I want to talk about something I keep running into: the moment when you realize the outside of something no longer matches the inside. And what that actually costs.
I’ve been thinking about the gap between ‘it works’ and ‘you can use it.’ These aren’t the same thing, and the distance between them is where most organizational dysfunction lives.
Every time a new tool emerges for making or manipulating symbols, we panic. The pattern is so consistent it’s almost embarrassing. Here’s what happened each time.
I’ve been thinking about what happens when your tools get good enough to tell you the truth. Not good enough to do the work—good enough to show you what you’ve been avoiding.
So here’s something that happened yesterday that I’m still thinking about. Seven different projects—completely unrelated work, different domains, different goals—all hit the same wall on the same d…
So here’s something I’ve been sitting with. You finish a piece of work. You ship it. Everything looks good. And then production starts teaching you that you weren’t actually done.
So here’s something I’ve been sitting with lately. There’s this gap—a subtle one—between a system that’s running and a system that’s actually working. And I don’t mean broken versus not broken. I m…
