Revolutions Must Anticipate Their Own Counterrevolutions

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1954 the economist Paul Samuelson received a postcard about an obscure dissertation. Written in 1900 by a long forgotten mathematician named Louis Bachelier, it implied that market behavior could be predicted using statistical techniques. Based on that foundation, Samuelson pioneered a new era of financial engineering.

As the eminent sociologist Max Weber pointed out, while material interests govern people’s conduct, ideas act like switchmen, determining the tracks that we travel down. Samuelson’s discovery of Bachelier’s paper was a moment when the track was switched. If markets could be engineered, the thinking went, they could be trusted.

We need to be careful about the stories we accept. Once the switchman changes those tracks, a zeitgeist forms and the wheels of society turn to keep the train going. We begin to judge progress on how far and fast we can get the train to go, rarely questioning whether we are on the right track or how we got started in that direction. Inevitably, we miss the backlash.

The Engineering Mindset

Samuelson’s discovery of Bachelier’s paper revolutionized economics. If economic behavior could be mathematically predicted, then systems could be built to drive decision making. Rather than rely on human judgment or fuzzy intuition, policy could be built on a much more concrete foundation. The hope was that the endless cycles of economic boom and bust could be eliminated, significantly reducing human hardship and pain.

This engineering approach to human affairs was not an altogether new idea. It was, in fact, early similar to the logical positivist movement that arose in the 1920s. Many felt that we need to take a more “scientific” approach, making sure that we logically verify each proposition we intend to accept and act on. In a short time, however, a young logician named Kurt Gödel would show that approach was hopelessly flawed.

In much the same way, a young mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot soon exposed unfixable cracks in the foundations of financial engineering. Essentially, he showed empirically that the world was far more volatile than Samuelson and Bachelier assumed and their mathematics assumptions were unsound. He predicted these flaws would eventually lead to a financial meltdown, which they did in 2008.

Financial engineering isn’t the only effort to take human judgment out of policymaking. The realist school of foreign policy advises us to act on our interests rather than our values. The consumer welfare standard suggests that economic analysis, rather than the concerns of regulators, should govern antitrust matters. The doctrine of shareholder value dictates how corporate leaders make their decisions.

It’s no accident that these approaches gained steam in the 1970s, in the wake of the phenomenal engineering accomplishments of the Apollo program. The logical positivist movement in the 1920s arose in the wake of historic advances in physical sciences. Unfortunately, trying to apply those approaches to social sciences courts disaster.

The Pervasiveness Of identity And Dignity

The idea that we can govern our decisions by pure logic is tantalizing. We can analyze the factors at play, apply an objective standard and execute the resulting decision. Yet there is a reason that these ideas consistently fall short. As Gödel showed in his famous theorems, every logical analysis is necessarily incomplete. One of the most often overlooked factors that govern human decisions is identity and dignity.

Consider the ultimatum game. One player is given a dollar and needs to propose how to split it with another player. If it is accepted, both players get the agreed upon shares. If it is not accepted, neither player gets anything. If the world was completely rational, the second player would accept an offer of even a single penny. After all, a penny is better than nothing.

Yet decades of experiments across different cultures show that most people do not accept it. In fact, offers of less than 30 cents are routinely rejected as unfair. It offends people’s dignity and sense of self. For many of the same reasons, there is increasing evidence that financial targets don’t motivate employees. No one wants to be a cog in someone else’s wheel.

This may seem impractical, but it is in the service of a greater logic. In a study in which a public goods game similar to the ultimatum game was played it was found that cooperative—as well as punitive—behavior is contagious, spreading through three degrees of interactions, even between people who haven’t had any direct contact.

Behavior isn’t just about transactions, it’s about setting norms. People need to make sense of the world and they do that through narratives. Those narratives, in turn, drive behaviors.

Building The Power Narrative

The march of history has been a succession of narratives. Centuries ago people marched into battle, bled and died gruesome deaths because they believed in the divine right of kings. The American revolution marked not just a change in government, but a change in the stories people told themselves. World Wars were fought based on competing narratives.

Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen a quick succession of failed storylines. The excesses of Johnson’s Great Society gave way to the Reagan Revolution, which told us that government was the enemy and needed to get out of the way. Then, in short order, we had a Savings and Loan crisis and it seemed that unbridled free enterprise had its shortcomings.

The growing distrust in government led to a new era of celebrity CEOs. Lee Iacocca paved the way for Jack Welch’s management revolution that hollowed out our industrial base and helped lead to scandals such as Enron. We believed the tales Alan Greenspan told us about self-correcting markets until a meltdown in mortgage bonds brought on the Great Recession.

With big business discredited, we put our faith in Silicon Valley, which looks increasingly like a doomsday machine. We no longer assume the good faith of idealistic tech entrepreneurs, but fear being manipulated and controlled by big tech monopolies. Unions, once pilloried as corrupt underminers of capitalism are now enjoying a surge in popularity.

As MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson point out in their book, Power and Progress, narratives are often pushed by elites for their own purposes. It makes sense for government bureaucrats to wax glowingly about the virtues of public service, while CEOs preach the joys of the free market even as they undermine competition and get fat off of government contracts. There’s always somebody selling us something.
If Power Corrupts, What Contains It?

Saul Alinsky noted that every revolution inspires its own counter-revolution. “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counterrevolution, we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counterrevolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward to minimizing the latter,” he wrote.

We are at an inflection point, with multiple pendulum’s beginning to swing the other way. The Business Roundtable denounced shareholder capitalism, Russia’s failures in Ukraine, military and otherwise, exposed not only the bankruptcy of the realists but the importance of values and living up to them. The New Brandeis movement is beginning to strengthen antitrust enforcement and promote greater market competition.

Underlying these trends is a convergence of power shifts the most important of which is demography. The Boomer generation, because the Generation X which followed was so small, has wielded political dominance since the 80s, but is now being displaced by Millennials and Zoomers who hold vastly different values and priorities.

Yet as power is shifting, we need to ask where it is shifting to, who will benefit, what narratives they will build. The ultimate adversary of genuine, lasting change is excess. The ideas that are now being discredited arose for a reason. They filled legitimate needs and produced real benefits. That’s how they gained traction in the first place.

That’s why if we really care about change, we need to learn to love our haters. They’re the ones who can keep us in check, point out flaws in our ideas and even point us toward shared values and shared purpose. Transformation can’t be an end in itself, it needs to be in service of the people it affects.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Don’t Let Corporate Jargon Hold Your Team Back

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Don’t Let Corporate Jargon Hold Your Team Back

GUEST POST from David Burkus

You’re in a meeting. Someone says, “Let’s circle back to ensure alignment on the KPIs so we can really move the needle across products.”

Everyone nods.

But in your head, you’re thinking… “What did they just say?”

That’s corporate jargon. It’s everywhere. Some people love it. Some people hate it. Most of us—well, we just tolerate it. And while jargon isn’t always bad, it can be a bigger problem than we realize. The real issue? When jargon stops making things faster and starts making things foggier. And that fog is slowing your team down.

When Language Obscures, Not Clarifies

Language is supposed to create clarity. It’s meant to connect people, to help them collaborate, and to make smart decisions quickly. But in many organizations, corporate jargon does the opposite. It confuses. It slows people down. And worse, it creates distance—between individuals, teams, and entire departments.

Anthropologist David Graeber explored this in his book Bullshit Jobs, arguing that layers of meaningless work—and meaningless words—emerge in organizations to preserve the illusion of productivity. He called this “managerial feudalism”: leaders expand their scope by hiring people to do questionable work just to increase their headcount. Jargon plays a similar role. The more complex the words, the harder it becomes to question the necessity of the work behind them. But hey, at least it all sounds official, right?

Why We Still Use Corporate Jargon

Here’s the twist: jargon isn’t always a villain.

Research in organizational communication shows that companies adopt specialized language to gain legitimacy. Industry-specific jargon signals expertise. It shows professionalism and alignment with norms. If you’re a doctor, an engineer, or a pilot, technical jargon actually saves time and prevents errors because everyone on the team knows exactly what those terms mean.

But here’s the catch: those teams have a shared understanding.

Inside organizations, that shared understanding often breaks down. Research has also shown that managers who use little to no jargon are actually seen as more trustworthy by employees. In other words, jargon may impress people outside the organization, but inside, it creates headaches.

The real problem isn’t jargon itself—it’s forgetting who you’re talking to.

Know Your Audience

Before you use a term like “OKRs” or “value prop,” pause and ask yourself: Does everyone in this room actually know what that means?

Inside your core team, shared language can be a time-saver. If your product team refers to an MVP, everyone knows you mean minimum viable product—not most valuable player. But when you step outside that team bubble and into a meeting with sales, HR, or external partners, that same shortcut can become a speed bump.

What’s familiar in one department can feel like a foreign language in another. Marketing talks about “demand gen” and “funnels.” IT throws out “DNS propagation.” Finance focuses on “run rates” and “burn.” HR wants to “360” everybody. None of these terms are wrong—but they are highly contextual. And when people don’t know what you mean, they’ll do one of two things: nod and Google it later, or tune out completely.

Here’s a better approach: assume at least one person in the room is hearing the term for the first time. Maybe it’s a new hire. Maybe it’s a partner from another department. Maybe it’s someone from a different industry where that same acronym means something else entirely. Either way, when people feel excluded, they disengage.

The best communicators—and the best leaders—meet people where they are. They don’t oversimplify, but they do make sure no one gets left behind.

Clarity Is a Competitive Advantage

Clarity is kindness.

Whether you’re leading a team or sending a quick email, your words do more than convey information. They shape how people feel about the work—and about you. Nothing slows down a team like a message that has to be reread three times just to be understood. And as communication gets more informal—thanks to Slack, emojis, and even memes—clarity matters more than ever. You don’t need to send GIFs to the board of directors, but you can write like a real person instead of a corporate buzzword generator.

Here’s a simple contrast:

“We’ll leverage our core competencies to achieve stakeholder alignment.”

vs.

“Here’s how we’re using our strengths to meet what our stakeholders need.”

Which one would you rather read?

Clarity doesn’t just improve comprehension—it builds trust. When people don’t have to decode your message, they focus on what you’re actually saying. And they see that you respect their time.

So before you hit send or speak up in a meeting, ask yourself:

Would a smart, motivated outsider understand this?
Would I say this out loud in a conversation?
Can I cut any words without losing meaning?

Nobody ever complains that a message was too clear. Or too short.

Call Out Fake Complexity

Sometimes, jargon isn’t just confusing—it’s a smokescreen. In some organizations, language is used to make something sound more important than it is. If you’ve ever heard a sentence that sounds impressive but doesn’t actually say anything, you’ve seen this in action. Phrases like:

“We’re architecting a holistic transformation framework to unlock cross-functional synergies.”

Sound fancy. But what’s actually happening?

One of the easiest ways to spot unnecessary work—or questionable priorities—is to listen to how people talk about them. If you can’t understand what’s being said, you’re not the problem. The language is.

This is why it’s okay—important, even—to ask, “What does that actually mean?” Or, “Can you give me an example?” You don’t have to be snarky. Just be curious. Either the person will clarify, and everyone will benefit, or they won’t—and you’ve just exposed a deeper issue.

Calling out fake complexity isn’t rude. It’s responsible. It saves time. It protects your team from wasting effort on meaningless work. And as a manager, you set the tone. When you say, “Let’s simplify that,” you give everyone else permission to do the same.

In the end, work that matters doesn’t need to hide behind big words. It speaks for itself.

The Real Role of Corporate Jargon

So let’s be clear: corporate jargon isn’t the enemy. It’s just a tool.

When used with the right audience, it speeds things up. But when it confuses or excludes people, it slows everyone down. The trouble is, jargon tends to creep in during moments of uncertainty. We use it to delay, to mask doubt, or to sound like we’re in control when we’re really just treading water.

But you don’t need jargon to sound competent. You need clarity. Clarity builds trust. Trust builds momentum. And that’s what drives high-performing teams forward.

Image credit: David Burkus

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Scenario Planning for CSOs: Building Multiple Futures into One Strategic Plan

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Scenario Planning for CSOs: Building Multiple Futures Into One Strategic Plan

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

Ask a room of executives whether they do scenario planning and most of them will say yes. Ask to see the scenarios and you’ll usually get three slides: a good case, a base case and a bad case, each one a slightly adjusted version of the same spreadsheet.

I don’t blame them. That’s what the exercise has been reduced to, and a spreadsheet with a pessimistic column isn’t scenario planning. It’s the same future with the volume knob turned up and down.

For a Chief Strategy Officer, the real challenge is a harder one. You have to carry several genuinely different futures in your head, and then produce one strategic plan that doesn’t fall apart if the wrong one shows up. Here’s how I’d approach it.

Why three slides isn’t enough

The good-base-bad structure shares a hidden assumption: that the future differs from your forecast only in degree. A bit better, a bit worse. But the futures that actually blindside organizations are different in kind. A regulation reverses. A customer behavior flips. A competitor arrives from an industry you never watched.

You can’t see a difference in kind by adjusting a growth rate. You only see it by asking what different worlds the signals in front of you could be pointing toward.

Start from signals, not from a template

The most common mistake in scenario work is starting with the scenarios. Somebody picks two big uncertainties, draws a two-by-two grid, and fills in the four boxes with the most vivid story each combination suggests. It looks rigorous. It’s also built on whichever two uncertainties the loudest person in the room happened to pick.

A sturdier method works from the ground up, which is how the [FutureHacking™](https://bradenkelley.com/offerings/futurehacking/) approach is built:

Collect signals. Small, specific observations about what’s changing: a competitor’s strange hire, a policy shift, a customer behavior that doesn’t fit your model.
Group them into trends. The patterns those signals suggest. This is where the team has to argue about what it’s actually seeing.
Build a set of possible futures from the trends. Several, and different enough that each demands a different strategic response.
Decide which future is most probable. Not to bet everything on it, but so you know where your current plan is implicitly wagered.
Choose the future you’d prefer, and map the path. That’s the part that turns a planning exercise into a strategy.

Because every future traces back to real signals, nobody can dismiss one as someone’s pet theory. The argument is about what the evidence suggests, which is a far better argument to have.

The test of a good set of futures

Not every set of scenarios is useful. Here are the questions I’d use to check yours.

Are they different enough? If one strategy works equally well in all of them, you haven’t described different futures. You’ve described one future with different labels.

Can someone defend each one with a straight face? A scenario that’s there only to look balanced, or to scare the board, doesn’t count. Each should be plausible to a thoughtful person in the room.

Does each one change a decision? If you can’t name something you’d do differently in a given future, it’s trivia, not scenario planning.

Is it tied to evidence? Every future should be traceable to signals you can point to.

From many futures to one plan

This is the part most guides skip, and it’s the real CSO problem. You don’t get to run four strategies. You have to deliver one plan. So what does carrying multiple futures into a single plan look like?

Find the moves that work everywhere. Some actions pay off in every future you’ve described. These are your no-regret moves, and they should anchor the plan.

Isolate the bets that depend on one future. Some investments make sense only if one future arrives. Name them as bets, with the future they depend on written next to them. Sometimes the right call is to place the bet. The point is that you’re doing it knowingly.

Build options for the uncertain middle. Where futures diverge, look for ways to buy the right to act later: a pilot, a partnership, a small investment that keeps a door open. Options cost little and are worth a lot if the world tilts your way.

Set tripwires. For each future, decide in advance what you’d have to see to conclude it’s arriving: a metric crossing a threshold, a regulation passing, a competitor making a particular move. Then assign someone to watch for it. A plan that says when to change course is a very different thing from one that hopes it won’t need to.

Done well, you end up with one plan that has a spine of no-regret moves, a short list of explicit bets, a handful of options and a set of tripwires. It’s a living plan that expects to be updated, which is exactly what the annual, single-future version can’t do.

The politics of it

I’d be doing you a disservice if I left out the human side. Presenting multiple futures to a leadership team can feel like admitting you don’t know the answer. Some executives hear “scenarios” and translate it as “indecision.”

The way through is to make the plan firm and the uncertainty explicit. “Here’s what we’re doing no matter what. Here are the bets we’re making and why. Here’s what would make us change our minds.” That isn’t indecision. It’s a level of clarity most single-future plans never reach.

A way to practice

If your team has never built scenarios from the ground up, start with step one. The free FutureHacking Signal Picker helps you identify and prioritize the signals worth watching, which is the foundation everything else rests on. Run it before your next planning cycle and bring the result into the room.

What I’m building next

I’m putting the finishing touches on the FutureCanvas Picker, which takes planners through the full arc: from signals, to trends, to a set of possible futures, to your most probable future, and then to the path toward the future you’d prefer. It’s the closest I’ve come to letting you feel the whole process in a single sitting.

I’m offering early access to a select group first: CSOs, strategic planners and leaders running a planning process right now who can give me honest feedback under real deadline pressure. If that’s you, reach out and let me know and I’ll follow up personally with the select few who get in first.

The plan that survives

The goal of scenario planning was never to predict. It was to build a plan that doesn’t need the prediction to be right. If your current one only works in one future, that’s worth knowing before the future gets a vote.

Image Credits: Pexels

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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A Triple-Threat Strategy for Making Progress

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A Triple-Threat Strategy for Making Progress

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re looking to make progress, the single most important skill is to see waiting as waiting.

The first place to look for waiting is the queue in front of a shared resource. Like taking a number at the deli, you queue up behind the work that got there first and your work waits its turn. And when the situation turns bad, prioritization meeting spring up to argue about the importance of one bit of work over another. Those meetings are a sure-fire sign of ineffectiveness. When these meetings spring up, it’s time to increase capacity of the shared resource to stop waiting and start making progress.

Another place to look for waiting is the process to schedule a meeting with high-level leaders. Their schedules are so full (efficiency over effectiveness) the next open meeting slot is next month. Let me translate – “As a senior leader and decision maker, I want you to delay the business-critical project until I carve out an hour so you can get me up to speed and I can tell you what to do.” The best project managers don’t wait. They schedule the meeting three weeks from now, make progress like their hair is on fire and provide a status update when the meeting finally happens. And the smartest leaders thank the project managers for using their discretion and good judgment.

A variant of the wait-for-the-most-important-leader theme is the never-ending-series-of-meetings-where-no-decisions-are-made scenario. The classic example of this unhealthy lifestyle is where a meeting to make a decision spawns a never-ending series of weekly meetings with 12 or more regular attendees where the initial agenda of making a decision death spirals into an ever-changing, and ultimately disappearing agenda. Everyone keeps meeting, but no one remembers why. And the decision is never made. The saddest part is that no one remembers that project is blocked by the non-decision.

The first place to look for waiting is the queue in front of a shared resource. Like taking a number at the deli, you line up behind the work that got there first and your work waits its turn. And when the situation turns bad, prioritization meeting spring up to argue about the importance of one bit of work over another. Those meetings are a sure-fire sign of ineffectiveness. It’s time to increase capacity of the shared resource to stop waiting and start making progress.

And the deadliest waiting is the waiting that we no longer see as waiting. The best example of this crippling non-waiting waiting is when we cannot work the critical path and, instead, we work on a task of secondary importance. We kid ourselves into thinking we’re improving efficiency when, in fact, we’re masking the waiting and enabling the poor decision making that starved the project of the resources it needs to work the critical path. Whether you work a non-critical path task or not, when you can’t work the critical path for a week, you delay project completion by a week. That’s a rule.

Instead of spending energy working a non-critical path task, it’s better for everyone if you do nothing. Sit at your desk and play solitaire on your computer or surf the web. Do whatever it takes for your leader to recognize you’re not making progress. And when your leader tries to chastise you, tell them to do their job and give you what you need to work the critical path.

There’s two types of work – value-added work and non-value-added work. Value-added work happens when you complete a task on the critical path. Non-value-added work happens when you wait, when you do work that’s not on the critical path, when you get ready to do work and when you clean up after doing work. In most processes, the ratio of non-value-added to value-added work is 20:1 to 200:1. Meaning, for every hour of value-added work there are twenty to two hundred hours of non-value-added work.

If you want to make progress, don’t improve how you do your value-added work. Instead, identify the non-value-added work you can stop and stop it. In that way, without changing how you do an hour long value-added task, you can eliminate twenty to two hundred hours wasted effort.

Here’s the three-pronged approach for making progress:

Prong one – eliminate waiting. Prong two – eliminate waiting. Prong three – eliminate waiting.

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Most Customer Experience Strategies Fail

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Because They’re Written For Customers, Not Employees

Most Customer Experience Strategies Fail

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

I was recently asked by an executive, what’s the biggest mistake leaders make when rolling out a customer experience (CX) strategy? My answer was simple. Most leaders think about the customer first.

For years, I have preached, “Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy to be embraced by everyone, from the CEO to the most recently hired.”

At some point, the phrase customer service was changed to customer experience. There is quite a bit of crossover between the two. Customer support and any frontline interactions customers have with employees (customer support, sales, etc.) and is part of the overall customer experience, which includes every touchpoint the customer has with a company, from browsing a website, receiving email updates, the unboxing of merchandise, and more. Regardless, both must start with a philosophical approach that the success of a CX strategy begins on the inside of the company with employees. In other words, it’s about the culture.

Employees Are the Backbone of a CX Strategy

Customers don’t have to know your CX strategy. They only have to experience it. And it’s not really the strategy they are experiencing. It’s your system. The sum of all interactions and touchpoints helps them decide whether to do business with you now and in the future. Start with the end in mind (what you want customers to experience). However, recognize that everything the customer experiences is generated from within the organization. Employees must design a process with the CX strategy in mind. Employees are trained on how their roles impact the CX strategy, whether they are on the front line, supporting those on the front line, or supporting the process that impacts CX. The point is that everything the customer experiences comes from what’s happening inside the company, and employees are what drive that experience. That’s your system.

CX Strategies Are More than Words, But That’s a Good Place to Start

The first step in creating a new CX strategy or initiative is for leadership to decide to do so. It starts at the top. Once the decision is made, the next step is to create the vision. I refer to this as a mantra. This is the “north star” that defines the CX Strategy. This is a sentence or short phrase that is simple enough for everyone to remember. For example, the Ritz-Carlton’s mantra (they call it their credo) is nine words long: We’re ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. This is not a slogan. This is their defining CX statement, and all employee training on customer/guest service focuses on bringing this mantra to life. While a mantra is just words, it is the definition of your CX system.

All Employees Must Know Their Role in a CX Strategy

While the mantra may be both inspirational and aspirational, what employees really need is direction. Inspiration tells them why. Direction tells them how. Once the mantra is created, every employee must know it, memorize it, learn how their role in the organization plays into it, and then be properly trained to it. Even people behind the scenes impact CX. A warehouse employee who never interacts with customers may pack a box improperly, resulting in a customer service issue. All employees must know and understand the mantra and take responsibility for their part of the experience.

Employees Need to Know They Are Doing CX Right

Years ago, I developed a six-step process to build a customer-centric culture. It starts with creating the CX vision (the mantra) and ends with celebrating success. It’s important for employees to know their hard work is paying off.

Final Words

The CX strategy you build falls into two areas: people and process. Training people in their roles and responsibilities is critical. Creating a process that customers find easy and frictionless demonstrates your system is working. When you combine people skills with a well-thought-out process, you have your system.

Don’t tell people to be amazing. Train them on how to do so. Analyze every touchpoint a customer has with you and optimize it.

Let the employees and departments that impact the touchpoints know how important it is to deliver on your CX strategy.

And if nothing else, remember this: Even though your CX strategy is about the customer, your customers don’t experience your strategy. They experience your system.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Image Credits: Unsplash

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20 Philosophical Questions to Wrap Your Head Around

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20 Philosophical Questions to Wrap Your Head Around

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

MSN published a piece with this title, and I am complete sucker for such things, mainly as a way to pressure test the views I express in The Infinite Staircase. I plan to answer as many of these questions as I can, one at a time, and invite you to follow along to play the same game in parallel with your own ideas about what’s what.

Today’s Topic? What is the true essence of reality? You gotta love a question that has three words in it, true, essence, and reality, none of which are readily definable! Here’s the paragraph that follows:

The article titled ‘What Is the True Nature of Reality?‘, published on the Curious Matrix website, explains how throughout history countless philosophers and scientists have grappled with the mysteries of reality. Their exploration encompasses both the realm encompassing matter and particles as well as the intangible aspects of existence. This philosophical dualism has sparked an array of probing questions; What truly constitutes the essence of the mind? How does it relate to the body? Do they exist independently? When we ponder the nature of the reality we inevitably question our perceptions. Contemplate the very core of existence.

By the way, it is worth clicking through to read that article because it goes way beyond the mind/matter dualism that is summarized above. Setting that aside, however, how should we reply to the question itself? Note that it has changed the phrasing from “true nature of reality” to “true essence of reality” which actually makes a difference, and I am going to stick with the former because the latter makes the assumption that reality coalesces into an essence, which is not something I can agree to.

My answer is that the true nature of reality is a hierarchy of systems, each one of which emerges from the ones prior, with no top or bottom system clearly in view. In The Infinite Staircase I make the case for a stack of eleven such systems, beginning with three at the bottom that are materialistic in nature (physics, chemistry, and biology), all of which are all governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or what I call the metaphysics of entropy. These are followed by four systems that are organic in nature (desire, consciousness, values, and culture), representing the evolution of life prior to the arrival of mankind, all governed by the dynamics of natural and sexual selection, or what I call the metaphysics of Darwinism. Those underpinnings tee up the topmost set of systems. ones that are distinctively human in nature (language, narrative, analytics, and theory), all governed by symbols and symbolism, or what I call the metaphysics of memes.

The advantage of this framework is that, instead of limiting ourselves to one or two foundations, we can refer to any of eleven possible platforms, alone or in combination with others, to explain any particular aspect of reality. Here’s how one might take advantage of this to answer the questions that are embedded in the latter half of the paragraph quotes above.

What constitutes the essence of mind? Mind is made up of multiple systems in the staircase, but the primary two are narrative and analytics, both leveraging the system of language. That is, most of our conscious experience is taken up with us telling stories to others or to ourselves and processing those stories to extract knowledge or entertainment. In support of this activity, our minds are powered by our brains, hence involving the stairstep of consciousness and all the material systems below it, so no, our minds cannot be independent of our bodies. At the same time, minds are socially developed, bringing in the stairsteps of values, culture, and language.

In sum, the true nature of our minds is that they are a layer cake of systems interoperating with one another in service to us executing our strategies for living. The fact that we have success in these efforts is demonstrated by the real-world outcome of our continued existence. This suggests that we have no pressing need to question our perceptions. The thing to question instead is the notion that there is a “very core” to our existence, a true essence of reality. That concept is way too monistic, given the complexity of the system’s hierarchy and its interdependent operations.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Gemini

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Three Audits Before You Finalize the 2027 Plan: Customer, Employee and Partner Experience

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Three Audits Before You Finalize the 2027 Plan: Customer, Employee and Partner Experience

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

It’s October, which means somewhere in your organization a spreadsheet called something like “FY27 Investment Requests” is quietly filling up. Every department has a list. Every list has a champion. Every champion has a slide explaining why their item is the most important thing the company could possibly fund.

And every one of those slides is built on the same raw material: what that department already believes.

That’s the problem with most annual planning. The requests that win aren’t the ones backed by the best evidence. They’re the ones presented by the most persuasive person, in the room, on the day the budget gets cut. If you’d like to change that for 2027, there’s still time, and the most useful thing you can do with it is look at your organization from three directions you probably haven’t looked at together: through your customers’ eyes, your employees’ eyes and your partners’ eyes.

Why now, specifically

Timing matters here for two reasons.

First, the planning window is open and it won’t be for long. Once the 2027 budget is locked, findings from an audit become next year’s problem, and next year’s problem has to compete for money that’s already been spoken for. An audit finished in November can change the plan. An audit finished in February can only decorate it.

Second, the money is under scrutiny. Headline inflation hit 3.7% in September, and the Fed raised rates last month for the first time in three years, with more possible. When capital gets more expensive, every line item has to justify itself harder. That’s a good time to swap “we believe” for “we found.”

Why three audits and not one

Most organizations that take experience seriously look at one of the three, usually the customer. That’s a good instinct. It’s also an incomplete one, because the three experiences are links in the same chain.

Your employees create your customer experience. A frustrated, under-equipped frontline team can’t deliver a good one, however polished the strategy deck. Your partners, whether resellers, suppliers, integrators, agencies or distributors, deliver pieces of your customer experience too, and when they stumble, your customer blames you, not them. Fix only the customer-facing symptom and you’ll often be treating a cause that sits in one of the other two.

Here’s the practical test. Pick any customer complaint you’ve heard this year and ask: was the root cause in our product or process, in the way our people are set up to work, or in something a partner handles for us? In my experience, the honest answer is “all three, depending on the complaint.” One audit sees one third of the picture.

The customer experience audit

This is the one most teams already understand, and the case for doing it before planning is straightforward. Surveys and dashboards tell you what customers have been willing to score. They’re far less good at telling you about the silent downgrades, the workarounds and the quiet frustrations that never show up as a number until renewal.

An independent audit walks the journey the way a customer does, not the way your internal process diagram says it should work, and finds the friction your own team has stopped noticing. Planning-wise, it gives you:

A ranked list of where customers actually struggle, instead of where the loudest customer complained last.
A way to separate friction that costs you money from friction that’s merely annoying.
Evidence for the investments that prevent churn and protect revenue, which are the hardest to defend when budgets tighten.

If you haven’t put a number on what that friction costs, the CX ROI Calculator is a good place to start, and the Customer Experience Audit page explains what an independent audit covers.

The employee experience audit

Here’s where most plans have a blind spot. We budget for tools, systems and programs for employees without ever asking whether the people using them find them workable.

An employee experience audit looks at how work actually gets done: the tools that slow people down, the approvals that add nothing, the handoffs where things fall through, the manual workarounds that exist because the official process doesn’t fit reality. It also listens to the frontline, who know exactly where customers get frustrated and are often the least consulted people in the building.

For planning, it tells you:

Which internal friction is quietly capping your customer experience, since your people can only deliver what their systems and processes let them.
Where the hidden costs are: time lost to rework, turnover in critical roles, and talented people spending their days on tasks nobody should be doing by hand.
Which investments in tooling and process will pay back, and which are expensive ways to rearrange the same frustration.

An employee-side finding is often the cheapest fix on the whole list, which makes it one of the best candidates for a budget under pressure.

The partner experience audit

This is the audit almost nobody does, which is exactly why it’s worth doing.

Partners are an extension of your organization from the customer’s point of view. The reseller who onboards your customers, the distributor who handles delivery, the integrator who implements your product: when they have a bad experience working with you, they pass it along. Slow payments, confusing onboarding, unclear support channels, a portal that fights them at every step. None of it appears in your customer data, but all of it surfaces eventually as a customer problem.

A partner experience audit looks at what it’s like to work with you: how easy it is to get started, get support, get paid and get answers. For planning, it helps you:

Find the places where partner friction is leaking into customer experience before it becomes a customer complaint.
Decide where investing in partner enablement, portals, documentation or support will do more for customers than investing in the customer-facing side directly.
Spot partners who are quietly disengaging, a risk that never appears on a revenue dashboard until it’s too late.

How the three audits help you prioritize

Collecting findings is only half the job. The value comes from using them to rank the investment list. Here’s the approach I’d take.

1. Tag every finding with its evidence. For each issue, note whether it came from observation, direct customer, employee or partner input, or data. Findings that show up in more than one audit move to the top, because they’re real.

2. Look for the cross-audit patterns. A customer complaint about slow resolution, plus an employee finding about a clunky internal system, plus a partner finding about unclear escalation paths: that’s not three problems. It’s one problem seen from three angles, and fixing it pays off three times.

3. Score each candidate investment on three things. Impact on customers and revenue, effort and cost, and confidence in the evidence. Be honest about the third one. A confident hunch is still a hunch.

4. Sort into three piles. Quick fixes that cost little and should happen early in the year. Major investments that deserve a place in the 2027 budget on the strength of the evidence. And items to hold or drop, because the audits showed the problem lives somewhere else.

5. Write down what you expect to change. Attach a measure to each funded item, so that next October you’re reviewing results, not rebuilding the case from scratch.

A realistic timeline

If you want findings in hand before the budget closes, you don’t have long, so here’s a workable sequence:

Now through early November: scope the three audits and line up access to customers, frontline staff and partners. Start with the customer audit, since it usually has the most evidence behind it, and run the other two in parallel at a lighter scale if resources are tight.
Mid-November: consolidate the findings, look for the cross-audit patterns and score the candidate investments.
Before budgets lock: bring the ranked list to planning with the evidence attached, so the conversation is about findings, not about who argues best.

Even a lighter version of all three beats a deep dive into one, because the point of this exercise is the combination.

What I’d say to a skeptical CFO

You’ve probably already thought of the objection: another set of studies, in a year when everyone is cutting. Here’s the answer I’d give. The audits aren’t an additional line on the investment list. They’re how you decide which of the existing lines deserve to survive. If an audit helps you avoid even one major investment aimed at the wrong problem, it has paid for itself, and in my experience, there’s usually more than one on the list.

Start with the one that’s closest

If you can only do one audit before the plan closes, make it the customer experience audit, and treat the other two as lenses to add as soon as you can. The Customer Experience Audit page explains what an independent audit covers and how it works, and the Experience Design Glossary is useful for getting your team using the same words before the conversation starts.

The 2027 plan is going to get written either way. The only question is whether it’s built on what your organization believes or on what it’s actually like to be a customer, an employee or a partner. I know which one I’d bet my budget on.

Download the Customer Experience Audit Checklist as a PDF

Image Credits: ChatGPT

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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Embrace the Genius of the Obvious

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Embrace the Genius of the Obvious

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I’m currently reading Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao’s new book, The Friction Project, which is really a breath of fresh air. I was particularly struck by one passage in the beginning in which they write, “Friction fixers pride themselves in being masters of the obvious. They are mighty skeptical of secret solutions, shocking surprises, and miracle cures.”

It’s a simple truth that humans crave status and taking on an air of sophistication is one way to attain it. We have an urge to inject complexity, to make the case that we see something others don’t. This isn’t a moral failing, but as Will Storr explains in The Status Game, an integral part of how people relate to each other and signal identity.

So the first step toward embracing the genius of the obvious is to recognize that it isn’t something we naturally do. We tend to look for interesting stories involving complex phenomena behind things in our lives, which is why superstitions and conspiracy theories catch on. It takes effort and expertise to filter out complexity and expose the simple core.

Make It Easier For People To Perform And They Will Perform Better

While we like things to be simple, complexity is somewhat unavoidable. Complexity scientist Sam Arbesman’s book, Overcomplicated, explains why. We start out with simple intentions, but then as we try to scale things up and do more, things naturally get more complicated through two processes: Accretion and interaction.

For example, the US constitution is a fairly simple document, but to run a modern society, the legal code has to deal with a wide range of activity, including crimes, contract disputes, family law and many, many other things, which is while the legal code is almost unimaginably large and complex. Take into account the interactions between different jurisdictions and it’s fair to say that no one on earth understands the entire US legal system.

The same thing happens in organizations. You can develop a simple process for, say, getting expenses approved, but you necessarily need to expand it to take into account a variety of different expenses, for different situations and levels of seniority. A junior executive taking a client out to lunch is very different from a more senior executive hiring a contractor. Add in interactions between different departments and functions and things get complicated.

That’s why Sutton and Rao make the seemingly obvious, yet profound, point that we need to actively work to make ourselves accountable for friction by being responsible trustees of others’ time. We need to limit the “smart talk” and “jargon monoxide,” that obscure rather than reveal issues and engage in a “subtraction mindset” in order to actively remove barriers.

It is this last point that I think is the most helpful. Processes accrete over time and, if you don’t remove those that outlive their usefulness, they stay on as zombies that gum up the works. Leaders need to get comfortable with saying, “no.” It’s too easy to enact a new policy or to start a new initiative. We need to do the hard work of figuring out what to remove.

Poor People Have Problems That Cause Them To Miss Work

Managers often apply a procurement mindset to hiring. They determine what the “market rate” is for a particular task, role or set of skills, and then pay accordingly. Just as it doesn’t make sense to pay more for rent or a piece of equipment than you have to, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to pay more for an employee to do a job than you have to, right?

Not quite. In The Case for Good Jobs MIT’s Zeynep Ton points out that, unlike equipment and real estate, people have lives and those lives affect how they do their jobs. If they can’t afford healthy food, child care, a decent place to live or to be able to cover unplanned expenses, things will go wrong in their lives, which will cause them to miss work.

With more absenteeism, managers need to cover for employees and don’t have time to manage properly. Increased employee turnover results in increased training costs as well as greater burdens on managerial bandwidth. Morale declines along with performance, costing the business even more and, of course, because managers spend so much time plugging holes, nobody has time to fix anything.

Ton’s Good Jobs Institute works with organizations to fix the problem and has seen impressive results. From businesses as diverse as Aetna insurance, PayPal and Quest Diagnostics, raising the pay of financially insecure employees reduced turnover, which allowed the firms to invest in skills, manage more effectively and improve processes.

There is an obvious logic to it all. Poor people don’t make a lot of money, so raising their salaries doesn’t cost very much. In many, if not most, cases the increased productivity more than pays for itself if leaders are able to leverage a more stable, motivated workforce to improve operations and increase competitiveness.

People Resist Change

One of the most obvious principles about any kind of transformational initiative is that any time you ask people to change what they think or what they do, there will be people who won’t like it. Some will work to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.

We all know this because we’ve all experienced it (and it has also been thoroughly documented in research). But some would have us believe that it doesn’t exist. Some so-called “change management experts” even claim that resistance to change is an illusion—the product of a failure to identify and communicate a value proposition rather than any real hostility to change.

This is so obviously hogwash that it’s hard to take it seriously, but then if you look at popular change management frameworks such as Kotter’s 8 Steps or Prosci’s ADKAR model, they have little or anything to say about overcoming resistance to change. In the rare instances they do discuss resistance they assume it is rational resistance and suggest some version of the information deficit model that we know doesn’t work.

That’s why at the beginning of every change initiative we work on we do a resistance inventory to anticipate who will resist, what form that resistance will take and what strategies can mitigate it. You can’t anticipate everything, but with a little planning, you can develop strategies to overcome even the most irrational, virulent resistance.

Don’t Overlook The Simple Truths

Ockham’s Razor, or the “principle of parsimony,” is often interpreted as another version of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule. Yet it is far more profound than that. A far more accurate translation from the original Latin is, “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, we should think before we add things that complicate matters.

In modern life we are constantly adding things. William of Ockham was a monk, who led a simple existence. We’re expected to build things and, as we do, principles, rules and procedures accumulate over time and, as a matter of course, multiply unnecessarily. We need to do the hard work of subtraction, taking out things that might have once made sense but don’t anymore.

When I’m writing, I always like to think my readers have a “cognitive budget” that they are willing to spend on a particular blog post, email, article or book chapter. When I edit, I always go through and ask, “is this worth the cognitive budget?” If there’s a doubt, I take it out. I’ve learned to apply the same principle to other facets of my life, to take out what doesn’t need to be there.

That’s the genius of the obvious. Simple truths are rarely left out in the open, but obscured by the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. It takes work to dig them out and that work requires focus. It doesn’t happen by itself, but takes determination to whittle down to the core, so that the truths we seek can reveal themselves to us.

We all need to hold ourselves accountable. Uncovering the obvious is not a simple thing, but the work of a lifetime.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Happy Brains Make Happy Doctors

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Happy Brains Make Happy Doctors

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

In this day and age, many doctors have fallen into a negative rut. They are filled with cynicism, negativity, complaining and self-defeating thoughts, many of which we see posted on social media sites like LinkedIn groups and Twitter feeds.

One of your entrepreneurial habits should be to be positive. To be positive, you need to practice having positive thoughts.

Michelle Gielan’s Resilient Optimism is a science‑backed guide showing that optimism is not a fixed trait but a trainable skill, built through five core behaviors that help people stay hopeful, grounded, and effective in challenging times.

The book structures its advice around five repeatable habits:

Recalibrate your mindset – Shift focus from setbacks to what’s working, reframing negative thoughts.

Transform your stress response – Reframe pressure as a performance‑fueling resource rather than a drain.

Triage your commitments – Protect time, energy, and attention by prioritizing what matters most.

Recharge strategically – Use recovery methods that truly restore capacity, avoiding burnout.

Connect the dots – Notice and share evidence of progress and the impact of your actions.

I would add learning how to say “no”.

Having negative thoughts has a neuropsychological basis, so re-wiring will take some cortical renovation that takes practice, practice, practice.

Here are the steps to having a happy brain:

1. Start noticing when you have negative thoughts

2. Some of your negative thoughts might, in fact, have a factual basis. However, in many or most instances, they won’t, so find evidence to the contrary.

3. With practice, practice, practice you should be thinking positively in 4 months. Imagine. Happy by this Fall.

4. Step outside of yourself

5. Exaggerate the absurdity of your negative thoughts. Can you tell a joke about your negative self? Here’s one for a start:

A woman was at her hairdresser’s getting her hair styled for a trip to Rome with her husband. She mentioned the trip to the hairdresser, who responded:

“Rome? Why would anyone want to go there? It’s crowded and dirty. You’re crazy to go to Rome So, how are you getting there?”

“We’re taking American”, was the reply. “We got a great rate!”

“American?” exclaimed the hairdresser.” That’s a terrible airline. Their planes are old, their flight attendants are ugly, and they’re always late. So, where are you staying in Rome?”

“We’ll be at this exclusive little place over on Rome’s Tiber River called Teste.”

“Don’t go any further. I know that place. Everybody thinks it’s going to be something special and exclusive, but it’s really a dump, the worst hotel in the city! The rooms are small, the service is surly, and they’re overpriced. So, whatcha’ doing when you get there?”

“We’re going to go to see the Vatican and we hope to see the Pope.”

“That’s rich,” laughed the hairdresser. “You and a million other people trying to see him. He’ll look the size of an ant. Boy, good luck on this lousy trip of yours. You’re going to need it.”

A month later, the woman again came in for a hairdo. The hairdresser asked her about her trip to Rome.

“It was wonderful,” explained the woman, “not only were we on time in one of American’s brand-new planes, but it was overbooked, and they bumped us up to first class. The food and wine were wonderful, and I had a handsome 28-year-old steward who waited on me hand and foot.

And the hotel was great! They’d just finished a $5 million remodeling job, and now it’s a jewel, the finest hotel in the city. They, too, were overbooked, so they apologized and gave us their owner’s suite at no extra charge!”

“Well,” muttered the hairdresser, “that’s all well and good, but I know you didn’t get to see the Pope.”

“Actually, we were quite lucky, because as we toured the Vatican, a Swiss Guard tapped me on the shoulder and explained that the Pope likes to meet some of the visitors, and if I’d be so kind as to step into his private room and wait, the Pope would personally greet me. Sure enough, five minutes later, the Pope walked through the door and shook my hand! I knelt down and he spoke a few words to me.”

“Oh, really! What’d he say?”

“He said: “Where’d you get the awful hairdo?”

6. Have a positive thought in reserve when it is time to change lanes.

Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, maybe they will begin to offer an option where group managers can ask them to flag negative posts as a form of social cognitive reappraisal. Wouldn’t that be a positive step?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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The Software Renaissance

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The Software Renaissance

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

For about two years now, I’ve been hearing the same prediction at conferences, in elevator pitches and at the occasional awkward dinner party: AI is going to write all the code, so the people who write code are finished. Usually the person saying it has the calm, slightly sad expression of someone delivering news about a distant relative.

I’d like to offer a different diagnosis. I don’t think we’re watching the end of the coder. I think we’re at the start of a software renaissance, and the coders are about to be more in demand than ever, just not for the reasons we expected.

The old math of software

Start with why software used to be so scarce. Building a custom application was expensive: months of work, a team, a project manager, a budget with a comma in it. That cost only made sense if you could spread it across a very large number of users or a very large number of dollars. So software got built for the big problems at big companies with big customer bases. Everyone else got a spreadsheet, a pile of sticky notes, and a heroic employee named Linda who “just knows how it works.”

Think about everything that never got built under that math. The scheduling tool for the 12-person plumbing company. The inventory app for the regional distributor. The intake workflow for the three-attorney law firm. The little internal dashboard that would have saved a department four hours a week. Not one of them was a bad idea. They were all just too small to justify the price tag. Linda kept the whole thing running on memory and caffeine.

What changes when building gets cheap

Now bring the cost of building software down by a large factor, which is what AI-assisted development is doing. The math flips. A project that was impossible to justify at $200,000 becomes an easy yes at a small fraction of that. All those never-built applications suddenly clear the bar.

Economists have a name for this pattern. When something gets dramatically cheaper, people don’t use the same amount of it and pocket the savings. They find a hundred new uses for it. We’ve seen it with electricity, with computing power, with bandwidth. Cheaper software won’t mean less software. It will mean vastly more software, built for far more people and far smaller problems.

And somebody has to build, direct and look after all of it.

The coder’s job is changing, not disappearing

Here’s the part the doom-sayers keep skipping. AI can generate code at a rate no person can match. It cannot, on its own, decide what the plumbing company actually needs, notice that the requirements contradict each other, judge whether the thing it built is safe, or keep it running when the world around it changes. That work takes someone who understands systems, who can ask the right questions, and who is willing to be accountable when it breaks at 7:00 a.m.

So the role shifts from typing every line to orchestrating: defining the problem clearly, directing the AI, reviewing what comes back, handling security and data, and maintaining the result. Call it conductor, not typist. And the conductor now has a whole orchestra to lead, for clients who never could have afforded one before.

Every company that couldn’t justify a development team last year has a reason to want at least one capable person this year. That’s a lot of newly interested employers.

What the data says (and doesn’t)

I like to check my optimism against the numbers, so I did. According to Indeed’s Hiring Lab, U.S. software developer job postings rose almost 15% between February 2025 and June 2026, while postings overall fell about 7% over the same stretch. That’s the opposite of what the “AI replaces coders” story predicted.

I’d be telling you only half the story if I stopped there. Those same postings are still about 27.5% below where they stood in February 2020, so this is a partial recovery from a low base, not a boom. And much of the recent growth is in senior roles and roles with AI in the title. Indeed also describes the link to AI tools as a correlation, not proof of cause.

I actually find that last point supports the renaissance thesis rather than undermining it. If the demand is for experienced people who can direct AI and own the result, that is exactly the orchestrator role I’m describing. The loss, at least for now, falls hardest on the entry-level, typing-focused end of the job. That’s a real problem, and it deserves its own conversation about how the next generation of developers gets trained. But it’s a shift in the work, not a vanishing of it.

The deflation angle

Now for the part I find most interesting, and I’ll flag that this is an argument, not a forecast.

The latest numbers show headline inflation at 3.7% in September, up from 3.4% in August. The Fed raised rates to a range of 3.75% to 4.00% last month, its first hike in three years, and has signaled more may follow. When the central bank’s main tool is making money more expensive, it works by slowing down demand. That’s a blunt instrument.

There’s another way to bring prices down: produce more with less. This is the oldest anti-inflation tool there is, and it has nothing to do with interest rates. Productivity.

Here’s how a software renaissance fits in. When a small distributor builds the inventory tool it always needed, it wastes less stock. When the law firm automates its intake, the same people handle more clients. When the plumbing company schedules its crews well, it makes more calls per day. Each of those is a small business doing more with the same or fewer resources. Multiply that by millions of small and mid-sized businesses, and you have a broad productivity gain that pushes the cost of delivering goods and services down, not up.

I don’t want to oversell it. Software alone won’t tame inflation, productivity gains take time to show up in the data, and the forces behind current prices are bigger than any one technology. But if cheap, custom software lets millions of organizations do more with less, that’s a quiet deflationary force working in the same direction as the Fed, and unlike a rate hike, it doesn’t require anyone to give up growth to get there.

What to do about it

If you run a business: make a list of the work in your organization that lives in a spreadsheet, someone’s head, or a stack of email. Each item is a candidate. Then find someone who can orchestrate the AI to build it and keep it healthy, whether that’s an employee, a contractor or a small firm.

If you’re a developer: lean into being the person who can define the problem, direct the tools, check the output and own the outcome. That skill set is in demand and is likely to stay that way.

If you’re worried about all this: I understand. Every technological shift feels like an ending to those standing in the middle of it. But I’ve spent my career studying what happens next, and the pattern is rarely “the work disappears.” It’s “the work changes, and there’s a lot more of it than anyone expected.”

Linda, for the record, will be fine. She’ll finally get to take a vacation.

Image Credits: Gemini

Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.

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