Best thing I've read today from "Systems Thinking" by Donella Meadows, and lots of applications in business.

Once a business has the basics down, many problems are a lack of resilience: sales collapsing, talent pipeline problems, difficulty raising capital, etc. Easy to mistake luck for resilience.

My thoughts about what goal-setting frameworks evolved as a result. You can see all the details, along with some ways to avoid this pitfalls, here: open.substack.com/pub/ceehart...

Many leaders flinch when considering having a difficult conversation. While this can avoid short-term pain, it works against their – and employees – long-term interest. It happens with comp conversations, and others too. As a result, employees aren't aligned with business goals.

Avoiding communicating about goals and progress often isn't a symptom of laziness but a reflexive reaction to avoid admitting a problem or explaining a change in direction. If you feel like "mailing it in" when talking about goals, take a deeper look at why.

The unpleasant truth is that working on and committing to goals is more uncomfortable than working on systems and processes. They are the knowledge work equivalent of spending hours analyzing what new running shoes to buy instead of just going for a run.

Leaders don't fail at goal-setting because they pick the wrong framework. They fail because setting real goals is deeply uncomfortable, and they unconsciously sabotage themselves.

I know this because in 2019, I caught the OKR bug and learned some things the hard way, like:

It's a good thing we didn't collectively give up on end to end encryption a few years ago...

This is such a superior experience for adding cards to Apple Wallet that I can’t believe it took so long for Apple to ship it.