode, you don’t just outsource work, you outsource your promises. And then you wonder why people don’t believe you when you talk. Why looking in the mirror feels vaguely dangerous. Why some mornings you have to sit in the parking lot in your car and give yourself a pep-talk to make it through your part of the town hall presentation. Why you feel like you’re required to choose between career progression and your own values. But that’s an article for a different day.

Speed Culture: Urgency Turns Defaults Into Survival Tools

If the first thought you had when you read the section above was, “oh my lord who has time for this?!” congratulations, you’ve already felt this next structural support that makes defaults sticky. When everything is urgent of course you use templates, rely on identified best practices, and cling to the familiar. Not because it’s better, but because it’s defensible. If you adopt the standard, you can always say “it’s what everyone does.” Pretty much the organizational version of hiding behind your more outgoing friend at a party.

Questioning defaults slows things down. It adds friction. As previously noted, it takes time, effort, energy and attention away from work that “counts.” If you’ve managed to survive your time in corporate culture without once being told “we are building the plane while we’re flying it” then congratulations you might have found a true unicorn amongst all the horses with carrots strapped on their heads.

The Broader Cultural Forces

We just covered some of the individual organizational forces that keep defaults hidden while making us less likely to ever do the work to notice that they exist or dig them out.

But there are also so forces at work in our larger culture that have made the problem significantly worse as well. In this essay I’m going to specifically focus on those related to education because they are the forces that have made this work more difficult for us to see. There are multiple financial and political forces that reinforce the social and organizational trends I noted above, but even my brain is ready to tip over and sleep so I’m going to save them. Just keep it in the back of your mind that this is far from all.

The ROI Reflex

The first of the cultural shifts that has actively undermined our ability to see defaults in the first place is that we have increasingly taught people to think of everything, including education, as an investment calculation.

Over the past forty to fifty years, the way higher education is structured and financed shifted so that college is treated less like a public investment and more like a personal financial product that individuals are expected to buy on credit. If you’re under the age of 50, chances are student loans were just part of the deal for education, the concept of being able to work while you went to school and just pay for everything might be something your parents talked about, but the cost of education was well out of reach for that to be a reality by the time you went to college. Let’s walk you through the history a bit.

As higher education became more common, employers started requiring degrees, even for jobs that hadn’t fundamentally changed, turning credentials into mandatory gate passes. Concurrently, governments and institutions shifted more and more of the costs on to individuals, who borrowed heavily to pay for what was now being framed as a personal investment in future earnings.

The result? Education stops being about learning to think and starts being about calculating returns. Students carrying tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt don’t have the luxury of asking “what should I study to understand the world?” They ask, “what will pay off these loans the fastest?” When your economic survival depends on that degree “working,” you don’t question whether the system makes sense, you optimize within it.

Okay great, but what does that have to do with defaults being harder to see? The fields that explicitly teach people to recognize frames AS frames, to question what counts as “natural” or “true,” to spot hidden assumptions….fields like philosophy, critical theory, history, the humanities, get labelled as “bad ROI.” As impractical. As luxuries you can’t afford when you’re going to be carrying debt to pay for that education. You’ve definitely heard jokes about people with liberal arts degrees flipping burgers at McDonald’s. Those jokes are the evidence of these ideas as core level “common sense.”

So the exact disciplines that train the capacity to notice defaults get systematically devalued and deprioritized. Students are nudged away from them. Institutions cut or shrink these programs. Additionally students become increasingly focused on courses only within their specific domain. Cross-domain learning also shrinks. The cultural message is clear: learning to see systems doesn’t matter. Learning to question frameworks is self-indulgent. Ivory tower nonsense not for people who have to operate in “the real world.” The “smart” choice is to accept the categories the market currently rewards and train yourself to fit them. Leave the rest for the impractical people with their head in the clouds.

Once you’re trained into that posture, once you’re managing yourself and your education like a portfolio, treating every choice as an investment decision, calculating risk and return on everything from what you major in to when and if you rest, you stop asking “does this frame make sense” and you ask “how do I win within the frame?”

That’s one of the most powerful default-blinding forces we experience. A default doesn’t HAVE to be hidden if you’re already oriented towards compliance. If you’re already living and thinking inside a logical world where success is “making smart investments and minimizing risk,” then challenging the frame is difficult to view as anything other than naive. Questioning the system starts to sound like refusing to be a functional adult.

You see it everywhere in how we talk about work. Saying “I want work that feels aligned and humane” seems like childish rebellion. People don’t say “this policy undermines trust” they say “how do we realistically manage the messaging?” The don’t say “our design causes harm” they say “that’s just business.”

It’s tempting to think it’s just because humans are cold and selfish creatures. But that’s simply not true. Humans have to cut off their own humanity to survive in these systems. We see it in the burnout and the breakdowns. It’s because the FRAME is incredibly strong, and it got strong partly because we made the disciplines that teach you how to see them and think about them economically dangerous to pursue.

Once you’ve internalized investment logic, you begin to experience values as optional add-ons. Nice to have when things are going right, luxuries to cut back on when the numbers get tight. And that capacity to step back and pause, to say “wait, who decided we’d measure it this way?” or “what assumptions are baked into this policy?” starts to feel inefficient, effort you can’t afford - both financially and in terms of your credibility in a room full of people who’ve also learned to call questioning “impractical.”

It’s zero surprise that employees react with cynicism when we talk about purpose and our mission. You can’t run a moral story on top of an ROI-driven system without it glitching. People feel the contradiction.

The Credential Trap

Degree inflation is where the ROI trap and organizational defaults lock together into a particularly vicious partnership.

Watch the progression. A credential becomes a proxy for competence > the proxy becomes a requirement because it’s a convenient screening tool > people stop questioning whether the requirement is REAL. Suddenly the degree isn’t just a piece of paper, it’s legitimacy. Proof you belong and a mandatory ticket to get through the gate.

The tricky part is how quickly this gets narrated as “raising standards” even when the actual work hasn’t fundamentally changed. We’ve seen this in our lifetimes. In the 90’s and early 2000’s middle-skill jobs (supervisors, technicians, administrative roles) started requiring bachelor’s degrees in job postings even though the majority of the people already doing the jobs successfully didn’t have degrees. It also happened for roles that already required a bachelor’s degree. Pharmacists required a doctoral level degree rather than a bachelor’s, physical therapists are another example. The credential requirement grew while the complexity of the work really didn’t.

Why do employers do it? It’s a cheap, fairly defensible screening mechanism. They offload training costs on to individuals and schools. The can assume candidates already have self-funded a baseline of skills. It’s efficient and the costs are exported to the worker which means that it’s not hitting the bottom line of the organization.

So now you have a system where degrees are mandatory to be considered for roles that didn’t used to require them, degrees are expensive and funded primarily by individuals, the degree must be financed with loans, and those loans mean education decisions are logically based on salary projections.

Using degrees as a proxy for skill is not neutral. It is easier if you have stability, family support, insider knowledge on how to navigate higher ed without falling into predatory programs. When a degree becomes the default filter for roles that could be learned through training or apprenticeship it’s not just an HR preference, it’s a design decision about who gets to participate in middle-class work.

And over time that design decision gets absorbed into “common sense” and exported everywhere. Talent pipelines are sorted by credentials, leadership readiness assessments include credentials, access is sorted by credentials. We stop asking “what conditions help people do great work?” and start asking, “who has the right ticket?” Side note, this is coming back to bite us right now because the skills that are required right now aren’t yet being taught in schools, and because organizations have abdicated their responsibility for measuring things like curiosity and learning agility, they’re poorly positioned to even know who in the organization can and should be trained.

There’s one final little loop here. The people most harmed by the system, those who can’t afford the credential or took on debt for it and now feel trapped by repayment, are the least positioned to question it. Outsiders, people new to a system are the most likely to ask “why” questions, but because credentials serve as a proxy for credibility, those questions from those without credentials or lower credentials are more likely to be dismissed as that person not understanding “how the world works.” And goodness knows those people can’t question the need for a credential in the first place, that just looks like making excuses for not having one.

So credentialism doesn’t just gatekeep opportunity, it gatekeeps the ability to even question the gate.

Legitimacy Laundering: When Repetition Turns a Worldview into “Common Sense”

This is the big one. Context-bound, contested ideas….theories….get repeated by someone important enough or in the right institutions and they harden into “how the world works.” Normative choices become managerial physics and once that frame is canonized disagreement stops looking like an alternative hypothesis and starts looking like ignorance and incompetence.

Let me show you how this works with a specific example that has shaped decades of organizational life: Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy doctrine. In 1970, Friedman wrote that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, but he explicitly conditioned this on firms obeying "the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom." He was writing into a world with stronger unions, more progressive taxation, robust antitrust enforcement, and tighter regulation.

That context matters because it shows why his ideas weren’t immediately proven flawed.

Business schools took Friedman’s context-dependent argument and every person who took any business course learned that the only reponsibility of business is to increase its profits. Full stop. The conditionality disappeared. The historical moment vanished. MBA programs canonized “maximize shareholder value” as the core purpose of the firm—not as one theory among many, but as the baseline against which everything else had to justify itself.

Students learned it in week one of corporate finance. It showed up in strategy frameworks. It became the lens through which “good management” was defined. And because it was taught as foundational truth rather than as a contestable hypothesis from a specific moment in time, it stopped feeling like a choice.

Meanwhile, the world Friedman was writing into got dismantled. Unions weakened. Progressive taxation eroded. Regulations were stripped back. The safety net frayed. Corporate political power grew. All the things that made his narrow corporate focus “work” in 1970 were methodically removed—often by people citing Friedman as justification.

So you ended up with a framework designed for a world with strong external constraints, now operating in a world where those constraints had been gutted. And instead of updating the theory when the conditions changed, business education doubled down. Shareholder primacy became more entrenched, not less. Jack Welch turned it into a playbook. Business schools kept teaching it. Consultants spread it. It became “how the world works.” Indoctrination so strong that it resists even catastrophic evidence to the contrary. More like a cult than science at this point.

Want evidence? When the 2008 financial crisis revealed the disastrous consequences of that framework, when taxpayers had to bail out firms that had been run exactly according to the “maximize shareholder value” gospel, the response wasn’t to question the doctrine. It was to treat the crisis as an unfortunate anomaly and go right back to teaching the same map.

Today, S&P 500 companies are setting all-time records for stock buybacks. Executive pay is still overwhelmingly tied to short-term stock performance. Business schools are still centering shareholder value in their curricula, with stakeholder approaches relegated to electives. The buybacks that divert money from wages, R&D, and resilience into engineered stock price support? Those get celebrated as “returning value to shareholders.” We’ve had over a million layoffs in the U.S. this year, often at companies posting record profits.

The doctrine that helped create the conditions for systemic collapse is still being taught as the responsible, adult way to run a company.

That’s legitimacy laundering. A context-bound idea from 1970 got repeated so many times, in so many prestigious places, that it stopped reading as “Friedman’s theory” and started reading as “how business works.” Questioning it doesn’t sound like intellectual inquiry. It sounds like you don’t understand capitalism.

That’s the trick. Legitimacy laundering doesn’t just make defaults invisible, it makes challenging them socially expensive. It turns critique into a credibility risk. This pattern is everywhere in corporate America. Performance management, hiring practices, organizational design….a decision gets made in a specific context, gets copied, gets taught, then it’s benchmarked and labelled “best practice” and somewhere in that repetition it stops being a choice and starts being common sense. Legitimacy, once established, is incredibly hard to dislodge….even when the outcomes are demonstrably harmful.

Why This Is Particularly Urgent

You knew we weren’t going to end 2025 without this circling around to AI. We’ve spent decades building systems that hide their authorship. And then we built a machine that is very, very good at making authored things sound like they are natural law.

LLMs don’t “think” their way out of frame, or notice the frame at all. They learn the frame by compressing patterns into human language and then giving those patterns right back to us with the kind of soothing confidence that makes it feel even more like an unquestionable reality.

Which means whatever has dominated the prior forty years of managerial writing and decision-making….ROI brain, metric worship, narrow ideas of value and productivity, “professionalism” as social policing, will tend to come back to us as the default continuation. Not because the model is evil, but because the model is obedient.

It’s a remix engine, autocomplete on steroids. It’s a reduction of our textual past, boiled down until it’s concentrated. And when you feed it a culture that has been training people to treat certain assumptions as maturity, it will soak up those assumptions, reproduce them, smooth them out and make them feel inevitable.

LLMs don’t have to be right, they just have to appear right. They have to be defensible.

The danger in that is that the smoother the output is, the harder it is to see the seams, the harder it is to pick apart. A human telling you “this is how business works” is much easier to argue with. AI won’t just obscure our defaults, it can turn inherited frameworks into polished “best practice” at scale and on demand.

That polish is so seductive too. Answers at the tips of our fingers, answers we are assured are the compilation of the best of human thinking. No need to question, no need to second guess or use our exhausted brains.

The model doesn’t just give you content, it gives you a feeling. “Someone competent has already sorted this for me.” The inherent problem is that it’s always wrong, but that it’s often plausible enough to lower your skepticism. If you already live in a culture that treats metrics as truth and professionalism as morality, then an AI system that speaks in polished, confident managerial dialect is going to feel like authority.

If AI becomes the first draft of your policies, your performance narratives, your competency models, your job descriptions, your training modules, your leadership messaging…then the organization’s operating system becomes even more likely to converge on the same polished, metric-friendly, defensible worldview.

And then it gets harder to tell where the organization ends and the template begins. Harder to tell which parts were deliberate. Harder to tell which parts are just the model handing you the past as “best practice.” Which means the social enforcement loop tightens: You aren't arguing with your manager's opinion anymore. You're arguing with the machine that sounds like the corporate universe.

So yes, this work is urgent now. Not because we're about to miss some shiny tech moment, but because we're about to further degrade our ability to tell the difference between a choice and a law of nature.

Okay, I Care….Why Should My Leader?

If you’ve ever been in an organization in the midst of a transformation initiative that started with energy and alignment only to watch it lose momentum and revert to “how we’ve always done things” you’ve felt defaults at work. Transformation initiatives cost a fortune and most of them fail.

Why? We usually blame it on the people. Defensiveness, lack of buy-in, lack of understanding, “resistance.” And that happens. But even when you have competent change management, even when the people are cared for, this work still gets stuck. It’s because the vision has to get translated through existing systems. The approval processes, metrics, performance templates, budget cycles, the everyday of how work gets done, and by the time the people doing the work are interacting with the vision, the vision has been reinterpreted back into something that works within the old patterns. After all, surely you didn’t mean collaboration that requires us to change our performance management system, or you would have told us to change our performance management system.

You think you have an execution problem or a communication problem, but you actually have a default problem. All of those systems are embedded with assumptions about what matters, what’s risky, what success looks like, who deserves resources, and who can speak up if something is going wrong. And unless you surface and redesign those assumptions, they will translate that lovely vision right back into whatever the system was originally optimized for.

This is why transformation efforts feel exhausting. It’s not just leading change, it’s fighting an invisible architecture that’s making thousands of micro-decisions against the stated direction every single day. Your approval process is still designed for control even though you said you wanted speed and innovation. Your performance management system is still optimized for payroll predictability even though you said you wanted growth. Your hiring rubric is still filtering for the same profile even though you’re trying to build diversity. Your metrics are still measuring and rewarding call length even though you’ve said you want to build customer relationships.

Because these systems are “the way it’s always been done” nobody thinks to flag them as a problem. The system gets to stay invisible while the transformation dies the death of a thousand translations. If leaders want their vision to survive contact with reality, they have to start caring about defaults. This isn’t soft culture work, it’s the infrastructure of execution. Your systems and processes are how you keep your promises and if you’ve outsourced them, you’ve outsourced your ability to lead.

What Do We Do With This?

A checklist can’t fix a world designed to hide its decision points, but I do think there are a few moves worth naming as acts of reclamation.

Begin to treat this is just how it works as a clue phrase. Not an accusation, a signal flare. A moment to pause and ask, what is being treated as natural here? Who benefits from it being treated as natural? What would it cost to admit this is a choice? What could we do if this was something we could change?

Build default literacy. Talk about the existence of defaults. Teach the ability to look at a system and see what it rewards, what it punishes, what it assumes about humans, what it makes easy and what it makes socially costly. Practice asking the question “If we didn’t choose this on purpose, why are we defending it so fiercely?” Be ready for this to be extremely hard, organizations are very practiced at avoiding that question.

It’s easier to talk about engagement than to admit we’ve designed systems that teach people not to trust. It’s easier to talk about resilience than to admit that for many people, work has become chronic threat exposure. It’s easier to demand adaptability than to ask whether the change itself is coherent, honest, or humane.

Going Forward

The work here is reclaiming authorship through mundane decisions. The unglamorous work of finding the settings menu. The courage to say out loud “this isn’t weather, this is a choice we’ve been living under.”

Once you acknowledge that it’s a choice, the question that becomes unavoidable is “what else have we been living under without our own consent?” Once you begin to ask that question, you start noticing all kinds of things you were trained to call normal. You start noticing where credibility gets assigned, who gets to be blunt and still be called decisive instead of abrasive, who gets to ask why and be labelled strategic instead of naive. Who gets to be different and still be considered leadership material, who gets supported vs who gets told to “level up.”

You’ll likely also stumble across the giant pool of grief roiling under the surface of this work. The grief of people who came into work wanting to do good work, to be useful, to build something, to belong….only to slowly learn that the operating system does not actually reward the values it advertises.

We’ve felt the turmoil of living in a system that rewards compliance, similarity, assimilation, the performance of being unbothered by things that should bother you. And when that’s the weather you can live inside it for a while. You can dress for it, make jokes about it, develop coping mechanisms. But at some point you either stop believing in the hype, or you stop believing in yourself.

This is so much more than “fixing culture.” It’s the infinitely harder and yet simpler work of deciding that in your organization, your sphere of influence, in the systems you touch, you’re going to be the author instead of the tenant. That you’re going to start treating “this is how it works” as a question instead of an answer. That you’re going to build and be part of organizations where the truth doesn’t cost people their credibility, their energy, their sense of self. Where people can do good work without having to become someone else to survive it. That’s what’s on the other side of this. Not perfection, not even ease.

The restoration of your relationship with truth, the small, daily practice of being able to name what you see without that voice in your head calculating the social cost. The freedom to say “this doesn’t make sense” and have it be treated as valuable data instead of a character flaw. The ability to look in the mirror and recognize yourself.

And maybe most importantly it’s the reclamation of human creativity and judgment. When you don’t have to spend all your energy optimizing within broken defaults or performing compliance in systems that don’t make sense, you get your brain back. You get to use it for the thing it’s actually good at: noticing patterns, making connections, imagining alternatives, building something new.

After decades of surviving inside systems that have asked us to choose between being honest and being safe, the possibility of building something that doesn’t require that is worth the work.

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We see a series of deeply connected patterns from multiple angles. A collapse in trust, a steady rise in constant small layoffs, a slow-motion RTO driven by fear rather than preference, and job seekers lowering their standards in a tightening market. These are symptoms of a system that has become unstable….and employees who no longer know what to hold onto.

That instability leaves a mark. Before we can talk about what the trends mean, you have to understand what instability does to the human nervous system.

Waves of Layoffs

Layoffs aren’t a single-impact event. You don’t survive, breathe a sigh of relief and then move on. The grief, anger, relief, guilt are processed repeatedly. The small, ordinary moments that catch you off guard with a quick stab of emotion. Reminders built into your everyday existence that the ground is shifting, even if the walls of the office might look the same.

It hits when you open your calendar and see a recurring meeting someone who was cut used to run. When you open a file and their name is listed as the author, when you’re suddenly the one sending updates to stakeholders they used to manage you feel a twinge. When you take on the work they left behind, you realize how much they were holding. When an old joke pops up in the team chat…..the kind that used to get a whole string of emoji reactions…..and now it just sits there, like a suspended artifact of a culture that used to exist. The ghost of Teams past.

Layoffs ripple They echo. They leave absences you trip over for months.

Now compound it by making it an ongoing series of layoffs……continually forcing people to process new grief, new losses, new insecurity. Week after week, month after month, colleague after colleague…..you’re no longer recovering from a single event. You’re living inside a permanent, extremely damaging pattern.

A system that won’t let your wounds heal.

Two Trends, One Story

I’m going to focus on the first two trends in the report. Glassdoor talks about these two trends like they are separate.

• Trend 1: Employees no longer trust leadership

• Trend 2: The rise of constant small layoffs

On the surface, it’s easy enough to see the connection between these two things, even if it might feel a bit loose. Constant instability doesn’t create trust. But we’ve been in high change environments for decades at this point. What else is going on?

Instability isn’t new. Layoffs aren’t new. Corporate contradictions aren’t new. What is new is the accumulation….the sheer density of threat, uncertainty, and narrative whiplash people have lived through since 2020.

A Timeline of Corporate Narratives

Let’s refresh ourselves on the history of the prior five years.

2020-2021:
”You matter.”
”We’re prioritizing wellbeing.”
”We couldn’t do this without you.”
”You are essential.”
And people believed those words. Employers seemed to authentically mean them.

2021-2022:
"We care about flexibility, growth and belonging.”
"Employees deserve to be paid for their contribution.”
”We are an employee-driven organization.”
This was the employment marketing hey day. External employer-brand investments spike in a tight labor market. The belonging campaigns. The great promises.

2022-2024:
”Actually we need you back in the office.”
”We’re tightening budgets.”
”We’re restructuring to increase efficiency and enable greater scale.”
”This layoff isn’t about performance, we deeply regret the need for this and care about our people.”
This was the quiet walk-back of every public commitment.

2025:
”Layoffs are the way we prune overgrowth”
”We have increased our already record-breaking profits by reducing labor budgets.”
”We are replacing employees with AI.”
And now the mask is gone and leaders are fully embracing layoffs as strategy rather than a source of shame.

In the past three years employees have lived with rolling layoffs, strategic realignments, economic messaging swinging between “looming recession” and “resilient economy” depending on which analyst was on camera.

People can handle change. What they can’t handle is contradiction wihtouth acknowledgment. And the modern workplace is a system full of contradictions that are whispered in stair wells and never ever spoken out loud for fear of being labelled negative, disloyal, or resistant to change.

You can’t ask people to believe they are valued while repeatedly showing them they are expendable. That’s the heart of Trend 1, and Trend 2 contributes to that experience directly. And quietly backing both of them up…..the slow-motion RTO and a labor market so broken that job seekers are accepting roles they would have once rejected.

Instability has become the dominant workplace experience. And when instability goes unacknowledged, or worse when leaders pretend its not a problem, trust collapses right along with it.

The Neuroscience

If you take nothing else from this analysis, you should understand that the human reaction to instability is not a mindset problem, it is a physiological event.

The human nervous system is built to handle spikes of stress, even intense ones, as long as there is recovery and coherence (meaning) on the other side.

We are not built for chronic, unpredictable, contradictory signals…..particularly when they come from the very place responsible for our financial survival. That combination gets the threat labelled as existential.

Here’s what’s actually happening in our brains:

• Unpredictability keeps the amygdala on alert. And when your body never gets the signal that it’s safe, your whole system stops resetting the way it’s supposed to after a threat passes. Over time, this kind of chronic vigilance floods the body with stress hormones meant for short bursts, not months or years. The nervous system starts conserving energy in all the wrong places dampening creativity and attention. Blood flow shifts away from long-term systems like digestion, immunity, and cellular repair. You become more inflamed, more fatigued, more reactive and less resilient.

  One layoff is an acute event. Ten small layoffs across three years is chronic stress, chronic vigilance, chronic physiological strain. It keeps the body braced and oriented towards survival. A workplace operating in chronic vigilance cannot be a high-performing workplace. It can’t be a trusting workplace. And it cannot be a learning workplace.

• Polyvagal theory helps explain why constant contradiction in the workplace feels so destabilizing. We’ve established that the nervous system reads predictability as a sign of safety. One of the cues for predictability is coherence. Coherence is the basic alignment bewteen the signals people receive: Do the words match the actions? Do the values match the decisions? Does the story match the lived experience?

  When the inputs don’t line up the body treats the mismatch as danger. Incoherence means you cannot reliably predict what will happen next.

  And if you cannot predict the environment, you must minimize the risks you take within it. This means you can’t innovate because that requires taking risks.

  When what leadership says and what the system does fail to match, people don’t just experience disappointment, they experience destabilization. The moment the environment becomes unpredictable, the body shifts out of collaboration and into self-protection.

This is the key to understanding why Trend 1 and Trend 2 aren’t just correlated. They are causally, physiologically intertwined. Trend 2 in combination with the mixed messaging from leaders floods the employees’ system with signals of unpredictability and Trend 1 is the logical response.

The human mind is built to anchor safety in predictability, coherence, identity, and belonging…..and the modern workplace has dismantled all four.

Why Even Cynical Leaders Should Care

This is the part that should make every executive sit up and pay attention;

Trust is becoming a competitive advantage at the exact moment most organizations are actively eroding it.

We are entering an era where nothing about work is stable:

• roles are shifting under the pressure of AI

• skill demands are changing faster than learning systems can adapt

• market signals are contradictory

• teams are reorganizing constantly

• headcount expands and contracts on erratic cycles

• economic outlooks flip weekly

Leaders cannot predict the next quarter, let alone the next two years. But here’s what they can predict:

They are going to NEED their people to do things machines cannot do.

They will need:

• creativity

• relational intelligence

• cross-functional sensemaking

• problem-solving without clear precedent

• innovation in ambiguous envirnoments

• collaboration across distributed teams

• emotional steadiness in the face of volatility

• learning agility (defined as the ability to learn when you don’t have a clear path forward)

• commitment rooted in something deeper than a job description.

And those capacities, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, rely on TRUST.

Not perks, not policies, not performance frameworks, not branding language……trust.

You cannot get creativity from a nervous system stuck in vigilance. You cannot get collaboration from people scanning for threat. You cannot get innovation from teams bracing for the next “strategic realignment” while knowing they can’t believe their leaders’ reassurances that this time it’s different. You cannot get honesty from employees who have seen leaders contradict every value statement on the wall. You cannot get adaptability from people who don’t feel safe enough to take interpersonal risks.

Organizations are about to need their people more than ever. Not as interchangeable cogs. But as relationally attached, psychologically resourced, meaning-driven humans who can move through complexity with one another.

And that kind of relational attachment…..the kind that keeps teams stable through ambiguity, only forms in environments where trust is consistently nurtured and reinforced.

What we are seeing in the data shown in Trend 1 of that report is the evidence that organizations are destabilizing the very capacities companies will need to survive the next decade.

What The Future Demands

Values are not meant to be the nice ideas that survive only when conditions are perfect.
They are the things you hold steady when conditions most test you.

But the past three years have sent a different message:

• That values are optional.

• That promises have escape hatches.

• That principles bend when pressure arrives.

• That the moment things get difficult, the story changes.

And nothing erodes trust faster than learning that the things you were told were foundational are actually provisional.

Here’s the irony — and the leadership blind spot:

This is happening at the exact moment organizations most need their people anchored in something deeper than a job description.

Because the rest of the landscape is already unstable. AI is reshaping identities, roles are dissolving and reforming, skills demands are shifting monthly, and the future of work feels like a moving target.

In that kind of environment, people don’t attach to tasks, they attach to truths. To beliefs. To leaders who say what they mean and mean what they say. To values that don’t evaporate the moment they become inconvenient. Because all of those things drive meaning. Humans crave meaning during times of instability.

Trust is not a “nice to have” in the next era of work. It is the infrastructure that makes every other form of performance possible.

Your sensemakers, connectors, creators, meaning-makers….your humans who can do what machines can’t are only able to give you their best work when they feel safe.

If you erode trust in an era defined by uncertainty, you aren’t managing risk, you are manufacturing it.

And no strategy, AI tool, RTO mandate, or branding campaign will save you from that. Repairing trust isn’t optional anymore. It’s the only future-proofing we have left.

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Performance management is one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon and what I will be using to walk you through to help you recognize these hidden defaults that continuously get in the way of the visions our leaders have for our organizations.

In case you missed it, I recently posted an extensive argument that most HR data isn’t bad because it’s fundamentally wrong, it’s bad because it was never built for what we’re asking it to do. If you’ve forgotten you can refresh your memory here:

We treat performance management as a system designed to help people grow and navigate their careers with our organization. But that system was built to help reconcile payroll, keep budgets manageable year over year, and mitigate bias claims. The architecture itself (tables, rules, and workflows) was never intended to capture growth. It was built to control cost. And you can feel the distortion in every tidy rating curve that pretends to measure performance while flattening the human truth.

We’re going to introduce Fake Corp today. Fake Corp proudly declares growth as a core value….growth for the company, its people, communities, and customers. It’s painted on the wall (a truly lovely mural right in the lobby), printed on coffee mugs, proudly included in onboarding decks, and prominently explained on the recruiting website in the “about our culture” section.

Now let’s look at their performance process. The mechanics are pretty standard….. “best practice” even. Every year Fake Corp goes through the same cycle of rituals. Managers and employees enter their goals into a form. They check in together at mid-year. At the end of year ratings are assigned 3’s for meets expectations, 4’s for exceeds, 5’s for greatly exceeds. Any 1’s or 2’s are already on a performance improvement plan so there’s no surprises there.

Managers meet together with Directors, Directors meet with VPs and VPs work with their HRBPs to “calibrate” the ratings…..making sure managers aren’t assigning too many 4’s or 5’s after all, surely SOMEONE must be an average 3?

Just in time for merit budgets the ratings begin to line up into a lovely bell curve. Compensation reviews open, dashboards update, and the fiscal year rolls over with reassuring precision. It looks clean, organized, and objective.

And it’s all, every single bit of it, payroll discipline wrapped in theater.

The actors know their lines by heart. Managers rehearse phrases like “demonstrated consistent performance” and prepare to explain that “greatly exceeds expectations” is only awarded to less than 2% of the employee population and certainly not in the first year or two within a role.

Employees practice how to sound grateful for a 3 while shoving the resentment that a 3% raise in an environment of 8% inflation is essentially a 5% pay cut even when they met ALL of their goals and then some.

The process tells them this is “fairness.” That sameness is the shape of equity. That calibration is a sign of rigor rather than the admission that leadership doesn’t trust managers to differentiate or defend their own managers. Employees learn the lesson that to be a manager is to be a powerless mouthpiece. Loyalty to the company line is the cost of admission to the bonus eligible, and even the best managers will never be able to truly take care of their star performers.

You might recognize this story, you might feel a bit sick to your stomach right now. That’s because this is, as I said before, a VERY common way of designing performance management. And this, this “best practice” is quietly undermining Fake Corp’s stated core value of growth. Betrayal wrapped in templates.

When Your Systems Are the Sandpaper That Polishes Nuance

Let’s talk about Jordan, a product manager at Fake Corp. Jordan spent the first half of the year leading a project to redesign the customer onboarding experience. Her stated performance goal was to “improve adoption metrics” and like all good SMART goals, it was measurable so the target was a 10% increase in active users within 30 days of signup.

The redesign didn’t deliver the metric bump she had hoped for (active users only increased by 5%). But the team’s work DID surface a deeper pattern: customers weren’t dropping off because of onboarding friction; they were getting stuck because they were confused by the product’s pricing structure and weren’t set up for adoption from earlier on in the sales process. If acted on, this information can influence sales strategy, marketing messages, customer satisfaction scores, adoption, and long-term retention.

When Jordan brought this up in her mid-year check-in, her manager agreed it was a valuable learning. He even wrote it in the reflection notes: “Jordan demonstrated strong curiosity and surfaced important insights for the broader customer journey and proactively shared them with relevant counterparts in other verticals.” But when they got to the rating, he paused.

The KPI hadn’t moved. The system requires a number, not a narrative. The contribution was important but it wasn’t the right kind of important. He noted that she was on track to meet her goals and advised her to focus the remainder of the year on projects that were likely to be relevant for her goals.

As in so many template performance management systems, performance is defined as hitting pre-set metrics, or exceeding those metrics. Performance inside the box is rewarded, discovery beyond the box is ignored.

The Subtle Betrayal

Nothing catastrophic happened that day. Jordan wasn’t punished, demoted, or written up. She appreciated her manager’s advice to target her efforts to give herself the best chance of a pay rise at the end of the year. But something smaller and more corrosive did happen. Jordan learned what kind of learning counts.

The message wasn’t malicious, it was procedural. Curiosity is admirable, but not actionable; insight is nice, but not measurable. The lesson sank in quietly: next time, stay closer to the metric. Don’t wander, don’t explore, don’t follow the stray thread unless you can tie it back to a goal already written in the system.

And that’s how organizational muscle memory forms….through repetition. Each time someone learns to mute curiosity in favor of compliance, the system polishes another edge off the company’s capacity to grow. Each focused employee becomes one more willing to ignore the “huh, that’s weird” moments that so often lead to innovation. Over time, what started as a best practice performance framework has become a kind of sandpaper, smoothing out complexity until only what fits neatly into a category is left.

The irony is that this frictionless consistency feels efficient. The dashboards align, the language is well understood, the calibration curve looks beautiful and keeps payroll right on plan. But what’s actually happening is the erosion of surprise, of experimentation, of the small, messy discoveries that real growth depends on.

Growth, after all, isn’t efficiency. Growth inherently includes variation, reflection, and adaptation. It’s the moment someone sees a pattern that the system didn’t even know to look for, and brings it to the awareness of the team. Fake Corp didn’t punish Jordan, they simply failed to value her initiative and curiosity because it didn’t match what she was told to do. And it doing so it trained both her and her manager to stay a bit smaller next time.

The Values Misalignment

Fake Corp has stated growth is one of their core values - growth for the company, its people, and its customers. Like many organizations they include a belief statement:

We believe growth happens when our people stay curious and keep learning; when our company adapts faster than the market through innovation and insight; and when our customers grow because we make their success easier and more sustainable.

If Fake Corp had designed their performance management system to deliberately reflect and support that value, Jordan’s discovery would have been the textbook definition of growth for them. Growth across all three dimensions the company cared about.

But the performance management system was benchmarked from best practices. It defined growth as a measurable improvement against a pre-set metric. In its logic, the only “real” growth is the kind that can be plotted on a dashboard and delivers in the time frame of the annual review cycle.

So when Jordan discovered something the system wasn’t built to measure, the data model couldn’t reflect the value of the insight as part of her performance. The irony of the very behaviors the company says it wants (curiosity, learning, adaptation) become individually risky when filtered through a process designed for consistency.

The form rewarded “goal alignment.” The value promised “learning through curiosity.” And the person caught between them learned that only of of those truly matters when ratings, raises, and promotions are on the line.

What Could Have Been

Now imagine if instead of using a performance management system built off of “best practices,” it had designed its system around the three part belief:

• People grow by learning and experimenting

• The Company grows by adapting faster than the market

• Customers grow when we make their success easier and more sustainable

The review form would include prompts like:

• What did you learn or test this cycle?

• How did your insight or innovation help the company adapt or improve?

• How did your work enable customer to achieve more with less friction?

Growth, in its truest form, isn’t linear improvement. It is adaptive capacity. That willingness to notice something new, integrate it, and let it change what you do next. A growth-driven system would have treated Jordan’s discovery as valuable and worthy of reward.

Let’s go deeper than just the questions on the form and build out an entire system that would support Fake Corp’s growth value.

1. The categories would shift

   Instead of a single 1-5 rating, every review would hold two dimensions:

   1. Performance against expectations - How reliably are you delivering in your current role?

   2. Growth and capability development - How are you expanding your capacity, experimenting, building new muscles for yourself, your team, our company and our customers?

      A “3” on expectations would also be anchored differently. Instead of average or the somewhat insulting “meets expectations” that is typical, 3 would be “delivering the full scope of the role.” 4 would be “outperforming the role and beginning to show early signs of readiness for promotion” and 5 would be “significantly outperforming the role, actively carrying work for the next level role, ready for promotion.”

      This would restore context and truth to the system. 3 is no longer average (or more cynically 3 is no longer “my manager doesn’t have any more raises to give out”), it is healthy performance in a well-designed system. 4’s and 5’s become signals of genuine role expansion and can be used as legitimate signal for parts of the business that might be under-resourced or sources of innovation.

2. Growth evidence is pulled from where work happens.

   Instead of managers and employees writing essays on progress, the system draws from real artifacts. Project retrospectives, learning logs, customer insights, experimental findings, code commits and design documents, client feedback, peer acknowledgements. The review becomes a place to make meaning and celebrate growth, not a place to make a case for your ability to afford childcare.

3. Manager become sensemakers, not scorekeepers

   During check-ins, the question isn’t “did you hit your metric?” but “what did we learn, and how did/should that change what we did/do next?” Managers themselves are evaluated partly on how effectively their teams learn. They’re rewarded for surfacing insights across boundaries.

Compensation and growth are integrated.

This is the part that traditional HR gets wrong. We pretend that development conversations need to be “pure” and free of monetary influence, as if adulthood and accountability aren’t something we bring to work. But compensation is the clearest expression of what a company actually values. Everything else is theather. If Fake Corp truly believes growth is a core value, then growth can’t be a narrative sidebar. It must be a compensable contribution. Not because it’s warm and fuzzy, but because it’s materially valuable.

So in a growth aligned system compensation still rewards execution, but it also rewards growth outcomes.

This might look like:

• Growth scores contibute 20-30% of the merit pool decision.

• Special growth stipends or “learning discoveries” for high-impact discoveries.

• Incentives for cross-functional insight transfer.

• Increased bonus multipliers tied to learning velocity, not only

  financial KPIs.

You cannot design for growth through symbolism. If one aspect of performance is incentivized through pay then growth must be as well. Otherwise people will continue to behave exactly as the system is designed…..stay close to your metrics, stay predictable, stay small.

Why This Matters

Growth is not free. It costs time, attention, emotional bandwith, and often political risk. If a company wants employees who follow their curiosity, surface uncomfortable truths, experiment, recognize and research emerging patterns, build cross-functional insight, or help customers succed in ways not yet measured on a dashboard then the company must compensate those behaviors.

If Fake Corp. were to implement rewards for capacity to learn, courage to surface insight, and the skill of translating discovery into action then they are making their value of growth real by making it operational. This is what HR by design actually looks like. It’s the opposite of default HR which relies on “best practice” without asking “best for whom?”

What’s next?

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably felt that mixture of recognition and resignation that shows up when you see your own company echoed in a fictional one. That’s the thing about defaults: they’re everywhere and they’re really good at staying invisible. Not because we’re careless, but because so many of our systems are those we’ve inherited from outside.

Performance management is just one doorway into this work. There are dozens more throughout HR - onboarding, job architecture, promotion criteria, engagement surveys, even how meetings are run. Every one of the reflect a choice someone made long ago, sometimes at a completely different company, often for reasons that aren’t even applicable anymore.

When we don’t examine those choices, the default becomes our directive. Not our stated values, not our strategy decks, not our leadership principles, not the decisions made by the people in the highest positions of our organization……our defaults.

These quiet rules that run beneath the surface and teach people how our organization actually works will overrule everything else. These are the rules that tell people like Jordan what kind of performance “counts.” The ones that operate in defiance of all our hopes, aspirations, visions, and missions. The ones that punish variation and experimentation while the CEO talks about innovation. The ones that turn good managers into something smaller than they meant to be.

Not bad managers or careless ones. Just managers who learned, slowly, quietly, and with tremendous internal conflict, how to survive inside a system that rewards compliance more reliably than courage, curiosity, or innovation.

These are the managers who came in wanting to advocate for their people, to nurture talent, to be the kind of leader they once needed. These are the leaders who have vision, passion, and the will to move our work forward. But when every system whispers “keep your head down, don’t fight the system, don’t make it messy” even when your leaders are encouraging you to challenge every norm, you’re going to stay safe. You might not be drinking Kool-Aid, but you’ll definitely be rationing oxygen.

When our systems ask us to shrink, not only do leaders visions wither and managers perform every smaller, they teach their teams that this is what leadership looks like here.

That’s why examining defaults matters. Not because it makes HR cleaner, or processes faster, or dashboards prettier. But because defaults shape the emotional and ethical landscape of your organization. They are the horizon that limits how far your vision can penetrate.

The hardest part of all of this is you can’t fix what you can’t see. Defaults hide in plain sight, but they are the ultimate chameleon. They blend into the wallpaper of “how we do things around here.” They feel natural only because they are familiar, not because they are true.

So the work ahead - for HR, for leaders, for anyone who has a vision for what their organization can be - is to become a default detective. Someone who notices what the system is teaching, where best practices are overruling values and templates are hindering your mission. Someone who can hold up a mirror and ask, gently but firmly:

• Where are we rewarding the behaviors we claim to discourage?

• Where are penalizing the behaviors we say we value?

• What stories are our processes telling about success?

• Who is shrinking to survive here and why?

• What would become possible if we redesigned the rule, not the person?

• What are we taking as fact in this system, and what would reality look like if it’s not true or only partially true?

• What holdouts from old limitations are we still working around?

Unexamined defaults are just unexamined designs. And unexamined designs solidify into your culture long before anyone chooses pretty words to go on the culture section of your website.

Once you start looking for them you’ll see them everywhere. In the way decisions stall, in the way some ideas take flight while others get smothered. In who gets believed, who gets interrupted. Who gets told “no,” or “not yet” and who hears “not quite but let me help you get there.” In the rituals that only feel normal because they’re habitual but when you evaluate them feel like way more work than they should be. In the places where people stop telling the truth and start parroting the party line.

Once you see them you can start to change them. Not through revolution, but through intentional redesign. Not burning everything down, but by asking better questions about the frameworks we have inherited or brought in from outside.

That’s the work I think about constantly - the work I write about, teach about, and build free resources for. It’s the work I believe in so much that I give away more than I charge for. I want you to have the language for the things you’ve been sensing for years. I want you to have tools that make the invisible rules visible. I want you to feel less alone in the gap between the culture you’re trying to build and the systems you’re forced to navigate.

For those leaders who have vision, who want to create and innovate, I want you to understand what might be holding you back. It’s not your people. It’s the processes that none of you chose, but all of you are defaulting to.

Because this work deserves a deeper home than my little corner of Substack, I’m writing a book about it. The Default Directive - coming Fall 2026. It’s for HR leaders, for managers and executives with vision, for people who can feel the tension in their bones but haven’t had the words for it yet.

It’s the guide to seeing the hidden architecture of your organization - and reshaping it so your values and your systems finally speak the same language…..which is the required foundation for your vision to land.

Until then I’ll keep writing here. Pulling back the curtain. Breaking down the processes that act like mischievous poltergeists in our organization….undermining our plans, wreaking havok on our transformations, and occasionally leaving dirty limericks on the white board of our glassdoor reviews.

Fake Corp will be joining me as my example in multiple future articles. While I personally love to pick on performance management and compensation structures, I’m curious what areas of HR do you think there are defaults hiding in that could be good targets for future articles?

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If something works, you scale it. The first question we ask when proposing a project, “is it scalable?” If you want to help more people, you focus on scalability. If you want to survive in a competitive market…..scale.

Scale is supposed to mean progress, and generosity, and efficiency all wrapped up into a tidy page of success. But there’s a quiet creed that carries a cost we don’t talk about enough: “what can be repeated is what matters, and what resists repetition must not be worth keeping.”

Once that logic takes hold, the goal shifts from preserving integrity of your product or service, to preserving output. We start optimizing not for the right ingredients, but for ingredients that behave predictably under pressure. The system begins to confuse uniformity with excellence. And slowly, almost imperceptibly the conditions that made your product beloved, that made innovation possible (experimentation, variation, a tolerance for things that don’t repeat neatly) begin to die off.

Today’s thought experiment is a long one, but I hope by the end of it you can see how our worship of scale has quietly led us astray. As the writer Edward Abbey once said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” It’s a sharp line because it’s true. When expansion becomes the only measure of health, we forget that every living thing (from forests to companies) survives through balance, not boundlessness.

To guide us through this exploration, let’s begin with an example…..a small success with its first taste of the scale bug.

The Local Bakery

First a reminder of the creed of scale: “What can be repeated is what matters, and what resists repetition must not be worth keeping.”

Now our local bakery, the one people will line up for because when people see that you brought that beautiful box into the office, you’re automatically the Monday hero. This bakery has built its reputation on two things: recipes rooted in local ingredients and flavors, and a team that actually knows the people who walk through the door. Who know that Joe is allergic to peanuts and Jane loves pan au chocolate on the days she orders coffee but switches to a scone when she orders a London Fog.

Our bakery is doing fantastic. Lines out the door, and pretty soon a second location seems like the natural next step….a way to spread that delicious baked love to even more people. And if our baker expands with intention, if they’re careful to bring the why along with the what then growth will nourish the business. The second shop can become an extension of the first, rather than a replica. Maybe it sources different ingredients or the recipes vary slightly depending on the needs of that neighborhood (fun fact, I’m friends with someone who owns restaurants and his biscuit recipes vary by location because the slightly different humidity and altitudes actually make a difference!). The point is that the magic isn’t lost, it’s flavored by the location and the community.

But that kind of growth takes a ton of work…..and a ton of restraint. It means saying no to shortcuts that promise consistency at the expense of character. It means accepting that each location, each loaf, will have its own fingerprint. And most organizations don’t do that…..not even close. They scale by standardizing the ingredients instead of standardizing the intent….the relationships, rituals, and care that gave the work its meaning.

And that’s where the trouble begins. That subtle pivot where the creed of scale starts to wind its way around the pillars of your work. The local mill can’t keep up with the new demand. The delicious butter from the nearby creamery costs too much to ship to the next town over. The farmers who grow their seasonal fruit can’t promise consistent quantities. So the bakery makes practical adjustments….a new supplier here, a cheaper option there. All in the name of making sure that the food at both locations is consistent. The croissants are still flaky, the coffee smells wonderful, the display case is clean and gleaming every morning.

But the flavor has changed. Not in a way most people can name….but in way that the regulars feel. The bread tastes fine, the pastries look perfect….but they’re somehow generic. Identical to those you can get at the bakery that’s a bit closer to your office, or that opens an hour earlier. The bakery hasn’t failed….it’s simply begun to trade the ingredients that gave it soul for ingredients that scale.

And that’s the moment, the sign….the way you know that the creed has taken root. When a system starts to believe that the best ingredients are the ones that scale, even if they aren’t the ones that make the best product.

Cheaper Flour Isn’t Just for Bakeries

Now that I’ve shown you the creed, I bet you can start to recognize it everywhere.

In healthcare, the “flour”, the ingredient that made everything work was time. Not just hours on a clock, relational time. Time to listen before deciding, to notice what wasn’t said, to earn trust. Time was the space where care actually happened and relationships were the driver that made patients more likely to trust and follow their doctor’s advice.

At first we created new systems to give us MORE time…..time we could dedicate to patients. Digital records, billing platforms, scheduling tools. They were designed to create order and continuity of care. But slowly, the tools started defining what “care” looked like. The moments that couldn’t be coded or billed….sitting with a patient, noticing a hesitation, staying an extra five minutes, talking with their family…..those critical moments stopped being counted as part of the work. And we all know that what doesn’t count eventually disappears.

In education, the ingredient was curiosity. That eternal heartbeat of learning, curiosity is the spark that turns information into understanding. It’s what makes a student want to understand why, not just memorize what.

Standards and assessments were designed originally to assess fairness and progress, to make sure every child had access to a high-quality education. The goal was to level the playing field so that the child in rural Oklahoma had the same access to opportunity as the child in Manhattan. But over time, the metrics once again took over the mission. When you have to educate everyone, rather than looking at the limitations and strengths of each location you default to what you can standardize.

And curiosity is pretty darn difficult to standardize…..but compliance, that’s much easier. Schedules, scores, measurable outcomes…..all ripe targets for standardization and scale. What began as a way to measure learning slowly became the way we defined it. Questions that wandered too far off the curriculum map became distractions instead of discoveries.

Teacher started teach toward what was countable, students learned to chase grades instead of ideas, and a system built to nurture minds and create a nation of builders and innovators, began rewarding memorization over imagination.

And that same learning creep didn’t stop when we made it out of the schoolhouse. It followed us straight into the workplace. In corporate life, we talk about training the way schools talk about testing. As if information transfer were the the same thing as behavior transformation. We build courses, track completions, measure attendance, solicit satisfaction scores and call it learning. But none of those things prove that anyone changed how they think, lead, or perform.

The metrics are comfortable because they are countable. Behavioral change, on the other hand, is messy, slow, and impossible to plot neatly on a dashboard. So we measure what’s easy. Participation, satisfaction, time spent……and then we tell ourselves the system is working. We are happy to pat ourselves on the back while the business operations people side-eye us and mutter about how much time we waste. We’ve standardized and scaled into something that looks like progress, but rarely feels like growth.

Final example and then I’ll move on. In business, that ubiquitous ingredient is judgment. Judgment is what translates knowledge into wisdom….the ability to read a room, weigh context, and act with integrity. It’s what turns information into leadership.

We began by building systems to help strengthen and support judgment. Policies, playbooks, approval processes….all meant to support fairness, reduce bias, and create consistency.

But then we just sort of stopped trusting people to exercise judgement at all. We decided it was safer to script every situation than to teach or allow discernment. We scaled compliance and efficiency, but left wisdom behind. Standard operating procedures, rulebooks full of scenarios, templates for every situation and communication.

Managers learned to ask “what’s the policy” or “what’s best practice” instead of “what’s right.”

Employees learned that following the process was safer than pausing and pointing out problems or being the person who raised their hand to tell a difficult truth. Our systems valued predictability over creativity, compliance over discernment, and rule-following over wisdom.

And it wasn’t long until the organization wasn’t encouraging people to think and innovate, but was actively teaching them how not to. That’s what happens when scale replaces trust, when systems designed to guide good judgement end up suffocating it.

So that’s the pattern….every system starts with an essential ingredient, something that defines the essence of the system. Each of those systems began with good intentions, but as growth builds, if we aren’t extremely careful, then the systems built to protect the ingredients begin to replace them.

Structure becomes the story, measurement becomes the meaning, and scale….the quiet creed of repetition and endless growth….becomes the goal.

The irony is that in chasing stability we strangle the very forces that keep systems evolving. When we smooth the friction of individuality and treat variation as an error, innovation and life and purpose begin to be sanded away.

When Uniformity Chokes Innovation

Innovation doesn’t die in boardrooms or budget meetings…..it begins its death before that when we begin to weed out variation in the name of stability.

Innovation depends on friction, on the freedom to try something that might not scale, or might even *gasp* fail! Once an organization begins equating repeatability with worth, freedom disappears and then eventually everyone wonders where innovation slipped away.

In a culture ruled by scalability, new ideas are judged less by what they reveal and more by how quickly they can be standardized. If an experiment can’t promise predictable or easily measurable results, it’s quietly dismissed. If a create solution requires a different process, or extra skill, it’s labeled inefficient…..the cardinal sin of the “growth company.”

Innovation becomes something you talk about but not something you practice. You make minor changes and tweaks but roll them out like they’re life changing and new. Vanilla…..now with darker specks! What was once the spark of discovery turns into a stage of the rollout plan and a pretty marketing campaign.

And the irony is a sharp….the obsession with scale eventually destroys the very diversity of thought and risk that make scaling possible in the first place. The more uniform the system, the fewer new ideas it can absorb without breaking. Flour and butter that still makes croissants, but is missing the flavor and depth that makes GOOD croissants.

And that, THAT is how growth stops being an evolutionary process and begins to be a parasite that consumes its host.

From Croissants to Kudzu

That pattern….growth that starts to choke out everything else. It has a perfect parallel in nature. Kudzu.

Wait, what?! Stick with me, we’re almost there. For those of you who have never heard of kudzu, it’s a fast growing vine brought to the U.S. from Japan in the late 1800’s. Farmers and conservationists planted it as a miracle fix…..a way to stop soil erosion and add nitrogen back into the ground. It grew beautifully. Well, sort of. Kudzu grows faster than almost anything else, and it grows by covering over and smothering everything around it. It wins by suffocating variation…..and once its finished the environment underneath is too depleted to grow anything new.

Within decades, it had blanketed the Southeastern portion of the US. Swallowing trees, telephone poles, abandoned cars, even entire houses. Its growth was so relentless that people started calling it “the vine that ate the South.”

Cotton was the economic machine of the American South throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. But that relentless monocropping depleted nutrients from the soil, leading to widespread erosion and ecological collapse. Kudzu was meant to restore fertility to the barren soil. But without natural limits or balance it spread unchecked…..smothering the very land it was meant to protect.

Our modern relationship with scale works the same way. We introduced it as a tool to stabilize and strengthen….a kind of economic kudzu meant to protect from uncertainty. Scale smooths volatility, keeps prices predictable, supply chains consistent, and demand steady. It makes the outcomes of innovation accessible and good affordable. Smartphones in every pocket, medical advances across continents, new ideas scaled into global industries.

But while the outcomes of innovation are more readily available, the more we scale innovation’s results, the harder it becomes to innovate again. Once entire economies depend on the efficiency of a system, experimentation gets expensive. Change becomes risk. And risk becomes something only those with the deepest pockets and the highest tolerance can afford.

So while scale democratizes access, it also concentrates control The vine grows thicker, but the space for new growth gets smaller.

And like kudzu, scale’s density creates its own kind of famine. It adds nitrogen to the soil, which feeds one kind of fertility, but blocks the sunlight and airflow that anything else needs to survive. The ecosystem looks lush from a distance, but underneath the ground is starving. That’s the impact of unchecked scale……pretty metrics, starving roots.

Restoring the Soil That Sustains Us

So here we are. We can see the pattern, we understand the history, but what the heck do we do about it?

Scale, like kudzu, doesn’t set out to destroy, it spreads by doing exactly what it was designed to do….grow.

The problem isn’t growth itself, it’s what happens when growth stops serving life and consumes it. When growth becomes more important than the product or service, than the actual mission itself.

When we forget that our systems, like soil, need time to rest, to decompose, to renew….that they need a variety of nutrients. That’s when we confuse abundance with health.

When we keep adding more goals, more process, more technology, when we are convinced that “more” is the definition of “better” then we inadvertently starve the conditions that make our system healthy…..trust, curiosity, judgment, connection. These are all inherently individual characteristics, individual characteristics by definition do not scale. They aren’t easy to define, which means they aren’t easy to measure.

That’s how we end up with lush-looking dashboards and barren cultures. Everything looks green from a distance, but dig just a little, and you find soil that feeds growth but not renewal.

Real resilience doesn’t come from uniformity or control. It comes from networks that are interdependent, that work together to nourish one another.

In nature, the real network beneath our feet isn’t just roots…..it’s the partnership between roots and fungi. A fungus sends out thin filaments called hyphae which interlace into dense, lace like webs known as mycelium. When those fungal threads fuse with the roots of plants, they create mycorrhizae…..a living alliance that scientists now recognize as one of the most sophisticated communication systems on Earth. (Fun fact, if you’re looking for a great strategy board game, check out Mycelia).

Through the networks, trees and plants exchange so much more than nutrients. They not only share carbon, nitrogen, and water, but also send out signals when they’re stressed or attacked. Old trees, whose taller canopies naturally capture more sunlight, have been shown to channel extra carbon to shaded saplings through these underground networks. It isn’t mystical, but it is pretty wonderous. The forest’s intelligence isn’t housed in a single brain, it’s distributed through connection.

Healthy systems at work are the same. Our relationships and our ability to trust one another is our mycorrhizal network. Information, care and truth spread throughout our organizations, sometimes subconsciously.

When we chase scale without balance, we sever those connections. When we treat the humans in our organizations as interchangeable, dispensible ingredients…..generic flour and butter, we break our ability to send out distress signals or share resources. We are no longer a rich mychorrizal network, we are kudzu.

Just like an ecosystem stripped of its diversity, an ecosystem that can only grow kudzu loses the signals that once warned of strain or imbalance. Information doesn’t travel, care doesn’t circulate. One branch starts to wither, and the rest of the system doesn’t even feel it happening.

Healthy systems rely on those invisible channels…..the trust, communication, and reciprocity that move quietly between people. That’s what keeps culture alive. That’s what lets us adapt to a crisis, recover after one, and turn lessons into good growth instead of scar tissue.

We need to remember our little local bakery and grow with intention. Not growth for the sake of growth, but growth that deepens our mission, that strengthens our purpose. We cannot let our goal shift from sharing something meaningful to producing something uniform.

Healthy growth doesn’t erase individuality. It deepens those fingerprints. It asks more of us….to know our ingredients, to honor the recipe while understanding local variation, and to always come back to the reason we started baking in the first place.

When we remember that, scale stops being a hunger for more and starts becoming a way to share what’s worth keeping. We can grow the mission without diluting it. We can feed more people without losing flavor. The goal isn’t to cover more ground, it’s to keep the soil rich enough that what grows nourishes.

When growth serves our mission, when it’s rooted in trust, curiosity, and care, the outcome isn’t sameness. It’s sustenance. For us, for our communities. We all benefit. Let’s make sure our organizations don’t just grow, but that they feed life.

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Most of the systems we pull data from were built to keep us compliant. They were made for payroll audits, budget controls, a literal accounting of check the box activities. They were not built for curiosity or insight, prediction or strategy.

We’ve spent years upgrading those dashboards, trying to make them faster, cleaner, prettier. But when the underlying logic is still about control, the story doesn’t change. Once again we are just doing the same wrong thing faster. The numbers line up but the truth slips through the cracks.

Built for compliance, not curiosity

Most HR systems are built like cameras, not telescopes. They can zoom, but they can’t see much farther than we can on our own. We keep improving the resolution….cleaner dashboards, tighter integrations, faster refresh rates, and calling it progress.

The problem is we still can’t answer the real questions leaders are asking.

Most HR data was built to record transactions, not to generate understanding. Its job was to prove things happened…..that people were paid correctly, that hours were logged, that compliance boxes were check. Everything about its structure reflects that purpose:

• Flat, event-based tables built to store individual records, not relationships

• Snapshots in time, not longitudinal histories that show change

• Data keyed to policy objects like cost centers and job codes, not to human behaviors or outcomes

• Validation rules that prioritize internal consistency (does this match payroll) over interpretative accuracy (does this match reality).

It’s architecture designed for certainty, not curiosity. Which is fine and even necessary if you’re reconciling a budget, but terrible if you’re trying to understand why people leave, how they grow, or what predicts success.

What predictive analytics requires

Predictive analytics, by contrast, depends on three things HR data almost never has:

• Stable definitions over time.
  A “promotion,” “termination,” or “high performer” has to mean the same thing year to year for a trend to be real. But in HR, those meanings constantly shift with reorganizations, new rating scales, or policy changes. The data can’t build a consistent story when the words keep changing.

• Relational depth between variables.
  Predictive models rely on being able to connect one thing to another — like seeing whether manager behavior affects retention, or whether training impacts performance. But HR systems store that data in isolated modules: learning data here, performance data there, engagement data somewhere else. There’s no connective tissue, so the relationships that matter most are lost.

• Natural variation in the data.
  To spot patterns, you need real differences — but HR systems are designed to minimize deviation. Calibration curves, standard pay bands, uniform policies… they flatten the very variance that prediction requires. The data looks neat, but the neatness erases the signal.

That’s why HR data can’t predict what’s coming, it’s been structurally engineered to eliminate the “noise” that actually carries insight. It’s built to confirm what’s already happened, not to notice or predict what’s shifting.

Double Duty Data

And it’s not just the structure, it’s the purpose of the data. Most HR data is doing double or triple duty. The same system that’s supposed to help us understand people is also the one that feeds payroll, satisfies auditors, and documents compliance.

Performance ratings, for instance, are treated as both a development tool and a compensation input. Turnover data doubles as a budgeting metric. Training completion data is used to prove legal compliance. Every dataset is asked to be a mirror for accountability and a microscope for insight at the same time.

That conflict is what makes predictive use nearly impossible. You can’t model human behavior on data that’s constantly been shaped by extraneous financial, legal, and procedural constraints. The patterns you find aren’t about people; they’re about policy. The signal we’re analyzing isn’t how work gets done, it’s how risk gets managed.

Budget Discipline…..Halloween Edition

I’ve already mentioned performance data so let’s keep flowing through that. On paper it looks objective. Numbers, curves, categories, all sorted neatly into boxes that make sense to finance. But the system itself wasn’t built to tell the truth about performance; it was built to control payroll costs.

Performance management systems were designed to support compensation cycles and protect against bias claims, not to reveal growth, team dynamics, or even the nuances of actual performance.

The goal was documentation, not discovery. That’s why the process runs like clockwork: ratings finalized just in time for merit budgets, distributions checked against the bell curve, calibration meetings framed as fairness. Budget discipline cosplaying as equity.

Those meetings (the ones where directors sit in rooms comparing employees they barely know, haggling over who fits where on the curve) aren’t about understanding contribution, they’re about enforcing distribution in service to fiscal discipline. Managers aren’t able to talk about the nuance of their team, they’re busy negotiating who can be labeled as “top” without breaking the budget. The process looks objective because the math is tidy. But the tidy math is the actual problem. Turning a development activity into an allotment exercise rewards consistency over accuracy, predictability over honesty, and in doing so teaches leaders that “fairness” and “sameness” are synonymous.

You knew it, now you know WHY

If you’re feeling a muddled mix of frustration and relief right now……good. Hopefully it means you can see behind the veil habit has pulled over all our eyes and you’re beginning to make sense of this tension…..to understand why you’ve felt a vague sense of wrongness for years.

Make “data-driven decisions” has been the drumbeat of “strategic” HR for decades at this point……and we’ve all known that the data didn’t match reality. We’ve felt the despair of beautiful dashboards that don’t actually capture anything TRUE about our people. That can’t hold the nuance of human experience. It’s not just you. No really. Our data in HR isn’t bad because we’re using it wrong, it’s not even bad because it’s factually wrong.

It’s bad because it was built for someone else’s purpose and we tried to be efficient and make it fit when we shifted from compliance-focused to strategic.

HR’s main character arc

In the future of HR systems…..the glorious future where we stop worshipping at the altar of “best practices” that were really just common practices we can start asking questions. Disruptive questions. Fun questions. Questions that move our work forward instead of performing innovation by just making our current (often broken) practices faster.

Not how can we make HR systems a convenient backup for finance, internal audit, or legal, but what can our data actually do for people operations and for the way we manage, understand, and predict human behavior at work.

That shift starts by returning ownership of the data’s purpose back to HR itself. It’s time for us to stop working around the vagaries of someone else’s blueprint. To stop working with systems built around what other functions needed from us. Those are legitimate needs, but they’ve come at the cost of insight.

It’s time to realize that the data we need has its own inherent value and we don’t have to justify collecting it through the needs of another function.

From tidy math to meaningful truth

When HR is the navigator of its own ship, processes begin to produce data that is meaningful for how we plan:

• Performance data stops being an annual ritual and becomes a continuous feedback loop. We can track growth over time instead of boxing people into labels. Managers can ask better questions….not how many 5’s did we give? but who’s learning fastest, and why? How can we use that to find other people who will do well or help the people we have?

• Turnover data stops being a postmortem and starts acting like a pulse. It shows early signs of friction or fatigue before they calcify into exits. The type of exit begins to matter…..are they someone who has outgrown our company for now and may come back with additional contributions? Does their exit indicate we did a poor job of predicting who does well here? Were there capabilities we could have instilled? Satisfaction signals we missed?

• Training data stops counting completions and starts tracing capability and even motivation. It reveals where curiosity thrives, where learning stalls, where we might be training for aspirations vs reality, and what actually translates to performance.

• Engagement data stops being a quarterly snapshot and becomes a living map of trust….not how happy are you today? but how connected do you feel to what we’re building?

When we design systems for learning instead of compliance, the data stops punishing deviation and starts highlighting it. Deviation is where discovery lives. Why is this person, group, etc different? What does their difference tell us about our company?

If an organization can learn from its own noise, that’s an indication of whether there is healthy and sustainable growth. And that’s the work ahead of us in HR, rebuilding our systems to serve understanding instead of simply auditing.

Think about it……this isn’t a data problem, not really. It’s a design problem, and sadly a bit of a courage problem. We inherited systems that count everything except what matters to us, then mistook their precision for truth. And we wondered why it was so difficult to ‘show the ROI’ on investing in people. The work now isn’t to collect more data; it’s to ask better questions, to understand what stories we need our data to be capable of telling. To design systems that serve understanding instead of control. And if we can do that, if we can build tools that finally see people as they are instead of as policy objects, then maybe our data will help us tell the truth about our people instead of just proving our governance.

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We fill in blanks. We make intuitive leaps. We land in places that look random to others but feel inevitable to us.

That’s also true of the ADHD brain. Whatever the source, I’ve always considered it one of my greatest strengths once I realized it wasn’t how everybody’s brain worked all the time.

MBTI was one of the activities we did during the capstone experience week of my MBA. I’ve since done a much deeper dive into the assessment and its strengths and weaknesses, but that’s irrelevant for today’s story.

Out of 32 students, only 5 of us had the N preference. Our professor walked up to the board, wrote the word leaf and split us into two groups. Those with the S preference (sensing, detail-oriented, literal, grounded in what can be observed with the five senses……you know….. “reality”). Those of us with the N preference were sent into the hallway. Both of our groups were given the assignment to list as many words as we could that connected with leaf.

Out in the hall we started in the obvious places. Green. Tree. Park. Autumn. Safe answers. Literal answers. And then someone, I don’t remember who, said “maple.” We all froze for a second. Not because we didn’t see the connection, but because we knew how fragile it felt. The risk of someone shutting it down with a “that’s too much of a stretch.” The lifelong memory of the teacher’s frown, the eye-roll from classmates, the quiet sigh from our boss…..the subtle message that we had all internalized that imagination was too far afield, not “professional.”

But then, like air rushing back into the room, someone else said, “syrup.”

Then we couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the ideas. Pancakes, brunch, hockey. We exhaled together. In that tiny moment of validation, we knew we were among our people. It wasn’t about caterpillars, it was about belonging. The tiny recognition that this is how our minds work. That we weren’t alone in making those leaps.

When we came back into the room the board inside held five words. FIVE. They were still debating about whether “chlorophyll” was too obscure to count. We handed over three pages front and back. Hundreds of words. Table, book, banana. (that last one courtesy of a dad joke: make like a tree and leaf….make like a banana and split.)

That moment stays with me because in the world of business, a world that prizes the literal, the measurable, the safe, the predictable…..finding four other people whose brains ran like mine was an incredible relief.

Which brings me to penguins. When I needed an example of something utterly random, something with no real ties to my life, something that could be an example when explaining how my brain works, penguins were the first thing I said. And then it built into a habit, something I didn’t have to think of that I could use over and over again.

Now they’re a bit of an in-joke in my family. If I make a connection that seems absurdly unrelated, my husband raises an eyebrow (yes he actually CAN do that) and asks, “Penguins?” Side note…..we also tend to use this word when our kids are being over the top because of the line in Madagascar “the penguins are psychotic.”

At this point, I’ve connected so many things to penguins over the years that I don’t even have to try to get to them. Seriously, give me a topic and I can do it. In a weird way the penguins are my Kevin Bacon. Not because they’re random, but because they’ve turned into an inevitable connection point. Kevin Bacon didn’t set out to become the hub of a cultural game, he wasn’t chosen he was discovered. People realized that if you followed the lines long enough, you always circled back to him.

That’s exactly what happened with me and penguins. I didn’t pick them (at least not on purpose) they just kept showing up until they became the center of the map.

It’s silly, but it’s the best shorthand I have found for the way my brain works.

To others this style of thinking can look scattered. Chaotic, distracted. But to me the only thing that’s difficult about it is drawing in the extra dots so other people can see the picture.

It’s why I can sit with an HR problem and trace the lines from an outdated form in the payroll system to a manager’s inconsistent practice to a cultural norm that everyone pretends is fine…..and end up at the real reason employees don’t trust leadership.

On the surface, those dots don’t look connected, but in my head the light up like a constellation…..or a light bright because let’s face it, constellations aren’t always that clear lol.

That’s the strength, the gift of the way my brain works. But it really can feel frustrating and discouraging when I’m trying to put those connections into a linear form…..slide decks, memos, bullet points. And that’s why I’ve adopted the penguin as my emotional support animal.

The penguin reminds me to be kind to myself. It reminds me that wandering is not wasted. That what looks like nonsense at first glance often hides its own internal logic if you zoom out far enough and sit with it a moment. That meaning doesn’t have to travel in straight lines to matter.

The giraffe may be my spirit animal, my mascot, the animal I’ve claimed and feel most at home with. But that penguin reminds me there is strength in the way my brain works. And the lovely part is that the penguin is my best friend’s favorite animal. Which someone feels right. Because our brains don’t just connect ideas, they connect people. They stitch together inside jokes, unlikely metaphors, and tender reminders.

So yes, Penguins are my Kevin Bacon….my connector, my shortcut, a reminder to be gentle with myself.

They remind me that my brain’s wandering isn’t wasted, even when it feels hard to explain. The leaps that look scattered to someone else are often the same ones that show me the hidden patterns in a system….the cracks no one talks about, the truths buried under policies that sound fine on paper.

Which feels right. Because the point was never just about randomness or even about ideas. It was about being kinder to the way my brain works, about trusting the patterns it finds, and about the relief of knowing there are people who can see them with me.

When I was reading through the coverage of the awards this year, one phrase jumped off the page: “Lore is the new core.” That was the headline takeaway from Weber Shandwick’s team as they unpacked the festival. The future belongs to brands that build lore - immersive worlds people want to step into, not scroll past.

Now if you don’t live in marketing, that might sound abstract. Lore? Core? What does that even mean? Let me translate and then I promise I’ll dive into why, while this is a marketing insight, sure, but it’s also a truth HR can’t afford to ignore.

What “lore” means at Cannes

This year’s award winners and the overall highlights made it clear that brands are now acting more like franchises than advertisers. Think Marvel Cinematic Universe, but for your favorite soft drink or travel agency.

The best campaigns weren’t one-off ads. They were world-building. Lore-building, Creating universes that have fans, that those fans want to be a part of. The kinds of universes that drive loyalty and obsession.

That’s what Cannes was pointing to: the shift from marketing as messaging to marketing as mythology.

Why does lore matter now?

What is so different about now that campaigns that build lore hit harder than campaigns that sell features?

Think of the undercurrents of our world right now:

• Soci: People are lonelier than ever. The old anchors of community have frayed: religion, extended families, unions, even stable neighborhoods. Lore offers belonging. It turns “I bought a soda” into “I’m part of a universe.”

• Political: Trust in institutions is brittle. Governments, media, even workplaces struggle with legitimacy. Lore-building gives people something to believe in when official channels feel hollow.

• Economic: Scarcity and precocity define daily life. Owning a little piece of a bigger story feels like continuity when financial stability doesn’t.

And beneath all of that is identity.

Lore matters because it lets people stitch their personal identity to something larger. You’re not just a consumer of Marvel, you’re part of the fandom. Not just a buyer of sneakers, you’re a runner…or a creative…or a rebel. Lore creates characters you can try on, scripts you can step into, communities where your quirks make sense.

That’s why Cannes was right to spotlight it. Lore is sticky not just because it entertains, but because it answers identity questions our fractured systems have left wide open. Where do I belong? Who sees me? What story am I part of?

And that’s why HR should be paying attention. Because inside organizations, the same forcers are at play. Employees are searching for identity, belonging, and continuity at work too, and if they don’t find it in the systems you’ve built, they’ll weave it into the lore they tell one another instead.

A moment of reckoning and grace for HR

Now it’s time to look in the mirror for a moment…..because in HR we have known for a loooooooong time that story matters. We’ve just gone about it clumsily. Instead of building systems that generate healthy lore, we borrowed shortcuts. We tried to manufacture the myth rather than earn it.

It’s worth pausing here with a moment of empathy and remembrance. Because it’s not like we were lazy or didn’t care. This didn’t come from nowhere.

For decades, HR has been told we aren’t “strategic” enough. We’ve been asked to earn our seat at the table. Translation: stop talking about people in human terms and start sounding like the CFO.

So we learned the language of business cases and ROI. We traded in softer truths for harder numbers, even when the numbers were bad proxies for the reality we were trying to describe. And when marketing dazzled the C-suite with sleek decks and glossy campaigns we thought to ourselves…. “oh, maybe THAT’S the way in. Maybe if we can package culture the way they package products we’ll finally be taken seriously.”

Add to that a chronic lack of resourcing. Most HR teams run lean by design, and it’s not uncommon for our empty seats to be the sacrificial lamb at the budget table, so when people leave the work doesn’t shrink, it just piles ever higher with fewer brains to accomplish it.

So it wasn’t cynicism, it was survival….the pressure to prove we belonged at the table, armed with the few tools we could actually afford.

The great tragedy of it all is that in trying to prove our strategic worth, we often undermine it. Instead of demonstrating strategy through the slow, heavy lift of system redesign, we reached for the faster, shinier play. Our employee value propositions, our values posters, our journey maps, our campaigns about belonging were all designed with the best of aspirations and intentions.

But when we created stories without the underlying truth of systems, policies, or practices that employees actually lived to scaffold them, and when we lacked the resources or authority or influence to make them true or show steady progress, they became promises that collapsed under their own weight.

Here’s another truth we rarely say out loud in our quest to be like the other “strategic” functions. HR work doesn’t lend itself to quick wins. Programs that touch people take time to show benefits. There are always a bazillion confounding factors….culture shifts, leadership turnover, market shocks, world events…..that make it impossible to show a clean, attributable payoff just one quarter later. Pile on decades of tech and data debt and ooof. Even when we do have an impact, proving it in the ways executives are trained to see can feel like an uphill climb in a hamster wheel.

Employees, of course, noticed. The noticed when the glossy EVP didn’t match the reality of their workday. They noticed when journey maps described a future state no one was resourced to build. They noticed when slogans got airtime and pain points stayed stuck and spoken about only in bitter whispers.

That gap became its own kind of lore. A cautionary tale passed down with eye rolls and side commends. “Remember when they promised xyz? Yeah that never showed up, no way this one is happening either.”

Which brings us to the heart of it. When HR borrowed from marketing, we borrowed the wrong playbook.

But wait…..

If we’ve been doing this wrong, if we’ve been building these campaigns on shaky ground, why can’t we show the cost. Don’t you know we need metrics for the leaders. We don’t want to give up our seat we worked so hard to earn. Don’t you know we’re “data-driven” now?!

We tell ourselves. That if the damage was real it would show up on the dashboard we worked so hard to get the resources to build. If it isn’t quantifiable, it must not be happening. But that damage wasn’t absent, it was just delayed and disguised…..hidden under something that economics has a word for, switching costs.

Switching costs (a mini course in economics)

For customers, switching costs are typically low. If a toilet paper or a soda brand lets you down, you grab a different one off the shelf. If a streaming service fumbles, it’s a bit more annoying because perhaps your kids are attached to a specific show that’s on there, but it’s still not hard to cancel your subscription. The market punishes missteps and broken promises quickly and efficiently…..and in a way that is attributable to the problem.

For employees, switching costs are sky high. Leaving a job means risking income and healthcare. It means uprooting identity and reputation. It means weighing loyalty to colleagues, navigating alternative childcare arrangements, geography, in some cases even Visas.

So when HR broke promises…..or failed to keep promises that were too aspirational…employees didn’t disappear overnight. They stayed. But they carried the disappointment with them. They told stories. They passed down the cautionary lore. Trust and engagement slipped, notch by notch, not in one dramatic plunge.

That’s why the dashboards didn’t flash red. The damage was there, but it showed up as a bit less discretionary effort, as presenteeism or resenteeism, as the quiet recalibration of belief in leadership. Less obvious than churn, but just as, if not more, corrosive.

That’s why the bill always comes due.

What HR should be learning now

If lore really is the new core, then our job in HR isn’t to abandon story, it’s to earn the right to tell it.

That means resisting the temptation to manufacture culture with a tagline, a poster, or a campaign. It means that making sure your employees actually receive value beyond a paycheck before you start talking about EVP’s. Every journey map, every values rollout is a promise. And promises only stick if they’re built on systems that make them true in practice.

Earning your right to tell story is slower and less glamourous. It’s redesigning onboarding so the “we set you up for success” message actually matches the first-week experience. It’s reworking performance management so “we care about growth” shows up in feedback and promotion decisions, in a way that is transparent and accessible for employees. It’s holding leaders accountable so “we value belonging” isn’t just in the brochure while your wheelchair ramp is around the corner by the dumpsters, none of the doors in your building are handicap accessible, the fluorescent lights in your open office spaces buzz and flicker, and there’s only one bathroom on each floor.

These aren’t just fixes. They’re mythology. Every ramp, every light, every bathroom, every feedback conversation is a symbol employees use to answer identity questions: Do I belong here? Do they see ME? Who am I in this place?

That’s what lore really is….not just the stories we tell about work, but the mythology people carry about what it means to be part of your company. It’s what they whisper to each other in the stairwell, text in side chats, what they tell their friends when they’re asked what it’s like to work here, and what they pass down to new hires as the “real” employee handbook.

Lore will form whether you design for it deliberately or not. The only choice you have is whether it’s lore of trust or of betrayal. Whether employees are telling stories that deepen belief in your leaders, or stories that erode it.

So if lore really is the new core….and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be since the same trends impact our workplaces as impact marketing, the question isn’t whether your employees are telling stories. They are. The question is whether those stories are strengthening the identity and belonging you want people to feel……or if they’re cementing the quiet mythology of promises that collapsed under their own weight.

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Two years ago it was finally time for the city to build out the park they had promised us. A park with walking paths, some wild fauna, a lovely picnic area and trees. We all watched as they turned the mounds of dirt and scattered weeds into the makings of a wonderful park. And then they started installing the landscaping. A few pines, a few oaks…..the kind of trees we expected. And some large rocks and stumps and logs as natural landscape features for kids to climb on. Very pretty. And then one day they showed up with the final piece they were installing.

Words aren’t going to do it justice, I promise I’ll include a picture but stick with me a moment. Imagine you walked out to your park and there was a large dead tree trunk with two to four large main branches, bolted upside down to concrete. It’s wild. None of us can quite fathom what they were thinking and every single one of us has made a joke at some point about what the poor installers must have thought while they were doing the work.

A park with trees. Well, we got what we asked for……sort of.

This story is about more than whether the landscape architect gave the installers the brief of “a park with trees” and they went wild, or if he had a moment of pure delusion and gave the brief of “Stranger Things, but for toddlers.” Seriously, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation…..anyhow…..the point is that we got what was specced. Just not what any of us actually wanted.

And that’s a feeling that is VERY familiar to anyone who has used HR tech. And something that should serve as a warning to anyone building out HR systems, tools, or tech right now. We’re in the middle of a massive shift. AI integrations. Self-serve portals. Workflow automations.

Everyone’s building. Everyone’s optimizing. Everyone’s promising transformation.

But we aren’t very specific in our language. We make a LOT of assumptions when we state our requirements and that can lead to chaos.

We say we want “user-friendly” systems that track engagement and automate onboarding.

But who do we mean by “user"? The manager? HR? Payroll? The frontline employee? Each of those audiences have different needs and the order in which you prioritize them makes a hefty difference to system design choices.

What do we mean by engagement? Are we measuring clicks, compliance, connection, or trust? And by what metrics?

When we say to automate onboarding, what parts of onboarding? How do employees get help? How do we monitor for when it’s going smoothly vs wildly off the rails? What things should NEVER be automated?

The systems we build are mirrors that reflect back the clarity, consistency (or confusion) of our instructions plus the interpretation of whoever receives the instructions. And the consequences are so much more than aesthetic.

Our systems are how we reinforce or undermine our culture. What we build teaches people what we value, how to behave, what we prioritize.

When we implement a performance system that rewards visibility over value, or a hiring process that filters out everyone who doesn’t fit a rigid mold, or a dashboard that tracks only what’s easy to count rather than what matters…..we are installing upside down trees.

A system that looks like what we asked for, but completely misses what we meant.

If we want to build the future of work with intention, we need to get honest about how often we use shorthand and even sometimes hide behind deliberately vague language. We need to slow down, ask the clarifying questions, make sure we actually know what we want, not just what we’re in the habit of having.

Building new tools with old habits is how you end up with playground features that look like the ghosts of poor communication in your park.

We need to sit in a room and say things like:
”Whose experience are we designing this for?”
”What does better communication actually look like here?”
”What are assumptions are we making that haven’t been tested?”

Every upside down tree was once a good idea, once a bullet point in a requirements document shortened for brevity and efficiency, once a vaguely worded wish that everyone thought had an obvious meaning. And once it’s built it’s much harder to undo than it would have been to just ask better questions up front.

So if you’re designing systems, if you’re planning processes, or scoping tools or writing the next “simple” feature request…..

Take a breath.

Be precise, be annoying even. Because “a park with trees” only works if you all meant the same thing.

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Scarcity, in contrast, becomes something to reject. Scarcity is small-minded, tight-fisted, short-sighted, outdated. A false limitation.

It’s an appealing narrative, particularly when the alternative feels like hoarding or despair. When you buy into the idea that by seeing limitations, you’re creating limitations, the last thing you want to do is have a mindset that is holding you back.

But that framing has always felt a bit unfinished, unrefined…a bit shallow to me. It treats scarcity like a moral failure, something to overcome with vision, trust, or better vibes. And I don’t know about you, but I for one am super over being told that the thing I can see in front of my face isn’t real.

The abundance vs scarcity framing assumes that noticing constraints is the same thing as being limited by them. And it flattens the difference between fear and discernment.

But what if scarcity isn’t imagined? Let’s talk about scarcity that is real. Time runs out. Budgets shrink. Energy wanes. Opportunities shift or close. The limit exists whether or not you believe in it, just like the sun will still burn you if you wander around in a swimsuit with no sunscreen on for the entire day. And in moments like that, moments when you are asked to just believe your way past a limitation, abundance doesn’t feel like empowerment. It feels like denial and delusion.

Earlier this year my family and I faced a version of this in our personal lives. My in-laws have been asking for years if we wanted to go to Vegas for a family trip. We’ve always said no thank you. Not out of stubbornness, but because we’ve learned what environments our eldest can navigate, and which ones push his system past the point of regulation.

With Fragile X Syndrome and the accompanying sensory processing disorder and anxiety, a place like Vegas is an avalanche of stimuli. Too loud, too bright. Just too much. And we’ve always chosen to protect his peace over joining in.

But this year was different. My father-in-law is 95. He has Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and has already well outlived his initial prognosis. For the first time, it was clear that saying no meant giving up this opportunity to celebrate him with our whole family.

Suddenly, the question wasn’t just whether the trip was manageable. It was what kind of discomfort we were willing to bear to show up…..for him, for us, for a moment we wouldn’t be able to recreate or reclaim later.

Family is one of our core values, but in this moment it was pulling us in two different directions. One urged us to shield our child. The other pulled us towards presence, connection, memory. The tension wasn’t a failure of clarity. It was a byproduct of caring about more than one thing at once.

We didn’t solve it by forcing a perfect answer. Any answer would have been a compromise. We solved it by designing around what was possible. Designing FOR the limitations rather than pretending they weren’t real. We planned more, we buffered more. We gave ourselves permission to adjust, to retreat if needed, to try even if it wasn’t guaranteed to work. We accepted the constraint and moved through it with care.

Scarcity didn’t derail our values. It sharpened them…..it PROVED them. And that’s what I keep coming back to over and over.

In organizations, we hit these moments all the time. When priorities compete, resources dwindle, and values start pulling in different directions…when there’s not enough time, or money, or people to do all the things we said we cared about.

In those moments, the goal shouldn’t be to pretend that there’s more than there is. We shouldn’t be chastising those who can see the limitations and telling them they need to just see the abundance while ignoring the pain of the limitation, the pain of the choices to be made. The goal is to choose. To choose deliberately, transparently, and with integrity.

To name what we’re protecting, to own what we’re pausing, to grieve what we’re giving up, and to teach through the decisions we make, especially when they are hard.

Scarcity doesn’t have to shrink us, but it will reveal us. It shows whether our values are decorative or directional. Whether our strategies are designed for temporary comfort or built to hold up under strain.

And if we let it, scarcity can do something else. It can clarify what we actually stand for. Not just in theory, but in motion. In tension. In practice.

It’s not just what we choose, but what those choices teach. When budgets run short, when priorities compete, when there’s no perfect answer. Your decisions tell a story. And when you explain the why, not just the what of your decisions, you do so much more than communicate.

You build trust, you reinforce culture, you teach people how to make decisions. I’ll say it again, your decisions are your values in motion….and how you talk about them is how people learn what matters.

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