Productive Flourishing

Preface: This is a chapter from a short book I've been working on for leaders going through a RIF (reduction in force or layoff). I deliberately wrote the book as broetry, with short lines and lots of white space, because the people reading it are usually stealing five minutes between hard conversations and don't have it in them to unpack my usual frameworks and philosophical wanderings. (Yes, I know that style is also what AI writes like. A human wrote this; the line breaks are on purpose.) If you or someone you know is leading through a layoff and wants the chapters as they come, sign up here.

When you’re leading through a RIF, there will be days where everything feels impossible.

There’s a saying I come back to in times like these, often attributed to Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard: “You can do one impossible thing at a time.”

You’ll think you’ve accounted for every variable and then someone tells you their visa is at risk. Or they just bought a house. Or they’re about to go on parental leave. Or the person you most trusted has quietly turned against the plan.

You’ll think you’ve hit the emotional bottom, only to find the basement you’re sitting in has sub-basements. This is normal.

A RIF doesn’t unfold like a project plan. It slams forward in lurches, layers, and ambushes. You can’t outpace it and you can’t solve the whole thing at once.

What you can do is manage one...

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In Sapiens, Harari defines three kinds of phenomena:

1. “An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and beliefs.”

2. “The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual.”

3. “The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.”1

Harari calls these phenomena, but he’s just as comfortable calling them layers of reality, and that’s how I’m using the word here. When I say “reality,” I mean the reality we actually live in, the one all these layers build together.

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So much of what matters and drives us is in that third layer. Meaning, money, status, politics, religion2 - all live in that realm. And as I wrote in How Much of Your Work is an Epicycle?, we will do a lot of work to make sure objective reality matches our inter-subjective beliefs, even when the data from objective reality doesn’t fit.

Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking that there’s a new layer of reality: algorithmic reality. As the name suggests, it’s the level of reality that’s generated by algorithms - machine learning, AI, search engines, and so on. Virtual and augmented reality are mostly algorithmic and are likely to be even more so in the future.

It’s none of the other...

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Today’s post came from a call I had with a client this morning and it’s also a bit of a companion to ’s When Commitment Debt Comes Due from last week.

It’s really easy for an easy yes to a new commitment to blow up into a whole lot of work or overwhelm us. I’m going to repurpose the project pyramid from Start Finishing to illustrate what happens.

New commitments often come in at the turquoise-colored blocks or above. Covering for a teammate who’s out often comes in there, too.

But if you’re like most folks ‘round here, you’re already at or above the five projects of that size that you can carry well. Even if you can pause one of your active projects quickly, there’s still some transition work that is itself a project for a few weeks that’s happening at the same time you’re spinning up the new project.

This liminal period will be messy and you’re likely going to feel scattered and overloaded, especially if you didn’t anticipate this new project hitting your deck. You’ve taken on all the projects and tasks that live underneath that quarter-sized commitment. And handling all of that is going to spread all of your time blocks even thinner.

The mess and the feelings are temporary and much closer to a situation than a problem. Once you’ve worked through the projects of leaving yourself breadcrumbs and adjusting to the displacement - there will be displacement - you’ll have a period...

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We often confuse a problem, a puzzle, and a situation.1

A problem is something that must or needs to be solved. It’s usually manifest because it’s painful, annoying, disgusting, or dissonant.

A puzzle is something that could be or would be good to solve. It could be “good to solve” because you enjoy the process of solving it or because the outcome you’re looking for would be a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

A situation is something that either doesn’t need to be solved or will resolve itself on its own. Situations sometimes look and feel like problems because the situation may not be what you want or need. You know you have a situation when it resolves with a true “It is what it is.” You may not like the is-ness of it, but the is-ness is not something to dwell upon. How you accept the is-ness is.

All of them rest on the same foundation: there’s a gap between the world and your vision, goals, needs, or wants. The difference is what to do about the gap.

It’s not a problem if you don’t subscribe, but doing so may help you with your problems, puzzles, and situations. 👇🏽

If you’ve been in a coaching session with me or at one of our community events, you’ve probably heard me say something like “Okay, I hear about the situation. But I’m not sure I hear a problem yet.” Or “Oh, that’s a neat puzzle. Are you making it a problem?”

What happens next is the point:...

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I was unsettled all evening after sending yesterday’s Base Teams vs Expedition Teams. I fell asleep ruminating about it.

I felt a stiffness in it that was unlike other posts that I’ve shared or was working on. Or maybe some strain. Or maybe a lack of spark. If you read it, you probably felt it, too.

At first I thought it may simply be the subject matter. But I actually love writing about teams, leadership, team dynamics, and so on. And I get excited talking to clients about team/org composition and I get excited when people get the difference between base and expedition teams and how it addresses some funk in their teaming.

What I couldn’t see all afternoon and evening was that the strain was coming from how the post got made, not from what it says. The post held up. The way I made it didn’t.

As I was falling asleep, I accepted the simpler answer: the problem was never in the post. By the time I started drafting it, I was tired, compressed, and frustrated.

Prior to drafting that one from scratch in the afternoon, which is already typically not my best writing time, I had worked on two other posts that I was much more excited by. Both of them ended up landing in my typical 1,000 +/- 200 word range.

And it was actually the fourth post I had worked on yesterday. I had edited another post earlier in the morning to add an attribution and that post would’ve been a good one to send yesterday, too. But it was also too long, landing in my typical word count...

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October has arrived, and with it, overwhelm. If I’m honest, I hit overwhelm a while back but kept pushing myself, thinking I could just get x thing done, or past y deadline, and all would right itself again. You can guess how well that wishful thinking went.

And I know all too well that feeling overwhelmed is a direct result of being overloaded. Or perhaps a more appropriate word for this time of year: overcommitted. Little by little, month by month, I’ve accumulated my fair share of commitment debt, and with only three months left in the year, it feels like that debt needs to be reduced or paid. Debt coming from:

All the things I had planned for 2026. A past version of me was perhaps overly optimistic, considering the best-case scenario, and didn’t account for the project pileup that inevitably happened when that best-case scenario didn’t pan out.

And also all the things I “planned” (intended) to do in 2026. Things that never quite made it to project status because there was no actual plan in place.

And then there were the things that showed up unexpectedly. The opportunities, events, projects, and tasks that only added weight to what I was already carrying. Along with the new ideas and possibilities the unexpected tends to bring along.

Let’s not forget those back-burner projects. The ones that have been left sitting, waiting for better timing, resources, or someone else to be available. And now, with three months left in the year, every...

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There are two kinds of teams: base teams and expedition teams.

Base teams work in the known, the predictable, and the routine. Their job is to create or manage a predictable outcome, process, or spec. If they do that, they’re successful.

Expedition teams work in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) arenas. Even when they know where they’re going, they’re not sure what they’re going to find there. And they sometimes don’t even know how to translate or transport what they find back to base. Learning and discovery tend to be the win conditions for expedition teams.

Just as there are different teams, there are different players. Some folks are base team players. Give them the checklists, spreadsheets, and routines all day and they’re happy.

Expedition team players want to live on the edge. That’s where the thrills and discoveries are. That they may not pull off whatever they’re trying to do is a feature, not a bug.

Some people can toggle between the two, but they’re rarer because they have to be able to switch from solving for VUCA to embracing VUCA.

As I said in Team Habits, team dysfunction (or high function) can often come down to team composition.

A team that needs to be an expedition team that’s stacked with base team players is going to struggle. The team will spend so much time getting ready and trying to factor in all the unknowns that they’ll eat up too much of their expedition and implementation...

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I didn’t expect the second post on TiP to be about my health journey, but it’s one of the major catalysts to some shifts in my thinking and being over the last few years. So we might as well get it on deck, even if it’s a little longer than I anticipate most of these posts will be.

In late 2024, as part of finally going to the Veterans Administration (VA) for some service-related issues I’ve been dealing with since my deployment in the mid-2000s, I discovered that I had all but one of the markers for fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. I knew I had PTSD, hypervigilance, IBS, hip/spinal issues, hearing loss, and tinnitus, but the markers were new information to me.

It also explained a lot of the aches, pains, wipeouts, and doctor visits over the last couple of decades. I had already figured out what activities I could and couldn’t do, but I didn’t know why.

The particular way fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue show up for me creates a challenging balance: I need to work out and move a lot or I’m in pain, but if I work out too much, I can have a fatigue wipeout. I’d gotten used to working in level 4 – 7 pain - that was my normal - but fatigue makes it hard for me to do anything, including everyday tasks and working out.

You read that correctly: if I’m not active enough, I’m in pain. If I’m too active, I can get crippling fatigue...

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Decision memos to bosses and boards typically follow a standard format: Issue, Discussion, Recommendation. IDR is solid, and it’s the house style of staff colleges, law schools, and policy programs. I teach my clients to reorder it.

Issue, Recommendation, Discussion.

Here’s why. In practice, the recommendation gets buried under seven or eight pages of discussion. Decision-makers take forever to find what’s being asked of them, and discussion-first invites them into the weeds of the decision before they need to be there, debating details instead of championing or approving the broad thrust.

The components carry their own disciplines:

Issue. Statable in two or three sentences. If you can’t state it that tightly, one of three things is wrong: you don’t understand the issue well enough, you’re writing at too low an altitude, or you don’t understand what your decision-makers need to see to decide.

Recommendation. What to do. It goes second.

Discussion. One to two pages, prose or a bulleted summary. Same discipline as the issue: what the decision-makers need to know and no more.

When I teach this, the pushback comes fast: “Don’t I need to build my case first? Isn’t leading with the recommendation abrupt?”

No. A well-written issue and recommendation do much of the case-building on their own, because together they tell your decider what you were considering and optimizing for. The issue opens a gap. The recommendation closes...

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I’m starting a new daily-ish section called Thinking in Public (hereafter, TiP).

Here’s the summary:

Shorter, daily-ish posts where I think out loud about whatever I’m chewing on. More unfiltered and unpolished, likely including more shop talk and personal wonderings alongside core themes.

I could list a lot of audience-facing and strategic reasons why I’m doing this, but they all cut against doing it equally well. The main reason I want to do it is because I’m creatively constipated after a few years of thrashing, making publishing harder than it needs to be, and behind-the-scenes stuff that I’ll likely talk about in pieces going forward.

If you’ve been on one of our community events, you’ve probably heard me say “Your cage; your key.” I’m eating my own cooking here.

As the summary suggests, TiP posts will span more than what I’ve made “core” areas. They’ll also be more fragments and snippets I pick up throughout the days.

Some writers are using social media, including Substack Notes, for similar kinds of efforts. That feels backwards to me, as you’ve already signed up and, like me, the last thing you’re probably wanting is Yet Another Social Media place to be. TiP posts will be hitting your Inbox.

By short, I mean they may be 300-500 words. TiP is doing some work for me that Twitter used to do; I hope it does the same “quick idea discovery” work that social media does...

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