Operational Excellence Mixtape - May 15, 2026
News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace better.
Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation
You don’t uncover a root cause in the boardoom
I’ll admit it. I’ve done it too. Sat in a boardroom with a group of cross-functional stakeholders to brainstorm the cause of a problem. We set the timer at 15 minutes, ask “why?” a bunch of times, create a beautiful fishbone diagram, and boldly declare that our problems are due to a “lack of training”. Without any evidence. Without any testing. Without any direct observation.
And the worst part? This is the norm in most organizations. Predictably, we will be back in that boardroom in three months, staring at the same problem, having burned through time, budget, and whatever trust our teams had left in the process.
AI and the Cinderella test
Every organization has a choice to make about AI. Use it to replace human judgment, squeezing more output from fewer people, or use it to multiply human capability, freeing people to do work that actually matters.
The choice leaders make reveals something deeper than a technology strategy. It reflects how they fundamentally see their people.
Steve Denning uses an unlikely lens to explore this: the fairy tale of Cinderella. The story, it turns out, is a surprisingly sharp mirror for how executives think about value creation, and whether the people around them are assets to be developed or costs to be managed.
The real payoff of Operational Excellence
I’ve heard it many times from leaders partway through a transformation: “It’ll be great when we mature and have no more ‘problems’ to solve.”
It’s an understandable thought. Teams are knocking out improvements at a rapid clip, burning through years of accumulated improvement debt, and it’s natural to wonder , “will there be anything left to fix someday?”.
But here’s the thing: that finish line doesn’t exist. Especially not in an era where the pace of change keeps raising the bar. The organizations I’ve seen thrive aren’t the ones with fewer problems, they’re the ones that have gotten remarkably good at solving them.
Those are two very different places to work.
Creating a Culture of Improvement
What got you here won’t get you there
I’ve had the meeting before the meeting, before the meeting. Making sure everyone has all the answers in case the Executive asks any question at all. Not only must we have all the answers, we must have a concrete 3 month action plan that will definitely resolve any potential concerns. Slide decks. Rigorous analysis. No surprises.
This worked, sort of, when the pace of change was slower, domain knowledge was stable, and the future was relatively predictable. But the world most leaders are operating in today looks nothing like that.
In an era of continuous change and increasingly complex organizations, omniscience, control, and self-assuredness are becoming liabilities. Humility, curiosity, and collaboration are taking their place as the more effective path forward.
And yet, many senior leaders got to where they are by mastering precisely the former. This is how they were taught to lead. This is how they were rewarded. Unlearning it is no small ask.
Why cooperation beats competition for innovation
Early in my career, I worked at an organization that embraced the hyper-competitiveness of Welchism, complete with the infamous “rank and yank” system. As a young engineer trying to prove myself, I didn’t mind it. But when I moved to a healthcare organization, that same competitive instinct became a liability. I found myself competing against colleagues who shared my goals and my outcomes. Worse, the laser focus on winning narrowed my thinking. I stopped exploring ideas that felt too risky to fail at publicly. It quietly held back both my effectiveness and my growth.
What I didn’t have language for at the time, research has since made clear. New research by PhD student Valentino Chai and Nir Halevy, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that cooperative workplaces generate greater feelings of autonomy than competitive ones. Counter-intuitive as it sounds, the reason is straightforward: when people feel safe to explore wider hypotheses without fear of failure or criticism, they think bigger and take better risks.
Unhealthy competition doesn’t just damage relationships. It shrinks the thinking of the people you’re counting on to solve your hardest problems.
If you want a culture of innovation and autonomy, the lever isn’t individual ambition. It’s psychological safety and shared purpose.
Leaders have better lives, but worse days
Leadership carries a weight that doesn’t show up in the job description. The unpopular decisions. The ambiguity. The responsibility for outcomes that depend on people, circumstances, and forces well beyond your control. The leaders I’ve worked alongside who struggled most weren’t necessarily the ones facing the hardest problems. They were the ones who had quietly lost their sense of purpose.
This is what makes a recent finding from Gallup so important. Leaders, it turns out, experience greater emotional burden than individual contributors, but that burden is significantly reduced when they are more engaged in their work. Engagement isn’t a perk. For leaders, it’s a buffer against the chronic stress that comes with the role.
And engagement for leaders isn’t abstract. Gallup points to specific investments that move the needle: purpose, people, and performance. Leaders who stay connected to why their work matters, who invest genuinely in the people around them, and who maintain a clear line of sight to meaningful outcomes are better equipped to carry the weight of leadership without being crushed by it.
The leaders who last aren’t necessarily the toughest. They’re the most intentionally engaged.
Coaching - Developing Yourself and Others
What we lose when work gets too easy
As AI promises to remove friction from nearly every corner of our work, a quiet but important question is emerging: what do we lose when everything becomes effortless?
Neuroscience professor Moshe Bar has a sobering answer. Humans don’t just tolerate challenge and struggle, we are wired for it. Engaging with difficult problems, navigating uncertainty, and pushing against resistance are precisely the conditions that generate what Bar calls “vitality”: a state of aliveness and capability that comfort simply cannot produce. Remove too much friction, and you don’t liberate people. You quietly diminish them.
This has direct implications for how we design work and processes. The instinct in operational excellence is to eliminate waste, reduce complexity, and smooth out every rough edge. And often, that’s exactly right. But not all friction is waste. Some of it is the productive struggle that builds judgment, deepens expertise, and grows the problem-solving capability of your people.
The goal was never frictionless work. It was meaningful work. Those are not the same thing.
How to use AI without turning your brain to mush
I’ve been using generative AI a lot lately. When I find myself staring at a blank page, or circling a problem without making progress, I reach for my AI assistant to get unstuck. And it works. But I’ve noticed something unsettling: I feel less connected to the thinking that comes back to me so readily. Less ownership. Less depth.
It made me wonder whether I’m quietly losing my ability to think hard about hard things.
According to Adam Green, a neuroscience professor at Georgetown, that concern is worth taking seriously. Twenty years ago, fears about “digital dementia” from over-reliance on search engines and GPS turned out to be largely unfounded. But Green suggests AI may be different. The speed and completeness of what it hands back to us may be eroding something more fundamental: our capacity for sustained critical thinking.
My mother, who passed away long before generative AI became part of daily life, had an instinct for this. She was slow to hand me answers as a child. She wanted me to figure things out myself, and she was clear about why: she didn’t want to rob me of the joy of getting there on my own.
I suspect she was protecting my brain from turning to mush after all.