Principles

01 — Chase the avoided problem

Every system — organizations, markets, relationships — produces work that nobody wants to do. This work accumulates at the edges, deferred by consensus and ignored by ambition. People route around it because it carries no glory and uncertain reward. That is precisely why it matters.

The avoided problem is avoided for a reason. It is usually foundational, which means whoever solves it changes something structural rather than something superficial. Most people optimize for visibility. The compounding advantage goes to those who optimize for leverage — and leverage almost always lives where attention does not.

Glamour is a signal. Follow it away from where you need to go.

02 — Do hard things for their own sake

Outcome-dependence is a vulnerability. When your effort is contingent on a particular result, you become fragile — to circumstances you cannot control, to recognition that may not come, to timelines that will shift. The person who needs the outcome to justify the effort will stop when the outcome looks unlikely. The person who has internalized the practice will not.

Discipline pursued without attachment to reward is the only kind that compounds. The work done in the absence of an audience, the decision made correctly when the incorrect one would have gone unnoticed, the standard held when no one is measuring — these accumulate invisibly and emerge suddenly as capability that cannot be faked or rushed.

Do the hard thing because it is the right thing. The result will follow or it will not. Either way, you will have become someone who does hard things.

03 — Sell by genuinely caring

Most people approach influence as a packaging problem. They refine the pitch, sharpen the narrative, optimize the presentation — and then deliver what they already had. This is persuasion in the service of the self. It works occasionally and fails consistently over time.

The more durable approach is to begin with genuine curiosity about what the other person actually needs. Not what they say they want, and not what you assume they want — what they actually need, understood through careful attention rather than projection. When you build toward that, you are no longer selling. You are solving. The other person can feel the difference. Trust built this way does not require maintenance.

Give people what they need, not what you have. The moment you stop, they will know.

04 — Strawman before you present

A position that has not been stress-tested is not a position — it is a preference. The difference becomes apparent the moment someone pushes back. Most people treat opposition as an obstacle to overcome after the fact. The better approach is to become the opposition yourself, before anyone else has the chance.

The strongest case for anything includes the strongest case against it. Not as a formality, and not to appear thorough — but because the process of genuinely steelmanning the counterargument forces clarity that no amount of forward reasoning can produce. You find the weak points before they are found for you. You answer the hard question before it is asked. What remains is not a polished argument but a tested one.

Thoroughness is not a style. It is a form of respect — for the decision, for the people affected by it, and for your own credibility.

Frameworks

Outcomes → Incentives → Structure

Most organizations design themselves in the wrong order. They draw the org chart first — who reports to whom, how teams are divided, what the spans of control look like — and then hope the right outcomes follow. They rarely do. Structure without aligned outcomes is just bureaucracy with a diagram.

The right sequence runs the other way.

Start with outcomes. Not goals, not OKRs, not KPIs — outcomes. The specific, observable change in the world that success produces. This is harder than it sounds. Most teams, when pressed, cannot articulate what they are actually trying to change. They can describe their work. They can list their deliverables. They cannot always say what is different in the world if they succeed versus if they fail. Getting to genuine outcome alignment is where the real friction lives — and it should. If a group of people cannot agree on what they are trying to produce, no amount of planning will save them.

Once outcomes are clear, the incentive question becomes tractable. What behaviors need to happen consistently to produce those outcomes? What gets rewarded, what gets measured, what gets noticed — formally and informally? Incentives are not just compensation. They are everything that signals to people what actually matters: what gets celebrated in a meeting, what gets funded, what gets a leader's attention. Misaligned incentives will defeat aligned outcomes every time, regardless of how clearly the outcomes were defined.

Only after outcomes and incentives are settled does structure become a meaningful question. Org design, team topology, planning cadences, execution models — these are downstream decisions. They should be shaped by the incentives required to produce the outcomes, not the other way around. When structure comes first, you get teams optimized for the structure. When outcomes come first, you get teams optimized for the result.

The sequence is not complicated. The discipline to follow it is.

Foundation and experiment

Most people treat systems thinking as a way of seeing — understanding feedback loops, second-order effects, emergent behavior. That is useful. But it does not answer the more practical question that every builder eventually faces: how do you construct something that is both stable enough to depend on and flexible enough to change?

The answer is architecture. Every system worth building has two distinct layers, and confusing them is the source of most structural failure.

The foundation is what everything else rests on. It is the set of decisions, principles, and structures that must be shared, understood, and protected by everyone who works within the system. Not because they are permanent — nothing is — but because changing them carries real cost. A foundation changed carelessly destabilizes everything built on top of it. This means changes to the foundation must be deliberate and intentional, made slowly and with full awareness of what they will disturb. The foundation is not sacred. It is load-bearing.

Everything above the foundation is experimental by nature. These are the pieces designed to be tested, modified, discarded, and replaced. The goal of an experiment is not to run it indefinitely — it is to resolve it. A team that runs experiments without resolving them is not learning; it is accumulating uncertainty. The discipline of closing the loop — deciding, based on what the experiment revealed, what stays and what goes — is what separates teams that move fast from teams that merely feel busy.

This is where the apparent tension between speed and quality dissolves. Speed and quality are not opposing forces. They appear to be in conflict only when the architecture underneath them is unclear. When the foundation is solid and well understood, the layer above it can move quickly without fear of structural collapse. When experiments are designed to be resolved rather than extended, quality is not sacrificed for pace — it is produced by it. Each resolved experiment leaves the system more defined, more deliberate, more capable of moving fast on the next one.

The cultural consequence of this architecture is equally significant. When people know which decisions are foundational and which are experimental, deliberation becomes objective rather than political. Foundational changes get the scrutiny they deserve. Experimental decisions get made quickly, because the cost of a wrong answer is bounded and the value of a fast answer is high. Teams stop arguing about everything with equal intensity — because the architecture tells them which arguments matter.

Build the foundation together. Experiment relentlessly above it. Resolve experiments fast. Speed and quality are not a tradeoff — they are what the architecture produces.