Don't shoot the messenger(s). Despite the mess, you have squeaky wheels doing their best to surface the issue. They might not be the most eloquent or diplomatic, but you're losing one of your only paths to reality if you shoot these messengers. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-296-trus…

Imagine it is a year from now, and you are trying to understand how your team (and your team's context) has evolved. What are some basic things you can make a point of keeping track of that might help? It doesn't need to be quantitative. How can you help not forget?

"Ultimately, we can think of operations and enablement in the context of product thinking, service design thinking, and organizational effectiveness. In effect, the company is "the product". " cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-300-how-…

"How to Think About Operations and Enablement" buff.ly/464xtjk John Cutler

Reading The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, and thinking about corporate political regimes: 1. Favoring loyalists 2. Creating scapegoats / blame-shifting 3. Centralizing decision making 4. Suppressing dissent 5. Targeting insiders who know

To simplify: Get your strategy, priorities, risk-taking heuristics, and goals straight, and treat allocation as a hypothesis. Then, play the game and see how things turn out. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-301-how-…

Person A has an easy answer when things go wrong: "The system works, so any failure must be due to individual shortcomings or lack of effort." Person B, on the other hand, has to invest a lot of mental energy to process the situation and consider multiple perspectives

Putting this picture together, we see that organizations are always a jumble of: A: The official way things work—the boxes to check, the "formal process." B: How things work—how work is happening C: The effort required to translate reality into the "official" way D: An

That migration / debt reduction effort someone proposed in July of 2023 that everyone dumped on because of "priorities".... yeah, it would have been finished by now. This is a helpful thought exercise, because back in July of 2023 this probably seemed like a "nice to have" and

Sharing some potential helpful class notes: -Why we measure and use metrics (and analytics) -KPIs vs. Metrics vs. Measurement/Telemetry -Effective Metric Checklist -Leading and Lagging Indicators -Inputs and Outputs -Proxy / Indirect / Concrete Metrics -Powerful Ideas Imperfectly

"Your team is burnt out. They are not getting anything done. Work is "low quality". You can see and feel those things. But what you are seeing is an output of something—the downstream effects of other things happening." cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-224-the-…

Can Do vs. Should Do by John Cutler 1️⃣represents the valuable things that we can't work on right now. 2️⃣is valuable AND possible, but only with a lot of unsustainable sacrifice. Leads to burnout. 3️⃣work is valuable, possible, and within a comfortable "can" range. 4️⃣ might be

It takes time to meaningfully make a dent in reducing cognitive load and fostering conditions friendly to more independent teams, or at least teams that feel more independent. You can't just do a re-org or org-flattening. cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-303-the-…

"Goal cascades are compelling but ultimately not effective. Instead, start where it really counts — with teams," says John Cutler bit.ly/3yOz5Sj #digitaltransformation #agile #leadership

"The sad reality is that somebody will judge you harshly for your off days. People will seize that moment to paint you as too theoretical, caustic, troublesome, polarizing, or too [whatever]. And this adds up over time, even if you're at your best 90% of the time."

Running the second iteration of my prioritization course if anyone is interesting... maven.com/john-cutler/ru…

the word "leader" appears zero times...

"Hire great people and get out of the way," is bad advice. It has no support from modern ideas about distributed leadership/autonomy, resiliency, mission command, or effective feedback mechanisms. Whoever was giving this advice to startup founders was giving outdated advice, and

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