Charles Lambdin

@cglambdin.bsky.social

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Some general meeting influence tips. Enjoy! thelaterallens.substack.com/p/meeting-in...

Was agile ever really an alternative to waterfall, or was this always an unhelpful false dichotomy? thelaterallens.substack.com/p/design-and...

Design and Agile’s Muddied Watersthelaterallens.substack.com What seems a pedantic debate to some will for others mark a deep and troubling conflict over the nature of their work. This has long been the case for Design and Agile. To take current example, design...

If leadership's behavior does not match stated values, then your organization is incongruent. Its words and music don't match. What is more, employees can always tell when the stated culture isn't in line with the organization's "shadow culture". thelaterallens.substack.com/p/culture-is...

If only your low performers get coaching (because you're requiring it) and your high performers get coaching (because they're demanding it), then you're doing it wrong. All your people are getting managed, and they should all be receiving coaching.

Be careful in rewarding “high performers” and “rock stars”. If they are not role modeling the right behaviors, then by keeping them around, the message you are sending is that your stated values don’t matter all that much. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/what-is-in...

How many meetings are you in where the same few dominant personalities do most of the talking? Or where you’re not sure why you’re there, the agenda is only sporadically brought up, and the meeting unerringly runs over its scheduled time? thelaterallens.substack.com/p/meetings-a...

This is more than just a strategy workshop. Do you have too many metrics? KPIs everywhere? Then you don't really know what to focus on. Here is a way to clean this up. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/strategy-w...

Strategy Workshopthelaterallens.substack.com Intro Today we’ll cover an approach I’ve used for running strategy workshops. It leverages a combination of VMOST (vision, mission, objectives, strategy, and tactics) and the North Star Framework, whi...

Assumption quality. That's the post. So much food for thought in that small phrase.

The famous "double diamond"--some have pointed out (such as Kees Dorst) that design does not really work this way. This raises an interesting question: Why do we need an inaccurate model of design to help us better design? thelaterallens.substack.com/p/design-as-...

Design as Dialecticsthelaterallens.substack.com My friend John Cutler recently posted about teams falling in love with crafting the perfect problem statement. This can be an issue when they focus on this in lieu of generating actionable solutions. ...

Research that helps steer you toward value-adding outcomes is not icing on the cake—it’s better cake. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/research-i...

Research Isn’t Icingthelaterallens.substack.com A common attitude about research is that it is a “nice-to-have”, or, even, merely “icing on the cake”. The assumption here is that research produces what are ultimately unnecessary refinements to the ...

Remote workers do not care that much about role power, and that drives executives and managers who over rely on role power crazy.

Building more software faster is nothing like producing more of a popular physical product faster. The conflation of design with manufacturing thinking collapses the product life cycle in staggeringly stupid ways.

Here is a series of exercises I've used to run strategy workshops for organizations. Enjoy! thelaterallens.substack.com/p/strategy-w...

Imagine an executive walks up and asks, "What are your top three priorities at work right now?” Can you name them? If you need time to identify them, then you do not know what they are, which means you are not using them to prioritize your work! thelaterallens.substack.com/p/getting-se...

Getting Serious About Resultsthelaterallens.substack.com It’s often said that OKRs are not any better than MBOs. I’m afraid it’s worse than that. MBO, after all, never stood for “Management by Output”. Yet whenever the KR part of OKR devolves into planned o...

Today's post summarizes a beautiful metaphor I learned from executive coach Tom Henschel. He calls it "Conflict House". How well you handle any difficult conversation will depend on how you navigate the three rooms of the house. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/dealing-wi...

Dealing with Conflict Without Dramathelaterallens.substack.com This is a concept I learned from executive coach Tom Henschel. It’s based on Difficult Conversations, by Stone, Patton, and Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Henschel uses this metaphor to enca...

Talk about strategy is often fluffy, nebulous. It can be extremely value adding to crisp this up. Try introducing some concrete strategy-building exercises, helping teams flesh out their collective wisdom and exploring alternatives. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/how-to-cre...

How to Create a Strategy Tablethelaterallens.substack.com Intro: A Word on Decision Quality Decisions are often both the main value driver and constraint in an organization. And yet we do not tend to focus on them. The desire seems to be to keep the focus on...

If you tell people that internal competition and infighting is a problem but are still clinging to the reward mechanisms that incentivize such behavior, then your “say-do ratio” is off. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/systems-as...

Systems as Mental Interfacesthelaterallens.substack.com In today’s post we’ll be discussing Edward Martin Baker’s Scoring a Whole in One. Credit to Sean Murphy, of SKMurphy, Inc., who reached out and asked if I’d like to write something about it. I said ye...

Just received a nice message thanking me for writing this. It's important to keep in mind, so much of what we complain about in org life is a downstream consequence of meeting culture and how meetings are run. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/group-deci...

Group Decision Foiblesthelaterallens.substack.com As individuals our reasoning is beset with biases and cognitive errors. Making decisions as a group is often no better. Yes, there are things we can do to vet each other, pool expertise, and offset er...

The "double diamond" is useful precisely because it is so counter to how we normally think. Left to our own devices, the left "diamond", the problem frame, remains a ghost frame. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/learning-t...

The biggest predictor of post-discussion decisions is pre-discussion preferences. The result is disagreement deficits, hidden profiles, and unwarranted belief perseverance. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/group-deci...

Social media sites have a variable-interval reinforcement schedule. Though not quite as intense as a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, the response pattern is similar. This means social media sites are almost as addictive as slot machines. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/addictive-...

Stakeholders will have competing agendas and preferences. As each competes for their own pet solution they will perceive the others involved as being “difficult” and “problematic” instead of realizing that they’re all just bringing different frames. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/are-your-l...

The great Peter Scholtes called MBOs the "Harvardization" of 1840s-style "train-wreck management". His writing, now a quarter-century old, still packs quite a wallop. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/do-you-hav...

You might have a pre-Civil War org culture, firmly rooted in the industrial revolution and the railroad industry of the mid-1800s. How old is YOUR org culture? thelaterallens.substack.com/p/do-you-hav...

OKRs are now a fad. They have "gone viral". And, as many who have experienced them can tell you, they very often MAKE THINGS WORSE. In my experience OKRs tend to go sideways for three reasons, discussed here: thelaterallens.substack.com/p/okrs-and-o...

It is a huge misconception that upfront planning is counter to agility across the board. This is not only false, but the opposite is true--upfront planning is KEY to strategic agility. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/assumption...

About five years ago I noted that design and agile seem to use the term "iterate" differently. This resulted in a thread that surfaced that even the Agile Manifesto coauthors mean different things by the term. Here is a summary. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/what-does-...

Depending on the context, talking about 5 Whys or root causes without getting at the existing power dynamics at play can be quite the red herring.

When employees say they want increased "transparency", that does NOT mean they want to hear from executives more. It means, rather, that they want to feel like they have access to the inside baseball. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/confrontin...

Focusing on outcomes, iterating, and learning your way forward are important, but also neglect all that can be done to improve the quality of decisions BEFORE they are made. thelaterallens.substack.com/p/how-to-cre...