Survivorship bias, superstitious learning, and the NPS effect — About a month ago I came across a couple of powerful posts that I couldn’t entirely shake, so I decided to write about them instead. Both point out organizational phenomena that get in the way of organizational learning. The first two are covered by a lovely post by Ethan Mollick…

Observations on organizations — PONA: real-time, objective, organizational sensing One of the key challenges in upleveling the way we manage organizational health is the analog way in which we sense it. In some cases, we’re literally talking about 1:1 meetings between two people to get a better sense for “how things are going”, an in some cases we’re talking…

End of ’22 Projections: Part I — I haven’t done much writing in this publication this year. …

Hello org-hacking readers, Most of my writing energy over the past several months has been directed at Web3-focused writing on Mirror and curating the Newsletter of Decentralized Work. Nonetheless, at the same time, this publication has reached 1000 followers! …

A paradigm shift in Learning & Development program design — The accelerating pace by which our world is changing has made investing in employees' learning and development table stakes for every employer that aims to attract top talent. However, a major gap exists between that intention and designing programs and experiences that actually drive learning. …

I’ve written before about my personal beliefs about compensation. Primarily in this primer, which I’ve later added nuances to in posts on variable pay and internal/external fairness. As one of the six fundamental problems of organizing, compensation is fascinating to me. …

2021 continued the theme of 2020 in terms of being a “weird” year. In some ways, more so than 2020. I found the concept of the “uncanny valley” to be true for me in a much broader sense. From Wikipedia: The uncanny valley is a hypothesized relation between an object’s…

I’ve been meaning to write about individual READMEs and “user manuals” for quite some time and I’m glad that I held off. It was recently brought back to my attention through Ed Batista’s post: To README or not to README. …

A few weeks ago, I had an incredibly generative conversation with Jabe Bloom. One of the hallmarks of a good conversation is that it leaves me with a long list of threads or breadcrumbs that I can explore and dive deeper into after it’s over. One of those threads from…