The Four Os: Observation, Open Questions, Opportunity, and Outcomes (with Radhika Dutt)

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Safety Gambit Podcast. I'm your host, Lindsay Polis. The Safety Gambit invites you to take a more curious and holistic approach to transforming the culture of safety in your own life, including bringing awareness to the impact of our safety decisions, the safety of our workplaces, the emotional and physical safety of our spaces, and the overall philosophy of safety. My continued hope is that the Safety Gambit podcast will connect us, educate us, and empower each one of you to enact change and create transformation around safety for your family, your communities, and your workplaces. Now, let's dive in to this week's episode. Hi, Radhika. Welcome to the Safety Gambit Podcast.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Lindsay. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker B: I always love these conversations. And I, through the journey of doing my podcast, have met so many great people with such enriching topics, and today is going to be no different. I'm so excited to dive in. Um, we didn't really talk too much before we started recording, so I'm just really excited to jump in. But before we do that, will you please introduce yourself, tell people a little bit about you and what you do and how you are doing what you're doing now.

Speaker A: Yes. Um, so I'm Radhika Dad. Um, I am the author of Radical Product Thinking, the new mindset for innovating smarter. Um, and I'm working on my next book about why goals, targets, um, okrs, why they don't work, and what actually does. But before I talk about how or why I decided to start writing this second book, um, I'll share a little bit of my background, which is that, uh, by way of training, I studied electrical engineering at mit. Um, and my first startup was right out of our dorm rooms at mit. Um, and all of that sounds wonderful and glamorous, like a Silicon Valley story. Um, except I'm gonna be different. And I'll say we made a ton of mistakes. Um, and just I learned a lot about what I now call product diseases, which make good products go bad. Uh, and these diseases are just so common. Um, and so what I learned was that when you don't have a clear vision, a clear strategy that translates into everyday actions. Uh, basically when your vision becomes disconnected from your everyday work, then that's where these product diseases creep in. Uh, and so that's where I wrote Radical Product Thinking so that we can have a really clear vision strategy. We can bring it into our everyday actions, um, not just right division and then file it away for posterity. So this was what radical Product thinking was. And the reason I started working on the second book was because a lot of people who read the first book said to me, you know, I love what you're talking about in terms of this long term thinking that, uh, you know, we want to bring in vision and strategy into everyday work. But they go like, okay, but you know, here's the problem. My company is Driven by targets, KPIs okrs, uh, which stands for objectives and key results. When I have all of these short term, um, numbers that I have to hit, I just can't use all this long term thinking that you're talking about. What do I do in that situation? And what I realized was just a lot of the things that I'd been experiencing in terms of why goals and targets don't work. It wasn't just me. For a long time I thought, okay, maybe it's just something I'm observing that others don't have this issue. But it turns out it is a very consistent issue. Um, and that's what drives me to write the second book.

Speaker B: This is a great topic because if you're working in any sort of corporate America, my guess is you have goals, you have targets. When you hit those, they're like, okay, that's great, let's do more. Um, and then they're revised every year. Sometimes they change, you know, drastically. Um, you know, uh, incentive plans might change. I'm thinking back to like my corporate consulting world of like every year it was like, different and you thought you'd mastered it and then it hasn't. So it's really an, like, such an enriching topic. So thank you for being here to share all this great information.

Speaker A: Well, thank you. Thank you for having this open mindset. Right. Because so often when one challenges the idea of goal setting, the instant reaction is, oh, but there's no other way. Goals are the right way. You know, this is what has been truly entrenched in us. If you want to drive motivation and results, this is how you do it. Um, so thank you for listening to a very different perspective on why it actually doesn't work well.

Speaker B: And I think it's good to bring this to the surface because if you are sitting at a corporate company where this is the way of life, then maybe you can be the voice of bringing in a new way of thinking. Something that we, uh, as I was preparing for this, curiosity kept coming up. And as a consultant, I love leading through curiosity, asking questions, even when it's very compliance driven. If I'm out doing a compliance Audit. I still show up very curious. Tell me about this. Tell me more about this. You know, what is happening here. Explain this to me, and then we can have dialogue and come up with a solution that way. So talk to me just around the thought of being curious and exploring a different mindset than what we're so used to.

Speaker A: Uh, I love it. And curiosity is really the essence for me of making progress. Right. We cannot change things or, um, even get beyond the status quo if we don't have that curiosity. Uh, so what is interesting to me is goals and targets kill this very thing that drives progress. They kill curiosity. Let's talk about what happens when you have goals and targets. When you set a target for people, the incentive that you create is they want to look like a high performer. Well, who doesn't? Right? You, um, want to look like a high performer, and therefore you want to show, look, ta da, I've hit that number that you've set for me. And what you really want as a leader is not just that someone says, ta da, I've hit my number, but you really want them to look at the bad numbers. To look at the bad numbers, play detective and go like, huh, I wonder what happened there. To have that curiosity and say, is that a problem? Is that an opportunity? How might I do something with that? What should we be doing instead? What is that telling me? But all that curiosity is sort of stifled. And it's not malicious, right? It's really not malicious. It's just that when you have a target, you want to focus on the positive numbers and you want to show, look, we've hit those numbers. And so this is where a different mindset comes in. Instead of a mindset of goal setting, what I advocate for is a mindset of puzzle setting and puzzle solving. I love that.

Speaker B: I love that. Just the name of that. So go ahead, continue.

Speaker A: No, tell me more. I would love to hear your take on how this features in the safety world.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And I'll share one quick tidbit as I thought about it in safety. But, um, I'd love your take on it and how it applies more broadly, perhaps, uh, for our listeners. Um, one thing that I found often is, um, oh, this was research that I did. Uh, when you have targets in the police force for number of cases solved, et cetera, very often they don't want to open a new case that someone reports because you want to show that our close rate is this high. So opening any new report is going to affect that. So let me just not open a new case. Right. Um, and I think in safety also this is a very relevant mindset when you have targets for X number of days. Since the last issue that we had when um, it's number of injuries, et cetera and we want to keep it below X number. The idea is, or the incentive we create for people is well, does this really need to be reported? You know it's. And very often to this people will say, well then it's just a matter of making sure people don't game it. But that's not what we want to create. Right. What we really want is that deeper thinking, looking at bad things that happen and then not brushing it under the carpet, but rather to just question what is that telling me? What might I do instead? How should we think about this? How might we adapt? But we tend to atrophy that muscle when we have goals and targets. I'd love to hear your thoughts and what you've seen in practice.

Speaker B: Oh for sure. I mean I can think about it from injury, um, reporting if there's so many different ways to incentivize. But I've seen companies where they have um, given away TVs have given away for like you know, the most. Uh, if we hit 100 days without an injury, we'll have a big party and what happens is people don't report, you know, and that is not what we want. We don't want people not reporting things because if we're not reporting them then we cannot get better, we cannot evolve as a safety culture, as a safety program. So that's just one example. But um, I definitely see this happening through the industry in the safety world of you know, people get in, in this, this sense that if I report I'm going to get in trouble, I'm going to blow it for somebody else, they're going to get mad at me. So I'm gonna like harbor this inside and just not say anything. Or if they see a near miss happen, uh, where we want all of this stuff where we like beg people to report as much as they can because that's to make the safety program better. But to, you know, I mean this kind of gets into like what's the human cost of this performance mindset. And I think it's stressful for people, I think it's um, demotivating. And when companies feel like if I put all these incentives out there, especially in different cultures or different demographics, getting a brand new large screen TV or you know, gift certificates for groceries and that could mean the world to them.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: I Think that's from a safety perspective where I think about it, yeah.

Speaker A: So much to unpack. In what you said, you talked about, um, it's the cost of performance. I think about it sometimes as it's the illusion of performance. We think that we're getting better performance, but it's just the illusion of it. Um, and Andy Grove, the legendary, uh, CEO of Intel in the 80s, he talked in 90s, ah, he talked about it. As you know, leaders are often the last to know because everyone wants to show you the numbers that you want to see, that you say, this is what we're trying to get to. And so people show you what you want to see and therefore leaders are lost to know. Um, so going back to. Oh, and there's one more thing that I wanted to mention, which was when you talk about, uh, underreporting, etcetera, There are a lot of people who will say, well, this is all about creating a culture of, ah, fail fast or making it okay to fail. What I found is that in reality you might talk about it in that way, but the very word failure creates a lot of, um, hindrance in terms of even reporting those failures. You don't want to, um, admit to failure. We all want to do well. Um, and so we. What I found is this vocabulary of puzzle setting and puzzle solving gets around so many of those issues. One, because puzzles naturally, uh, triggers the sense of curiosity like, how am I going to solve this? Right? And when you're solving a puzzle, every attempt that you make, if you're working on a Rubik's Cube and that attempt doesn't work, you don't even think about it in your head as a failure. You're just trying again. Um, you don't even need to call it out as fail F fast. You're just continuously learning without necessarily thinking about it as a failure. This is just part of solving a puzzle. So this is why we want to move towards puzzle setting and puzzle solving from goal setting. So how might we do that? The framework that I have is, um, something I call ola, uh, which stands for Objectives, Hypotheses, Learnings and Adaptations. Now that sounds a bit dry. So OLA is the easy way to remember it.

Speaker B: That sounds fun.

Speaker A: And so let's break that down into what puzzle setting and puzzle solving means. So the objectives, the O part of OLA is how we set the puzzle in a safety context. Here is a puzzle that we might say, maybe we're really happy about the 100 days without, um, any event. And what we could Say is that has gone really well. But here's a puzzle that uh, we might still want to look at as a team. The puzzle might be. Here are a couple of near misses that we observed and what might be going on. There are some open questions that you might have to ask around this. You've just described what the observation is that here were some, um, uh, near misses. Then the open questions might be, uh, a few things around it. Is it, uh, that our process needs some sort of change that we can avoid this. Was this because someone was really tired that they had this near miss? Um, or it might be more questions around like, um, was this near miss because we're doing something wrong in terms of equipment and how that equipment is being serviced? Um, do we need different guidelines for it? Um, so there might be a bunch of open questions that you describe here. And then the summary is the puzzle. How do we solve this puzzle so that we can keep the streak going longer? But again, I've not set a target about this. I'm um, talking about how do we keep the streak going on? And it's by solving this puzzle so that we can avoid something coming out of those near misses where it's an actual event. Right. So that's the puzzle setting part. One thing to observe in the puzzle setting is that we're asking open questions that we genuinely don't know the answers to. This is a very different mindset, by the way. A fundamental shift from a place of goal setting or setting targets, because a target might be create a new process for blah, blah. It comes from a place of knowing and deciding that this is the solution. Whereas the open questions are a bit uncomfortable. Like as a leader, I genuinely don't know. Is it this? Is it this? What might be going on? We're going to figure this out together. I'll pause here for a moment before we go to puzzle setting. Sorry, puzzle solving. I'd love to hear your thoughts and what resonates or doesn't.

Speaker B: I love this, this way of thinking about it. And it goes back to curiosity. Right. We're coming from, like you said, not knowing the answers but genuinely wanting to know what the answers are, wanting to improve. Um, I, I guess I'm wondering is there a. And maybe this is in your book or maybe not. You know, we love diagram drawing things on, on dry erase boards or whatever for the puzzle. When you're identifying the puzzle pieces, is that, do you have any sort of like diagram or like way of putting it all together or is this. Just write it all out, get all those questions out and be curious in finding the answers.

Speaker A: Um, the way I think about it, and, uh, you know, I can see you're a very visual person. I think about it as, uh, the four, um, under puzzle setting, right? And the first o is what is the observation? And this is where, you know, when I work with a team on a whiteboard, the first thing I might write out is, what's the observation? And it might be one thing that we've seen that is the starting point for all of this. The second question is, what are the open questions? So that's the second O, the open questions. And this is where I might list, you know, two, three, four questions that I genuinely don't know answers to. And this is where we really want to invite feedb from, uh, the people around us, because they might be observing things and we don't have the same lens that they do. Then comes, um, what is the opportunity? In here we've described the observation or the problem statement, and the opportunity is basically the opposite of that, which is, if we solve this puzzle, what do we stand to gain from it? In this case, it might be a longer streak, um, that we can just continue on well beyond one, maybe just something where our culture of safety is much better. Um, and then the last thing is, um, what are the outcomes? So what is it that we hope for, right, by solving this puzzle, what is it that we would hope for? Um, and so your, um, outcomes, um, and the opportunity might be very similar. It really depends on, um, you know, kind of how you want to define it. For me, the outcome in terms of safety would be, you know, really being able to create a culture of safety where this is a way that we're constantly puzzle solving together. But this framework becomes a mindset for us as a way of continuously learning collaboratively so that we can keep figuring out such puzzles together. Right? That would be my hope. Um, so that's kind of how I visualize it on a board.

Speaker B: I love that. And I think I am a visual learner, and I think people like to have structure around that. So I think how you just described that in the four quadrants can give somebody something that they could put up, you know, in a meeting and say, all right, let's work through these different quadrants as we're puzzle setting and really understanding, you know, where the thoughts, insights, opportunities, um, could be. And I think if, if in the end, the outcome, if we go back to 100 days without any incidents, you know, if that is our goal or opportunity, then we can sort of back it into what you were just describing. So I really like that. I think there's becomes more discussion and more collaboration around that than just saying, let's get to 100 days without any events.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And what you just said about um, it invites more discussion. This also is something I've, um, instilled in the framework as part of puzzle solving. So let's talk about puzzle solving for a moment. So in the OLA framework, the hypotheses, learnings, adaptations, the hla, um, that's the puzzle solving part. And um, there are three simple questions that we use because hla, again it sounds very dry. So, uh, the first question is how well did it work? Whatever. Our first attempt at that. Puzzle solving is our first attempt. We try it out and we say how well did it work? In this case, maybe the near miss. We realize that it's because, um, people, when they are coming in, um, that they're already really pretty tired. Um, we um, need to assess tiredness before they're allowed to do this task. Maybe that's our first attempt that we think about, like if, if you're too tired to do this, we're not going to put you in that dangerous situation. And so the experiment there might be, you know, we're trying this new technique to assess, like, how are you feeling in this moment? To be able to decide, um, whether we put you in that situation or not. The first attempt is we try, um, this test and we're seeing that it is filtering out people. And yes, that is working. Then comes the second question. The second question is, what did we learn? The first question was how well did it work? And that is inviting the good and the bad. The second question of what did we learn? That's inviting you to not just look at numbers, but to sort of talk more about the narrative. So in this case we find that, um, maybe 5% of people who come in, they're just not in the right state to be able to do this task. We see that, oh, we're learning that this means that sometimes we don't have enough people to fill the shift. Um, what might this mean? What are we going to do about it? Um, because this is now causing downtime in other ways, even though it's improving safety and near misses, but it is causing downtime. Then what will we try next? This is where we figure out maybe here are some bottlenecks or here are some equipment changes that we can do so that this process itself is a little safer and so that we don't have to do this test, but for now, this is what we're going to have to do. Maybe this is the adaptation. Adaptation that you decide at the end. But now you have these three questions. How well did it work? What have we learned? What are we going to try next? And what this is showing you is basically you're inviting both the good and the bad, and then you're figuring out how you learn and adapt. And it's this continuous learning part. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, the first question of, um, how well did it work? And looking at m. Maybe what, uh, are the, you know, pointing out if somebody's tired? So I talk about something called a personal hazard assessment, where in safety, we assess everything from, you know, electronics to, you know, everything, everything, everything. Walking, working surfaces, heights, all that. But when do we ever look at ourselves, right? When are we ever assessing ourselves saying, are we ready to show up to complete that task that is in front of us for that day? So I love how that kind of pulls in something that I've been trying to talk about as well and just bringing more awareness to, like, that being the first step of even just looking at the human aspect of what, um, in this puzzle setting of. Of what, um,

Speaker A: how.

Speaker B: How well did it work? Right. So how are our people showing up? Are there opportunities there to maybe shift something so that they're showing up a little bit better? So I really love that. And also my second thought on this is it makes me think of when you mentioned Rubik's Cube. My son loves Rubik's Cubes. We have all of them. We've got the octagonal ones, the triangle ones, the five blocks. That's, you know, all the things. And he will work at it and work at it and work at it. And you're right, he doesn't look at it as, oh, this was a failure. I'm a failure. I didn't figure it out the first time. He will dig into the resources. He will dig into YouTube to find the right video, to find the right algorithm, to find the right moves to get it to the next thing. And even with that, he's still learning at each turn, at each practice that he does. And so I think looking at it this way really allows us to not shame us for failure, not label it as failure, which I think once something is labeled as a failure, there's, like, feelings around that, and we judge ourselves. We take it personally. Oh, you know, now that's a failure. I'm a failure. And reworking it this Way, I think, turns it into such a positive light and more opportunity to grow and learn and come together, pull that culture together as a team. So much more.

Speaker A: You know, one thing I found, and this example with your son and constantly pursuing and persisting in finding algorithms, doing better, et cetera.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It reminds me of, um, something I often hear in workshops that I do around puzzle setting and puzzle solving. A lot of people talk about how when they start working on this from a puzzle setting and puzzle solving mindset, it's not exhausting to constantly m solve puzzles, that it taps into this inner drive you have because as high performers, you actually care about your work. And you keep persisting on solving puzzles because by the time you've solved one layer of the Rubik's Cube or one layer of this puzzle, there's the next layer that emerges. In this example that we talked about that, okay, you've solved the tiredness problem, but it opened up this downtime problem related to shifts. Now what are you going to do? And you keep solving this, although this opens up one puzzle after another, and then you keep solving. You. First of all, it drives better results, but the second thing is, it doesn't tire you out. Whereas at the very beginning of this podcast, the way you opened, you were talking about how, you know, every time you hit a target, there's the next target that you have to jump to, right? And that creates this feeling of tiredness. Like, there's this exhaustion that and like

Speaker B: you're never getting to the end. You're never able to. You know, it's like you hit that goal, but then there's always something next and always something next. So even just talking about it, it feels really heavy. Like, my body feels heavy. I'm exhausted in my brain saying the words.

Speaker A: And isn't that fascinating, right? Because goals and pursuing the one target after another creates the sense of heaviness. And yet I talked about, you know, setting one puzzle after another, and it unravels the next puzzle. And that doesn't create a sense of tiredness. Why is that? It's because the external goals are ones that are, uh, pushed on us by someone else. Someone else is telling you, you have to do this, this, and this, and now you have to do this, this, and this. So it feels like you're being forced to run one sprint after another, exhausting. Whereas puzzles are something driven within you. It's your internal drive. You want to solve this. And therefore, it's not exhausting. It's your. It's driven by your curiosity. And which is why we want to move towards this mindset of puzzle setting and puzzle solving. Uh, because it there, there are all of these benefits. Right. And now finally we have a framework so that for leaders it doesn't feel scary. Because until now, for leaders, if you had ever mentioned the word puzzle setting and puzzle solving, it would saying to them, let's just, you know, go off to the playground, you know, we'll play for a while, we'll come back when we're done. And that sounds downright scary.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Whereas now you can see that this is very rigorous. It's not off to the playground. And yet it triggers all of that internal drive which drives actual performance as opposed to the illusion of performance.

Speaker B: I love that so much. Do you have an example, um, of one that you can talk about, where you've had a team that has switched from goal setting to puzzle setting and puzzle solving and how has that helped their team or what changes did they notice in doing it? Um, this different way.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, I'm happy to share an example. So here is one where, um, I've been working with a team for about two years. Uh, they're in the maritime industry. Um, and it's uh, the best way to describe it, the company's called Signal. The best way to describe it is they data platform, uh, so that you can maximize profits by matching which shipping vessels should I use for which cargo. Um, and they have the best data to be able to do that. So uh, when I started working with the team, I was brought in because, um, they'd been using uh, okrs, objectives and key results to set targets for sales, for product metrics, etc. And, and the CEO brought me in because just growth had stalled. And this was in 2023. Um, and so when I came in, what I saw was very often we were focusing on lots of things that would hit the numbers. We were very often chasing numbers like, oh, okay, if we just make this improvement to the user experience, to the user interface, then maybe more people will start using this platform. Uh, so let's focus on this. It was always jumping to the next small thing that we could do. And so when we shifted to this mindset of puzzle setting, puzzle solving, what we started doing was staying in the problem space for longer. So first thing was we had to look at the problem statement or the observation. And the observation was, it's interesting, but it's only tech savvy people who are brokers in the maritime industry, only they are the people using this platform. So then there are some Open questions around this that I honestly didn't know the answers to. So why is it that only these tech savvy brokers are using our platform? Why aren't the others using it? But to unlock that, there were other open questions I had to answer, right, like how do these people in other roles, how do they think about their job? Like, how do they work? What is their workflow? I didn't know. And then we had to ask questions like, well, how are these tech savvy people different from these tech averse people? Like how are their thinking models different? Again, questions I didn't know answers to. And so the puzzle, the, the objective or the summary of this puzzle was how do we solve this puzzle to then get back to a growth trajectory, um, so that we can address these users beyond just the tech savvy brokers. Now comes the puzzle solving. What we did was we really worked to understand, um, how these people think. We had a lot of user interviews, both with people who are using the platform, but also people who weren't using the platform. Then the first hypothesis we had after really understanding their workflow, we're like, great, now we can build the whole workflow and let's automate all these different processes so that for a tech averse user, everything is automated. And we already know you do step one, two and three. Let me just automate it for you so that you'll use it more. Sounds reasonable. Uh, this was our first attempt at the puzzle and what did we find? That when we did all this automation, they really did not like it, so it didn't work. Well. Second question, what did we learn from this? Why wasn't it working? Well, because that was shocking, right? Like we know steps one to three that you're doing. If we automate it, why wouldn't you like it? So turned out that tech averse users actually they felt like this platform was like magic. And for them they weren't trusting magic. It was this feeling of you just automated this. But how do I know that this is the right answer? How do I know? Where did you get these numbers from? M It turned out that techverse users didn't like magic. Then comes question three. What will we try next? For that we decided now we know that we shouldn't just give you magic. Forget the automation, we're going to guide you through each step so that it feels simple. But at each step you know exactly what to expect. And so we changed it to this, right? And people liked it a whole lot better. So that was. So we unlocked that puzzle, we figured out how we'd adapt. We tried that and yes, that worked much better. So this is a way of puzzle setting and puzzle solving. And in terms of results, we doubled sales in 2024, again in 2025. And remember that sales had stalled back in 23. So doubling sales two years in a row and we reduced customer churn from 26% to 4%. And the big result to me was what the CEO said, which is he was seeing the team take more ownership because now it felt like it was their puzzles and he felt like they had thought through the decisions better and then, uh, lastly that they were making better decisions as a result. So this was a huge win for me to hear the CEO talk about it in this way because he had been the one who brought in okrs.

Speaker B: That's a great example. I really enjoy seeing and the evolution of, um, the conversation around it and the curiosity, the interviewing the different users. And as we've been talking about, it's really a way to get more involved and pull your team in to finding the solution instead of just saying we need to double sales, okay, Then people throw their arms up and they're like, well, how are we going to do that? Right? We've had these challenges. This is what's happening. We have the system that we don't like using. How are we going to double sales? So it's gone from a very discouraging feel around doubling sales to oh, let's, let's really be curious around this and oh, let's make these changes because of what we've learned. And now look, we can double our sales. So even just the feeling and the heaviness around that goal of just doubling sales has changed, has shifted into like you're talking about a problem solving mindset instead of just somebody is pushing down this goal to you.

Speaker A: And what you say is so true. And I definitely observe it with the motivation in the team. Right. And you know, as I've been working with the whole team, we are so much more gelled together as a team. So much more aligned. Um, and aligned because you're always in sync in terms of how well did it work, what have we learned, what will we try next? We know the why behind everything that we're doing next. Right. Like this level of alignment you don't just get by setting goals once in a year and sort of, you know, just having everyone pursue these goals. Um, and the second piece of it is beyond the alignment. It's the motivation, like just how driven people are. It's a lot more than we ever were, just chasing numbers.

Speaker B: And I think that pulls the culture piece into it as well, is you're gonna build a stronger culture around whatever your company's mission. If you're coming at it this way and being able to have that communication, um, in. I mean, I just love the four O's and the three questions to ask because it keeps people engaged, it keeps the conversation going until you're getting to that end result. And I think that is definitely different than just giving people some goals to work on by themselves in their bubble. So this is, so, this seems much more collaborative and much more culture building, positive culture building.

Speaker A: And it's such an important point, right, that you, uh, mentioned, um, bubble, um, and there can be this negative bubble where you're just having to stew in it. But, um, you can create a bubble of a wonderful culture. So let's say you find yourself, um, as a man manager in a company where it's all about targets and goals and you have no hope in the world of changing that sort of a culture. Right. So what do you do then? And how can you use this approach? So one thing that you can do going back to this bubble idea, is you can create a bubble of safety within your sphere of control. Uh, so within your own team, within a group of people that you feel like you have the psychological safety with, you can talk about, um, problems in this way where you're setting the puzzle and then you're solving the puzzle together. You know, you're inviting collaboration as you talk about what are the open questions as you set this puzzle, you can share learnings, talking about how well did it work? What have we learned? What will we try next? Right. And by doing that, you can create this bubble of psychological safety, um, and, uh, create a bubble where, you know, work can be less soul sucking, that

Speaker B: no matter what goals I think we're all see.

Speaker A: Exactly. Um, so this is one way for you to use it, uh, regardless of what your company does.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. I think that it's, it's great to turn it around and pull in, you know, the bubble of psychological safety. Because I love talking about that. And I feel like the last few years there's definitely been a lot of buzz around, um, making a psychologically safe workplace, whether that be in safety or sales or whatever it might be, and just really creating a space for people to feel seen, heard, included, um, innovative. And I think this way of thinking and how you present it is such a great opportunity. So if people are listening to this and thinking, this is great. M. Where can I learn more? So as we wrap up, I feel like I could ask you tons and tons of questions around this. Um, selfishly, but how can people, um, learn more about this technique or work with you if they're like, we need to have you come in and work with our team because they just need some more power behind it.

Speaker A: Tell us about that. Yeah. So, um, you're welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn and I'll share a, uh, link to my LinkedIn profile, uh, for the show notes. Uh, so please feel free to reach out. Also, I'm working on this book as we speak, uh, on why goals and okrs don't work, what actually does, how to shift to this puzzle setting, puzzle solving mindset. So if you want to download this toolkit, there's a free toolkit as well that you could use. Uh, um, and, and I'll also share a link to, uh, the toolkit, um, for show notes. But basically you can go to radicalproduct.com and under toolkits you'll find the OHLs or OLA toolkit. Um, and then, uh, feel free to reach out and tell me your experience. Or we can work together and your story might just make it into the book as a case study.

Speaker B: Amazing. That's so fun. Is there anything else, uh, before I let you go, that we didn't cover, that you wanted to share or wanted to make sure people know about this, um, new way of thinking. Maybe it's not new, but your innovative way of thinking about this and sharing

Speaker A: with the community, maybe one thing I'll say, since you bring in the personal, uh, along with the professional on a personal side. Right. I think very often we have the same mindset of chasing goals, that it might be goals and targets that society encourages to, encourages us to chase. It might be a job title, that promotion, the fancy house, the fancy car, et cetera. Um, and very often, you know, being so target driven, we kind of miss out on what is the puzzle of life that we really want to solve for ourselves. Right. And so, uh, even there, um, I found that for myself, for example, you know, for the longest time, I'd always been chasing, um, sort of one thing after another. Um, and it's only in my 40s that I look back and now I'm saying to myself, okay, what is it that I find life enriching? Um, and there are open questions around that that I continue to ask and that I discover. And that's my puzzle. Um, and I've been working on experimenting, learning, and adapting in terms of how well did that work? Ah, what have I learned from, from it and what will I do next? Um, so that's a framework even for us to think about in our personal lives, whether we're parenting, um, or wherever else that we want to learn and grow.

Speaker B: That is a perfect way to tie it all together. I, um, feel like I'm in this mindset right now or in this, um, season of wanting to really identify what is life enriching for me and for my family. And uh, so that's a great, good alignment on that because I, I think that this would be a good way to look at that from your personal lives too, because I think a lot of people set goals for the year, whether it be financial goals or travel goals or whatever. And maybe try thinking about it in this puzzle solving, puzzle setting, puzzle setting, puzzle solving mindset would, um, maybe make 2026 a new way of, of looking at your goals and objectives for the year.

Speaker A: I love it. I love that thought.

Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your time and I just love this topic. So good luck on your second book and we'll make sure all of those links get in the show notes so people can follow you and track you down to work together, um, if they're interested.

Speaker A: Thanks so much. It was so great talking to you, Lindsay.

Speaker B: Thank you. Mhm.

Speaker A: Sam,