An emphatic statement tells. A question invites.

And that small mark of punctuation often determines whether teams react or reflect.

Statements drive activity. Questions drive accountability.

The Problem: Scoreboards don’t create clarity

A target tells you what outcome you want, but not what you must become or improve to achieve it.

Yes, teams can act on “grow revenue.” But those actions will fragment—each group doing what makes sense in their lane. One team discounts. Another raises prices. Marketing adds promos. Ops tightens costs.

Everyone’s rowing, but not in the same direction.

“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future…”

Some days it feels like Steve Miller was singing about my calendar.

I’ll start the morning with clarity about what really matters. Then the little things show up—emails that “just need a quick reply,” meetings that expand beyond their purpose, texts that break my focus. One after another, they eat away at my day.

Did you know the placebo effect is active in your brain every single day, not just in hospitals or clinical trials? 

Psychologists call it Expectancy Theory, and it shows that the reality we experience is driven by our expectations.

Nice is a trap. Kind is a catalyst.

At first glance, nice and kind sound like synonyms. But when coaching a team through execution, they couldn’t be further apart.

The moment a suggested solution hits the table, people pile on. Options multiply. Debates fire up. Pretty soon you’ve got a full menu of alternatives, but very little clarity on whether any of them fit the situation.

What usually gets skipped is the boring alignment on the fundamentals:

The words that sink execution aren’t the fancy bits of jargon. They’re the everyday shortcuts—the words so common that nobody notices how vague those words are.

Squishy words leave a trail of misunderstandings, false assumptions, and dropped balls.

Every time you draw an org chart, you're picking sides in battles that haven't started yet.

That's just human wiring. Social identity theory shows people quickly form in-groups and out-groups, even on trivial distinctions. Any structure you choose will naturally create "us vs. them" dynamics.

Without intentional design, you get the classic blame cycles: Sales says Marketing sends bad leads, Marketing says Sales doesn't follow up, and Engineering blames both teams for changing requirements mid-sprint.

But you can architect your organization so those tribal instincts work for you instead of against you. Here's how:

Why Work Miscommunication Is the Norm

At work, we interact with people far less often than our closest relationships. They have even less context for what’s in our heads. What you say is always filtered through their priors:

• Their role and incentives

• Their past experiences with similar topics

• Whatever else is competing for their attention

That’s why, “But I told them,” isn’t enough. It’s not about what you said. It’s about what they heard and how they interpreted it.

When you’re accountable for the outcome, letting go of the “how” feels risky.

If the team takes a wrong turn or misses a date, you’ll be the one explaining.

Still, trying to own every move will burn you out, disenfranchise your team, and likely leave better solutions undiscovered. Instead, define the destination; they determine the path to get there.

Scroll LinkedIn long enough and you’ll see the usual suspects:

• Posts claiming Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research.

• That Netflix beat Blockbuster because they had more vision.

• That Kodak went bankrupt because it ignored digital photography. 

They make for great click bait. Visionaries as heroes, analysts as villains. The punchline is always the same: one bold idea is all it takes. What’s missing is the part that actually determines who wins — execution.

Let’s take them one at a time.

With (American) football season right around the corner, I’ve been revisiting some of my highlights from former 49ers coach Bill Walsh’s excellent book, The Score Takes Care of Itself. It’s packed with leadership insights that reach well beyond the field.

One section in particular stands out, especially for those of us thinking about how to build and lead effective teams. It’s called Establishing Your Standard of Performance, and the rules are pretty darn good:

There’s a mismatch in many organizations that leads to frustration, inefficiency, and that nagging “why can’t we get anything done around here?” feeling.

It’s the disconnect between Authority and Accountability.

You know that message you’ve been repeating over and over? The one you’re worried everyone is tired of hearing?

Keep saying it.

Because chances are, they didn’t really hear it the first time. Or the second. Or even the third.

It’s not that your audience is ignoring you. You’re fighting biology.

In just the past few weeks, I’ve heard the phrase pop up in three separate conversations:

“We need to celebrate failure.”

I understand the intent. It’s about reducing fear and encouraging risk-taking. A noble goal. But I think it’s the wrong message—especially right now.

For many people, fear isn’t some abstract concept that sits quietly in the back of their minds. It’s real. It’s watching a respected colleague get laid off and wondering if your name’s next on the list. In environments like that, “celebrating failure” doesn’t feel like a courageous rallying cry. It feels disconnected. Even reckless.

And let’s be honest, nobody wants to fail.

Push too hard in one direction, and nature pushes back. Forests catch fire. Rivers overflow. Ecosystems collapse. Balance is nature's resilience.

The same is true in business. When strategy gets lopsided, progress in one area can come at the unintended expense of another.

Inside organizations, we get excited about clever concepts and breakthrough plans. But even brilliant strategy—without full commitment—can fall flat. A great idea, half-executed, just looks dumb. Or worse, confusing.

Strategy isn’t self-fulfilling. It needs people to bring it to life with clarity, precision, and energy. Everyone playing their part. Everyone on tempo. Everyone believing it’s worth doing right.

“Reasoning is biased in favor of the reasoner.”

David McRaney dropped that gem in How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, and it’s one of those lines that just won’t leave me alone. It’s clever, sure. But it also nails something fundamentally true about how humans think—and why we’re better off thinking together.

When we reason on our own, our brains aren’t wired for objectivity. They’re wired for advocacy. We argue for our own perspectives with built-in bias and barely notice we’re doing it. 

Our brains are also lazy. Or, to be more charitable, efficient. Reasoning takes effort. So we delegate that cognitive load to others. It’s why the best thinking happens in groups—especially diverse groups—where we can distribute the mental workload, challenge each other’s assumptions, and sharpen each other’s thinking.

Do you remember The Dress controversy?

Back in 2015 a washed-out photo of a striped dress split the web: half the planet saw blue-black, the rest swore it was white-gold.

I recently came across an article that explained why so many of us conclusively saw something so different. Scientists found two key drivers: (1) the photo was low quality, forcing our brain’s visual system to “repair” missing data, and (2) people’s repairs depended on the light they were used to. Regular daylight dwellers mentally subtracted bluish light and perceived white-gold; night owls tended to discount yellowish bulbs and landed on blue-black. The real split was experience-driven guesswork by the predictive brain, which constantly fills gaps with prior knowledge to keep perception running smoothly. 

That same shortcut shows up whenever leaders drop a half-lit strategy note.

Steve Jobs. Serena Williams. Yo-Yo Ma.

Different fields, same formula: they all became legends by first being obsessive followers of their craft.

The best leaders I’ve met all started as world-class followers.

"He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader"- Aristotle

Think about it. Great authors read obsessively. Great musicians are fans of other great artists. Great athletes are students of the game, watching tape like it’s their job, because it is. Observing is how mastery begins.