2025 - The Year We Fired OKRs - Radhika Dutt Brings the Matches

Danny Glutch: Foreign.

Narrator: Welcome to the Elephant New York, presented by the Fearless People Experience.

Radhika Dutt: Do you know those things in the

Narrator: workplace that make work suck but remain unchanged? Well, those are the elephants we're here to talk about. We believe that these topics can and should be addressed with common sense, courage, and compassion. We may not have all the answers,

Kashadora: and we're definitely not always going to

Narrator: be right, but we're here to build a better people experience. You got to start somewhere.

Kashadora: Let's go.

Danny Glutch: Before we get started, I have a small confession. I've spent countless hours in conference rooms watching perfectly sane adults debate whether a goal should be classified as, uh, shared, cascaded, or strategic with a passion that is normally reserved for politics at Thanksgiving dinner. And I sit there and just wonder, is this even necessary? This seems like a big waste of time. So when today's guest, Radhika Dutt, came in and said, not only is goal setting ineffective, but also harmful, I knew I had to hear more. If you're not familiar with Radhika, she's the author of Radical Product Thinking, a book that's been translated into Chinese and Japanese and whose methodology is now used in over 40 countries. She's an entrepreneur, speaker, and product leader who's been part of five acquisitions, including two that she founded, and she currently advises the Monetary Authority of Singapore on product thinking. She consults with everyone from scrappy startups to giant multinationals, helping them build products that actually change things instead of just generating prettier dashboards. Her background spons telecom, media, robotics, ad tech, government, consumer apps, and even wine. Because why not? She has degrees from mit, speaks nine languages, and crucially for today's topic, is working on a new book about why goals and targets backfire and what actually works instead. So if you're heading into the new year already bracing yourself for another annual goal setting marathon, it's okay, we've got this. This conversation gives you permission to torch the whole goal setting system and replace it with something that actually works and drives learning, innovation, and psychological safety. This is the Elephant in the Org. Let's go. Welcome back to the Elephant in the Org, everyone. I'm, um, Danny Glutch and I'm joined, as always, by my co host, Kashadora.

Radhika Dutt: Hello.

Danny Glutch: And Marian Anderson.

Kashadora: Hello.

Danny Glutch: And today we have a fantastic Elephant in the Org that we're going to talk about, goal setting. And it's not just that you're doing it wrong. And to talk about that, we have author, speaker, Radhika Dutt. Did I say that name right?

Radhika Dutt: Yes, you did.

Danny Glutch: Thank you for Asking awesome, why don't you introduce yourself?

Radhika Dutt: So my background is that I did electrical engineering at MIT and then my first set of startups were ones where I learned a lot from. I made lots of mistakes, uh, and I caught what I now call product diseases. And for our listeners in the tech industry, I think you're going to listen to these diseases and say oh yes please, you know, we've caught all of these. But that's the story of how it goes in the tech world, right? So here are some diseases. Pivotitis. There is obsessive sales disorder which I will admit to having contributed to. There's strategic swelling. Oh, and narcissist complex. Um, which is why we're so focused on what we want, what we think we should be building, that we forget about our customers. And then I think at the moment, just given how data driven we are, the disease that is top of mind for me is hypermetricaemia. And so, so my background is I wrote Radical Product Thinking, which is my first book and which came out in 20. It's about how we can build world changing products while avoiding all of these product diseases. And now I'm working on my next book which is about why goals, targets, okrs backfire and um, what actually works. Because it's not enough to just say goals and okrs don't work.

Kashadora: Yeah.

Danny Glutch: And it's not that. Oh, I was going to say it's not that they don't work or that like you're not good enough. You just need to get more skilled at doing the goals and okrs. There's a fundamental like structurally this is harming you.

Radhika Dutt: It really is, it is fundamentally bad for organizations. Let's talk about why. The first thing is when you set a target, the incentive you create for people, whether you intend to or not, the incentive that you create is that you make them look at the good numbers and show you the good numbers to say tada, we've hit those numbers, I'm a high performer. That's really the incentive you're setting. And so what happens is even when people are not being malicious, even when they're not gaming numbers, et cetera, they're looking at the good numbers to show you that look, I've achieved your expectations. They're not looking at the bad numbers, they're sort of sweeping the bad numbers under the rug or not noticing them because you know, your, your whole desire is to please the others, to show that you're a high performer. The bad numbers are what tell you actually what's Going on. Those numbers are where you want to play detective. Ah, you know, maybe there's a puzzle here, maybe there's an opportunity, there's something happening. And you miss all of that because of targets and okrs.

Kashadora: I'm going to, I'm going to come at this from the chief people officer lens, from the HR lens. I like to tell people that I'm a, I'm a CPO in recovery, because that's the truth. And you know, when I think about traditional organizations, particularly larger scale organizations that are um, rigid in their kind of annual life cycle, you know, their, their um, employee activity life cycle, it kind of goes a little bit like this. You know, you, you close out the year, open the year and it's review season. So we're doing reviews, review, review, review. Then we have calibrations for that, then we have, you know, our, our uh, outcomes awards given. Then we're in a promotion cycle, then we're in some other review, then it's mid years, then it's this, Then like it goes like that the entire year, right? It's like a marathon. And when that window of goal setting comes round in many organizations, it just feels like one godamn more thing that we have to do. There's a tick box exercise, right? And it's like most of the employee life cycle stuff is very tick box and highly performative. And the other thing is that we like to overcome. We like to either overcomplicate goal setting to the point where people are so confused about what goal they're meant to be following. Is it a uh, cascaded goal? Is a shared goal? Is it an individual? Like no one knows, right? And then we confuse people with like, well, is it a spark goal? You know, like it's just, it's such a mess, right? And I think there, that's where it just becomes the point where people are just like, oh, let me just bang anything down. And then like, you know, and whatever. And then you've got the group of people that are in roles that the role is so either poorly designed, poorly supported, where they're so overwhelmed they don't even have a chance to fulfill goals because they're just keeping the lights on, right? You know, I'm thinking about HR people particularly in that sort of situation. And so it's, it to me like it feels that there's a real need like most things in human resources to blow it up and start again, reimagine it. You know, I think this sits really well alongside with compensation, performance related pay or not performance related pay. You know, there's such a movement around that just now as well, should pay and performance be decoupled, etc. So like, I think that where all of these things were established, like many of these notions were established in the 1930s. Right? We know that through, through historical data. Yeah, it's time to blow up and start again. Maybe I'm being radical, but that's how I feel.

Radhika Dutt: But you know, when you say we, it's time to blow up and start again, it sounds downright scary for leaders, right? Because, well, you know, okrs goals, this is what I've learned all my life, that this is how you build products, this is how you build companies. And you're saying blow that up. There's so much to unpack in what you said because, you know, a lot of times to all the objections that you brought up, people give simplistic answers. Well, the answer is easy. Just divorce compensation from goals. Oh, you know, rigid organizations, simple. Just do goal setting more often. You know, do it every quarter. There are problems with every one of those. Right? Because when you say just divorce compensation from goals, most smart people aren't thinking about showing you that they've hit their targets just because they're thinking about this bonus cycle.

Kashadora: Right.

Radhika Dutt: They're thinking about their long term careers. So there's no divorcing compensation from OKRs because you're always looking to, uh, show that you're a high performer. It's the long term career trajectory when you're smart and a high performer. You know, when you talk about rigid organizations and how goal setting becomes really constraining, this whole idea that, oh, just set goals more often. There was someone who said this to a leader and the leader just laughed, saying, you know, we would die if we had to do this multiple times in a year because it's hard enough to do it once a year. So the solution, right, isn't so much that we just, oh, have to do goal setting. Right. You mentioned the historic aspect of goal setting. I want to dive into that a little bit historically. Where does goal setting come from? Why is it so entrenched in our corporate psyche? And I was looking back through history, so OKR seem like they're new because John Doar evangelized them in 2018. But actually Andy Grove, he called him the father of OKRs. Andy Grove instituted OKRs at intel in 1978. Well, you go back to 1978. Where did Andy Grove get this idea? He looked back at management by objectives from Peter drucker in the 1940s. And so you go back to the 1940s and you say, okay, what problem was Peter Drucker solving? And the answer to that is he was working with General Motors at the time. And the problem at the time was that the workforce was working on assembly lines, primarily repetitive tasks. And actually research shows that when you have a repetitive task where there's one right way to do things, like doing crunches at the gym or if you're stuffing envelopes for a campaign, great goal setting works wonderfully. And that's what Peter Drucker found. Great. You know, when you're installing tires, one right way to do it, set goals. It's a fantastic solution. That's why it's revolutionary for the 1940s. Now you take those same ideas and you put goal setting on manufacturing floors where everything that could be automated, uh, and more has already been automated. Right? And that's where you see, like at Boeing, you have quality issues with, you know, panels flying off of planes. Goal setting does not work. And this is what research shows, goal setting does not work. When the problem that you're working on is more like a puzzle where there isn't one right solution, but there could be many. And you're trying to figure out how do you achieve this? Right. In that case, goal setting has a negative set of side effects.

Kashadora: That makes a lot of sense. It really does. Yeah, it does. And especially as we think about that, uh, in modern environment, in environments in companies and industries that are innovation led, it stifles innovation, right? Because again, go back to that psychological safety piece. I will not take a risk, especially in this current, um, climate, I will not take a risk to innovate. And if it means that I'm likely to lose my job because my, I'll get a target on my back. Right. Which again, completely supports what you just said. So what is the, what's the solution then?

Radhika Dutt: So the solution is moving to a mindset of puzzle setting and puzzle solving. So not goal setting, but puzzle setting and puzzle solving. So let's talk about what this actually means, because even the word puzzles sounds scary for leaders. Because does it feel like, you know, I'm just sending my people off to the playground? You done playing around? You know, and in the meanwhile, what's happening to all the deadlines and what I have to show shareholders and leadership? So when I talk about puzzle setting and puzzle setting, uh, puzzle solving. Let's look at a sales example. A sales target would be like, okay, hit X million revenues by the end of this year. Whereas a puzzle would be the market expects us to hit X million by the end of the year. But I am seeing some issues. We grew in, but sales have stalled in the last year. What is going on? So that's the observation. The observation. Then the next O, it's a set of three O's. The observation was the problem. The open questions is the second O. What are some open questions, like genuinely things I don't know the answers to? Maybe something has shifted fundamentally in the market. Maybe something is happening with AI and it has second order effects that I'm not seeing. So even though our product isn't directly, uh, affected by AI, there's something happening where the market is shifting. What's going on? Or maybe another open question is maybe we were really good at selling to the early adopter, we haven't figured out how to sell to the mass market. Or uh, maybe our product was working for the early adopter, but it's not meeting the needs of the mass market. So here are some open questions I genuinely don't know answers to. And I invite my team to share their thinking on defining this puzzle and what might be going on. And now the last O is the objective. So the objective is that I want to summarize the puzzle by saying I want to solve this problem and get back to our growth trajectory by figuring out this puzzle. So that's setting the puzzle right. And now I'm going to solve this puzzle. And so once I start exploring the problem space of this puzzle, I start to understand the nature of what's going on. And as I understand the nature and stay in the problem space, now I ready to take a crack at the solution. I'm not jumping to the solution and experimenting. Let's just lean in, throw things at the problem, right? I am m figuring out based on what I've done in exploring the puzzle, what will be my first attempt. This is like looking at the Rubik's Cube. And now I'm ready to take my first try. Now, in puzzle solving, I asked three questions for this attempt. How well did it work? Notice that, by the way, notice the psychological safety built in. It's not asking you, did you or didn't you achieve this goal? It's how well did it work? I'm inviting the good and the bad. Then the second question, what have I learned? Don't just regurgitate numbers at me and show me dashboards. Tell me the narrative. What have I learned? And now the last question. Based on how well it worked and what have I learned? If I gave you a magic wand, what would you ask for next? What you notice, given that you guys are so into psychology. The first question triggers the left brain. How well did it work? I'm looking at data hypotheses. The second question is the narrative of the learning. It triggers the right brain. And the last question, what will you do next? If you had a magic wand? Again, the right brain out of the box thinking, so how would I do this? For the sales problem, how well did it work? Maybe the sales problem was, I try new messaging because I think it's not working for the mass market. I try this new messaging. How well did it work? Uh, it looks like it's working. It looks like I'm getting meetings with decision makers. Great. That's the first question. How well did it work? Second question, what did I learn? So I'm getting meetings with decision makers. It turns out there's now a new group within the decision makers we've traditionally never talk to. It's a new influencer within this organization. We need to start talking to them because otherwise sales cycle is too long. Third question, what will I try next? So based on how well it's working and what I've learned, I'm going to now create new material to reach this different group, this influencer. I'm going to do webinars to include this group. I'm also going to create easily shareable material to bring this other group on board so that the decision maker can use this material and bring this other group. Let's see how well it works. Now. I could. I've basically set a new element of the puzzle that starts the cycle again. I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of what I shared, because that was a lot.

Kashadora: No, I'm. I'm like digesting all of that. Uh, I. Oh my gosh, I love it. I suppose all of that makes a huge amount of sense to me. And I think if you think about it this way, I think it's what we sort of do naturally day to day, but as soon as someone mentions it in a format of goals, we deviate back to that. Here's my target. And so, like on psychology, right, there's a massive shift that's required in how we think to be able to kind of make that the norm, even though I think a lot of that we do naturally as human beings and just don't recognize it. So I suppose then that leads me to the question of thinking about change management, in particular cultural change management and organizations which we know at least 70% always bombs. Right. Always fails. How would you approach bringing that change into an organization where it's likely to succeed?

Radhika Dutt: Oh, I love this question. Change management and how do you bring this in? And uh, before I answer that, I want to also ask. Kasha, you've been very quiet in all of this. I would love your thoughts on what resonated for you in all of this puzzle setting and puzzle solving.

Narrator: Oh, I appreciate the question. Slightly similar to Marian is when thinking about goals, right. It's always very much like I think about the, the psyche of the individual writing their goals. And in the world that we live in right now, it's. How do I protect my job? Because we live in a world of just. We live in a layoff world basically. Right. Like there isn't an industry that hasn't been hit. And so there's a, there's a incumbent fear on, um, what if I don't hit this goal? How do I write this goal so that I do in fact achieve it? Which then ends up with a fallacy line of authenticity. Because now I'm writing a goal just to achieve it. Not necessarily to actually have something. I don't want to say a worth of value because that means that like, you know, it makes it sound like there, that there's like not worth, but being able to say like, you know, that you're going to be doing, uh, going to your problem solving line. If you're writing your goals and you're thinking about goals through the lens of problem solving, how many organizations have to pivot because their industry is pivoting right now?

Radhika Dutt: Right?

Narrator: Like, like where there's. You could be in a regulated space, you could be in a, uh, in a production space. So you, you're only as good as your last, whatever. And you're constantly problem solving. And so being able to write toward the problem that you're doing in your day to day versus this. How do I keep my job? Almost get invites that innovation. That's so hard, right? Yeah. To kind of quantify. But like I think of the mindset of people when they write their, when they're writing their goals right now. And it's just. How do I write my goal to keep my job?

Radhika Dutt: Yeah.

Narrator: Uh, it really does create this space of just not being able to do it. Right. I think, you know, and maybe even do it honestly.

Kashadora: Yeah.

Radhika Dutt: So m. That, that was kind of

Narrator: my thought process when you were, when you were talking about that. Because I was just thinking about the world we're in right now and the Mindset of people in there. And yeah, I love the problem solving component because that's what we do every day.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, there are two things that both Marian and Kasha, you said, which is this mindset of solving problems, solving puzzles, etc. It is so innate to us as humans. We just like solving puzzles. Right. I've done this question so many times in workshops where I ask people two questions, right? I say, tell me your feelings at the end of each one. And you guys have already reflected that in what you've said. I say, you know, there are two questions I'll ask you. So the first question is, what goals do you want to achieve for your company this year versus what puzzles do you want to solve for your company this year? And unequivocally, um, the feedback I get is goal setting creates this feeling of anxiety, burden, fear for me and puzzles. It's this feeling of excitement, cur. Curiosity, you know, I want to solve puzzles. There's this innate drive that I want to do it. It's not my company making me do this. Right. And Marion, to your point, you know, and yet, like, the whole organizational mindset is to motivate you. I have to give you goals. Like, aren't we being silly? Like, look at the internal motivation that people have when you talk about puzzles and approaching it as puzzles. And Kasia, you were talking about the fear of goals, those goals, right? And doing this from this perspective of, oh, you know, I want to keep my job, so I'm going to write goals in this way. But, you know, when you solve puzzles, there is like, think about when you're solving a Rubik's cube. You don't go at it saying, oh, I tried my first attempt. That was a failure, but I'm going to embrace failure. You don't use these bullshit lines. You're just going at it. You're thinking about what you did. Oh, that didn't work. Let me try this instead. You're constantly going through this mental process of learning from what didn' and then adapting. You don't artificially have to call out, oh, failure is okay. We're going to fail fast, Learn fast. You don't have to artificially create these bullshit statements, because puzzles just genuinely innately create this mindset of, I'm gonna, first of all, look at the problem, understand it. Then I'm going to try something. And you know what? I'm gonna learn from it. Adapt and keep doing this really quickly because I have this internal drive. So to now, go back to this question of, how do you Bring in this mindset shift. I'll share with you what I tried, what didn't work, and what does work instead. Uh, the first thing I tried was I looked at all of these problems and I shared with leaders. Look, goals and okrs, they have all of these side effects. Don't use those. Use puzzle setting instead. That did not work because of the fear that there were two fears. One this fear, that with puzzles, I don't have control. The second fear was, does my team have the capability, the competency, to do puzzle setting and puzzle solving effectively so that I can comfortably move away from what I've known all my life? Because goal setting is what I've known all my life. It's the devil I know. Does my team have the competency to this? And so what I have found to work well instead is a, uh, top down and a bottom up approach. I tell leaders, look, here are the side effects of goal setting and okrs. You're not hearing the reality from the trenches as much as you think you are. This is why Andy Grove at Intel said in his book only the paranoid survive. He said, leaders are the last to know. It's because you set goals and targets. You hear what you want to hear. And so I share this with leaders, but I'm, uh, not asking them to make change. I tell them how I'm going to build competency to do better in the team. And so then I just started working with the team to say, you know, I'm not even going to talk about this as a mindset shift, but I introduced the structure of puzzle solving, the structure of how well did it work? What have we learned? What will we try next? And so, you know, within our product teams, I started using this approach to say, you know, let's have these learning meetings for each of us. You know, let's look at what we've released. And depending on your cycle, right, it might be what you released in the last month, that might be what you released three months ago, whatever it is. But, uh, pick something and share for me. How well did it work? What have we learned? What will you try next? And give me honest answers. And we're going to do this within the safety of just our small team. And we'd created psychological safety in that team. And so the team started sharing this, me, this stuff with me in learning meetings. And it was fascinating to me, by the way, in the first such instance, right, in terms of what have we learned? People were regurgitating numbers and dashboard for me. They would show me, you know, Weekly active users, the growth, blah, blah. And I was like, stop. Okay, so what, like what have we actually figured out? What is happening actually with the users? And you ask a couple of such questions, people really got it. Like, I wasn't interested in just dashboards and numbers looking good. Tell me what you learned. Right? And we were going to talk about these learnings in just two such sessions. People's mindsets changed entirely. You know, as we started even doing design sprints, whatever we were talking about, we started asking better questions, right? And by the way, the end result in this company. So when I started in 2023 as a consultant, sales had stalled, growth had stalled. In 2024, we doubled growth. In 2025, we again doubled growth. And I mean both growth in terms of sales as well as number of customers. And we've reduced churn from 26% to 4%. And we did this through constant puzzle setting, puzzle solving. And at this point, they don't set targets for the product team anymore because of the results they see from puzzle setting and puzzle solving.

Danny Glutch: That's incredible.

Narrator: I love that so much.

Danny Glutch: You know, when you were talking, I was really reminded of, uh, you know, my, my background's in education. And one of the experiences that really changed how I approached teaching at the university was there was a little overlap where I was, I was starting to teach, but I was still driving buses. And I drove a bus, a group of seniors in high school, to Joshua Tree. And it was this really interesting school. It's called the Urban School. They're one of the best high schools in the country. They don't give grades at any point from freshman year all the way through senior. No one knows their grades until it's time to apply for colleges, because then you have to. And the idea is that they wanted them to enjoy learning. It's. It's not about getting the grade. It's about learning. This was the most interesting group of students I'd ever met. They were, they were curious, they were smart, they loved. They were asking me if I'd read Moby Dick. And I was like, of course. Course I read Moby Dick. That's incredible. How have you read Moby Dick? You're 17 years old. And it was, it was so fascinating that I tried it at the university and I was like, I'm not going to give my students grades until the end of the semester. And the problem is that the students wanted their grades. They needed their grades. That's what they had known their whole time growing up in school. They needed to know how they were doing, especially the ones who were good. And I was like, look, you're like my best student. I'm still not going to give you the answer you're looking for. But, but like, don't worry about it. Just, just be here, keep engaging, keep doing what you're doing and you're great. And they just, they didn't get it. There's something in the mindset where it, it needed to be like this whole thing. Like the, the school couldn't just do it for like one class. Like that whole high school, every class, no one was giving grades. And it was, it was a known and accepted cultural part of that. And, and I'm curious if like an individual team in an organization, do you think they could choose to approach things this way or would the sort of surrounding culture be pushing them on like, oh, but what are your, your okrs? And you know, they might not get asked that specifically, but like there's still going to be a little bit of that pressure to talk about their goals and their numbers and, and hitting.

Narrator: Well, there's so many like internal and environmental factors that go into that. Right? Like uh, do you have stakeholders? Are you a public company? Are you a private company? And like I, I totally understand why, Danny, like in your college course that you were teaching, why people were craving those grades. Like we're, from the time we're young, we need validation because the education system tells us we need this validation, right?

Danny Glutch: Scholarships are like, hey, you need to be getting this, this, you know, this grade per every course, let me know what the grade is. And it's like, sorry, not gonna do that.

Narrator: Yeah, it's interesting when you think of all those factors that just go into now we're professionals and we have this mindset that we don't even know we have. Right. It's almost subconscious of how we assess things from. You were talking about the product group and it was like they're probably thinking, starting the conversation, thinking to themselves, okay, well how many activations do we have versus how many logins do we have versus how many. What's our utilization like? Like from a client base, like they start to look at all those things, but it's really comes down to sometimes that three letter word of why. Mhm.

Radhika Dutt: Yeah, but you know this, this thing that you said about grades, right. So my kids, they also went to a school where, so it was a school for gifted kids and the teacher, uh, said the principal, her view of the world was, you know, if you're a K that is doing Math four grade levels above you. Why would I give you a B for the level of challenge that you're taking on? Like, what am I telling you in terms of, you know, your achievement? If you're doing, if you're really challenging yourself, then why should I give you a B for that? Maybe, you know, you might be just getting by doing math four grade levels above, but I'm not going to give you a B for it. So, you know, that's why they did not have grace grades. But at the same time, what they did a good job of was the self assessment and helping you understand exactly where you stand. Like, how well do you understand this material? It was good feedback and, you know, how are you, where are you right now in terms of how you're doing? What do I need to do better? What do you need to do better? Etc, right? Like people crave not grades, but knowing where they stand, what they don't want is a surprise at the end. Because this fear of what's going to happen at the end of the semester when you know, Professor Danny is going to finally give me a grade, that is downright scary, right? If I know exactly where I am, that yes, you know, you're on track. You know, this will, uh, you're, you're doing fine. I have nothing to complain about, or here's what I want you to do better. Like that kind of feedback. People genuinely want to grow. So here's what research shows about growth, by the way, that people really want feedback and are, uh, receptive to feedback unless they feel evaluated. So the more people feel evaluated, the less open they are to taking feedback. Isn't that fascinating? Let's think about how corporate evaluation process works. We are constantly trying to give people grades. You know, you are a five. You here are a three. You know, this is where then you then give people feedback and you say, okay, last Wednesday, you know, I saw you in this meeting, here's one suggestion for how you can do better. And there's instant defensiveness like, oh, come on, you know, you're just not quite understanding the context. Here's what actually happened that Wednesday, right? Why do you get all this pushback as a manager? It's because that, that feedback might be the difference between my getting a 4 versus a 5. Of course I'm going to push back. And so, so what we want to focus on as leaders so that we get the most or harness the most out of every employee is rather than making them feel evaluated, to give them this feeling that I'm on your Side, I want to develop you. I want to give you that A. And you are going to get that A. Here are things that we can work on together. Here's exactly where you stand. I'm not going to bullshit you. I'm not going to give you dishonest feedback. This is where radical candor comes in. I love that book. You care personally and you approach it directly. And there was, you know, one of my teammates who said to me, you know, anyone else giving me this feedback, I would have been defensive on. But I appreciate how you've approached this. Right. We can give direct, honest feedback, but we have to make people feel like we're on your side and then all of what we want to share. You know, when they give me this information from this angle of how well did it work? What have I learned? What will I try next? I know exactly where you stand. You know, there have been people who came from backgrounds from Google and Amazon. They would tell me, what have I learned? And it was all about optimizing numbers. And I suddenly realized, wow, everything that you've been doing until now has been this bullshit of optimizing numbers in terms of what your learnings have been. It's been too shallow. And I've been able to challenge them, saying, I need you to think deep. Like you said, Kasha, uh, the why. What have you actually learned from all of these stats in terms of what you'll do next? You know, this experiment that you want to try, like, there has to be a better, smaller version of that. You know, I'm able to push teams better because I'm getting honest answers.

Danny Glutch: That's amazing. I love a couple of the things that you were talking about. One is the feeling evaluated. Uh, just the one example you were talking about of, you know, the, the goal setting ver or what goals do you want to do for your company this year versus what problems and puzzles you want to solve for your company? And, like, I honestly think one of the differences is that people feel like, well, this one's going to get evaluated. Because, you know, at some point it's like someone's going to say whether or not I did this thing, as opposed to, like, oh, them seeing that I'm doing this good job working on this puzzle and that feeling like, the formal evaluations are so rough because of ex that you feel evaluated. I teach and do facilitations on how to give presentations and things like that. And so many people are terrified of public speaking. And one of the things we talk about is, well, what's the feeling. Because just being scared and it always comes up. I feel like everyone is evaluating me. Everyone is judging everything I do. And you get that. I think some people really are evaluating and judging. They're sitting there counting the ums and things like that. And it's like, guys, stop it. No one cares if you say um. And if you do care, it's because you've never had a real conversation with anyone. Like, it's. It's just ridiculous. And I. I think there's actually a lot of the problem is that it's not that they feel that they're being evaluated. It's that they actually are being evaluated. And. And I think your. Your talk and. And changing this language and, you know, really coming in and, you know, hitting people's hands when they're doing the stuff that they're not supposed to be doing can really help shift this feeling of, like, oh, oh, I'm not doing this anymore. We're not just being evaluated. You also used a lot of the we language, and I think that really brought in this idea of, like, it's not my individual magnifying glass on me. It's, hey, we're all just on this team doing this thing together, and let's. Let's worry about where we stand and how to keep improving as opposed to that feeling of, you know, being under the microscope because no one likes that. And. And I think that this naturally puts you towards psychological safety. And I think that's one of the struggles with psych safety is people, you know, read about it and, you know, they. They read a couple of specialty leaders, read, like, a couple summaries of books, and they think that they get it, but they have no way. They don't understand how to implement it. Like, how does this look operationally, organizationally, for everyone in the organization? And I think switching over to these different structures and formats and languages really provides this different feeling, just like you were talking about, again with that difference between what goals do you want to. Or what. What goals do you want to achieve for your team this year versus what problems and puzzles do you want to solve for them? To, like, immediately changes the feeling.

Radhika Dutt: Um, you know, you brought up psychological safety, and it's related to the previous question which you asked, which was, can you do this within your team or how influenced are other parts of the organization? You know, what I will say is that in this particular organization, there wasn't psychological safety outside our team.

Kashadora: Right.

Radhika Dutt: Our team, we'd created this environment where you really could share, honestly, this how well did it work? What have I learned? What will I try next? And, uh, what I will say is, first of all, you can create this bubble of psychological safety. Figure out where is your sphere of control, and you can create that. That right without shooting the messenger. You can really encourage honest discussion, and you can create this bubble. And as you start to build this capacity within your team to be able to share information in this way, to be able to think in this way, then you can spread these ideas. Then I had to tell leaders that, look, we're going to present information to you in this format, whatever you do. Just because we're sharing bad news, don't kill that psychological safety. It's so fragile. You want to hear the good and the bad. And, you know, when I then started getting the whole team to share this in monthly business reviews, we actually had very insightful discussions. And the leader was starting to be more careful about not sort of squishing, uh, the information that was actually coming up, the insights that were coming up.

Kashadora: Right.

Radhika Dutt: And that was really powerful to see. And then we had to take it a step further because there were some people in the organization who, if the product team presented it, they want it to look good, and they would sort of question some of your results or shoot things down.

Kashadora: Right.

Radhika Dutt: But I will say that it had to be the slow change and creating awareness within leadership so that, uh, you normalize this way of thinking across the organization. But I so agree with you. We all talk about psychological safety. We all talk about these mantras of fail fast, learn fast. We should embrace failure. Doing it is hard because there isn't a structure for it. I loved Amy Edmondson's book the Right Kind of Wrong. But I was like, how do I actually implement this? This is the scaffolding that gives you that approach. And then around this approach, you can create awareness. Do not shoot the messenger.

Kashadora: Yeah. Something that was just kind of in my head when you were speaking and when Danny was speaking and when you mentioned Radical Cander. Because it's one of those ones where I read that book and I loved it too. And then I saw. And then I saw it get misused. Well, I'm just being radically, like, right.

Danny Glutch: And we've seen someone read a summary somewhere.

Kashadora: Exactly. And then they're like, I'm just being radical with my candor. And I'm like, right. And, uh. And I've seen. I've seen that play out. And it speaks to the level of awareness and maturity and insight within a business. And also it speaks to a lot of the organizational culture, right? Where some leader has had a really good intention, a really good intention to bring this narrative, to bring this book, to, to give people a, uh, tool or a vehicle to be able to understand how to deliver feedback in a good way. But it's been completely misunderstood and misused and misapplied. And the damage that has sustained thereafter has been fairly big. Right. And the same thing's happened with psychological safety. You know, again, like, these guys hear me. When I hear people misuse and misunderstand the terminology, like, it sets me off because I am so, so concerned about it becoming another dei, quite frankly, it's a bad thing. We shouldn't have this. It's da, da, da. It, uh, needs to go like. And we're already hearing that, we're already seeing that. So I get, I get really worried about that because they, they're so essential. But the problem, again, is where these misuses and misinterpretations are coming in. It's typically because of lack of understanding. Understanding, lack of transparency and trust, lack of, of capability and enablement. Right. There's those themes again, and that's where they fall down. So I guess that goes back to the, the change management piece. Right. How do you take these concepts, these constructs that are so powerful and set them up for success? Because when you, when you implement these in a way which hasn't really considered the maturity level or the capability or the enablement of the people that are going to use it and be around it, then it can not just bomb, but it can actually have a completely inverse effect and create real sustained damage. So I realize that it's a thesis question in itself, but what's your thoughts on that? Because I think that's one of the genuine fears that OD L&D HR practitioners have. When they bring something this radical or perceived to be radical to a leadership team and they want it to work, they want it to land, but the fear can get in the way because the impact of it going wrong could be huge. And that's why people just get paralyzed and don't do anything.

Radhika Dutt: Um, you know, it is so funny what you say about psychological safety being misused. I've seen this happen. Actually, Actually there was this group, uh, meeting at an organization where they were like, why don't we have psychological safety? Get psychological safety. It's like, you can't order until morale improves. Yes. Oh my God. Doordash. It doesn't come on doordash. Yeah.

Narrator: You can't order it literally or figuratively.

Danny Glutch: Yeah. But I mean, I think it brings up the point of, of even if someone really has the good intention of doing this, and, and they're, you know, they're trained and shown like, hey, we want to go through this sort of like, you know, this different way of questioning with objectives, hypotheses and learnings and all that, and, and reflections and puzzles and puzzle, you know, creating puzzle solving and. But like, I, I just know some people are going to ask those questions and all a way that feels very evaluative. Right. And it kind of. I just know what's going to happen.

Narrator: Your intent versus impact, right?

Radhika Dutt: Yes. Yeah. You know, everything that you're saying, like, okay, I've been struggling with this question, right? And here's one of my big learnings, and a leader at Adidas who's been using this approach really enlightened me on this. So, uh, the big mindset shift for leaders is that, you know, until now, what we've learned, especially in the Western world, is that leadership is all about knowing. You know, it's all about, I come from a place of knowing. I know what is the problem, I know what is the solution. And therefore, I'm setting goals and telling you, you know, if you just do this and hit this target, then this is progress, because I just know.

Narrator: Right.

Radhika Dutt: And the puzzle approach is very different because it comes from a place of not knowing. It's the humility versus hubris. It comes from a place of saying, this is the observation that we can see altogether that this is what's happening. These are the open questions, things we genuinely don't know answers to and what we have to investigate in the problem space. And that's where, you know, we start to figure out this puzzle together. Now, this leader at Adidas was telling me how when she started introducing the. This approach to her organization, when she listed open questions, even the team said to her, wait a minute, shouldn't you know the answers to this as a leader? And she had to say to the team vulnerably, and she felt like she was in this vulnerable position, saying to 20 people in that room, no, I don't know the answers to this, and we're going to figure this out together. How many leaders have the security to be able to say that?

Kashadora: Right.

Radhika Dutt: To stay in the problem space? It's much easier as a leader to jump to the solution space to say, oh, I know, I have a hypothesis. Let's jump to this. This is what we're going to do. This is what Data says, uh, let's go do this. This is why here's your target. Because Data is telling you this. Go be Data driven. Go look at Data. Right? It's all this desire to stay in the solution space, get to solutions as quickly as possible, as opposed to staying in this uncomfortable space. Let's invite those questions. I don't fully understand what is looking at the puzzle long enough that we can arrive at the first solution that's more effective. Right? Otherwise, what happens? We have this mindset of let's just iterate. We try things, we experiment. I'm going to jump to hypotheses, and the result is you find the local optimum, but not necessarily the global maximum. That's why you need to stay in the problem space. And so the mindset shift. And this is why we misuse radical candor. This is why we misuse psychological safety. And why, by the way, there's this whole fad of, uh, founder led that Brian Chesky from Airbnb, he introduced this term founder led, which, oh, my God, is just, you know, it's, it's, it's such a step back, unfortunately, in terms of all the progress that we are making, this, uh, whole foundation founder mindset or founder led is this idea that the founder knows best, that, you know, because they founded it, that because they understood the problem so well, you know, they should unilaterally make decisions and everyone else should follow, like, don't be afraid to make your unilateral decisions. You know, I can see why Silicon Valley jumped on this. And I really see this as an incapable leader, you know, someone who just isn't able to, to be able to, uh, delegate, right? And there's this fear of delegation. But the fear also comes from either you delegate too much and you completely give up control and you're putting all the responsibility, where you're abdicating leadership, where you're putting all the responsibility on your team. That's one approach or the other approach is I'm going to micromanages, micromanage, uh, everything. This is the Elon Musk approach. And the happy balance is actually the hardest thing to do to understand how well can I delegate or how well can my team take this delegation? And then knowing what to delegate and how much, right? So when you have the scaffolding of people sharing with you, how well did it work? What have I learned? What will I try next? I get a good sense of how well are they able to solve this puzzle, and therefore I know how much to delegate. How much handholding does this person need versus this Other person has a lot more in terms of knowledge, skills and experience. I do a lot more delegation with them. So using psychological safety and radical candor has to come with this sort of scaffolding so that I know what is the right level of hand holding or just, you know, giving them a long leash. And we've missed that. And the bad leadership that resulted from it is why we misuse radical candor and, and psychological safety, I bet too,

Narrator: like when you have that right level of assessment on your team of um, who can handle what and to what capacity and to what scale. If I were using that same mindset towards looking at this goal setting moment, it also should in my mind inform me that the whatever is written right for an organization, if it is in fact goal, if it's the problem that you want to solve, whatever it is, it shouldn't, it should be different for those individuals based on all of those things. Instead of I, ah, have 20 people who report to me, you all have the same goal. Because at the end of the day you don't have the same goal. You're not going to achieve it the same way. It is going to be different. That's just my. There's my hot take based on all of what you just said.

Radhika Dutt: Oh my gosh, you hit the nail on the head. Because let's look at Andy Grove, the legendary intel CEO, right? He instituted at okrs at intel and yet if you read his book Only the Paranoid Survive. Everything that he talks about in terms of how he transformed intel from a memory chip company to a uh, microprocessor powerhouse, he doesn't mention goals and okrs even once. What he talks about is experimentation and adaptation. That's what he emphasizes. But here's the thing they do it for through intuition. Like he just had this innate gift for how do you do this experimentation? How do you drive it in your organization? How do you have psychological safety? Do you know that Andy Grove, he didn't have a corner office. He used to keep a same size cubicle as everyone else. Why? Because he wanted everyone to challenge him, to not be afraid to challenge him, that he wanted his opinion to be equal to everyone else else's right? Isn't that impressive? Like that is how you create psychological safety. When you are so focused on psychological safety, creating an environment of experimentation, learning, adaptation, then whether you're using goals or okrs etc doesn't matter. But here's the difference. When Andy's successors came along when they didn't have this innate gift for experimentation, learning, adaptation for Puzzle setting and puzzle solving. What they focused on was goal setting and goals. Sorry, was. Yeah, goal sett and targets. So his successors, people like Bob Swan, Paula Tolini, they hit old goals and targets and numbers looked fantastic. Revenues were up and to the right. But you know what? They missed everything that matters. They intel at the time they decided, oh you know what, When Apple asked them to provide chips for the iPhone, they said no, not important enough for us. When it was time to invest in extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is the next gen density of chips, they said, oh, too expensive. They still, they, they didn't spend enough. They spent, but they didn't integrate all of that into their processes. They missed out on huge opportunities like building standalone GPUs, which is why Nvidia overtook the AI market. They passed on investing in OpenAI. All of these misses because they focused on targets. They lost that muscle for experimentation, learning, adaptation. So exactly to your point, Kasia, whether you have goals and okrs, if you have this ingrained approach for puzzle setting and puzzle solving, you can do well. But that's the piece. It's really, really rare. It takes a legendary CEO like Andy Grove to have that innate mindset. Which is why this whole framework for puzzle setting and puzzle solving that I call ola. Objectives, hypotheses, learnings, adaptations, that's what gives you this framework so that you can build this sk relying on a rare innate intuition.

Danny Glutch: Mhm. Yeah. It takes a lot, right? It takes a new structure, framework, mindset, attitude, language to get it to work. If you're not just oh, this is, you know, like you said, this is just who I am. Right. It's, it's innate. And is that something that you think can be scaled and taught and spread? Well, where as individuals are coming up in that organization, they'll learn to lead using those tools as opposed to defaulting back to like the way they do things.

Radhika Dutt: Yes. And I feel like that is so key. You know, it's like a uh, Jedi skill. You know, when you just tell people, use the Force, this is why the Jedi is die out. What you need is a better framework than use the Force. And so this is the kind of Jedi skill set building toolkit, right. Where Jedi masters can now use this to train their apprentices that this is what you do. So here's what you can do as a leader, you know, as you're building this skill set in your team, think about an initiative that you have been working on. Think about it as a puzzle. And start by writing out those three o's for yourself, you know, the observation, what were some open questions? What was the object or the summary of this puzzle?

Kashadora: Right.

Radhika Dutt: Think about that puzzle and define it. And then you can present to your team for that initiative this format of how well did it work? What have we learned? What will we try next? And by doing that, you're role modeling for your team. Both the framework but also your role modeling for them. The psychological safety that it's okay to share the good and the bad. And then you know, you can invite this team to be able to share information with you in the same form. You can build and scale this approach. And the way you do this is also by the way, start with your really competent team, right? Start with just a few people and introduce this to them. Have them share this information to you in the privacy of just a one on one meeting. And then you can slowly grow this to group meetings and then to like monthly business reviews instead of presenting okrs as you know, red, green or yellow present. How well did it work? What have we learned? What will we try next? So these are some actionable steps you can do next to start to scale this approach and grow it.

Kashadora: That's mhm.

Danny Glutch: Amazing.

Kashadora: Well this is, this is a perfect time for this conversation because again, so many HR practitioners, leaders that are just setting up for this stage in the business calendars, we get into the new year and I think those who are confident and competent to be able to kind of experiment with this could really have some good fun with it.

Danny Glutch: So yeah, I, I think this would set a lot of teams up for strong 2026. I can't believe it's almost 2026. By the time this comes out, it might be 2026. Happy New Year everybody. So your, your book though is not going to come out till 2027. So what can can people who are interested in teams who, who want to start trying this stuff out, who want to start experimenting with this, what uh, you can, can they do?

Radhika Dutt: Yes, thank you for bringing that up. So they can download the OLA toolkit. Just go to radicalproduct.com and I'll share the link for the free toolkit. I used to call it ohls, but ola, uh, just rolls off the tongue. Objectives, hypotheses, learnings, adaptations. So you can download the toolkit, start using it. And now that I'm working on this second book, I'm in the writing phase. So just you know, feel free to reach out to me, talk to me on LinkedIn, just send me a message on LinkedIn connect with me, tell me about your experiences as you use ola and maybe it might just make it into the book as a case study. But I always in any case love to hear how people are creating change in their organization, how you're being vision driven. So feel free to reach out. And lastly, you can also get the radical product thinking book in the meanwhile that helps you take a more vision driven approach and overcome product diseases. And maybe that's a whole different topic that we can talk about. Talk about sometime in 2026.

Danny Glutch: Yeah, that, that would be fantastic. Fantastic. I know a lot of people have. What was the metrics 1 metrics?

Radhika Dutt: Hyper metrocemia.

Danny Glutch: Yeah, that's uh, that's going around.

Narrator: You said that narcissistic one and I pulled a face I don't think is fit for public consumption.

Danny Glutch: Oh, we will not be releasing the video of this podcast. Don't worry.

Narrator: There's my psychological safety.

Radhika Dutt: I'm good.

Danny Glutch: R.A. thank you so much for joining us. This an incredible conversation. Um, I hope you can come back again and actually talk about the product diseases. I think that just is also super fascinating. And uh, everybody, you can find her link to her LinkedIn in the show notes as well as a couple of other links she's going to share with us with the uh, free toolkit. Thank you everybody for listening. Be sure to like subscribe, leave a 5 star review, help us get found on the algorithms and all the Spotify's and Apple podcast podcasts. That's really helpful. Thank you all so much. Have a great day.