Recently I challenged a post by Sally, whose work I admire. She wrote: “Leadership will make or break your culture. On this there is no middle ground.” I asked a simple question: If culture fails, must we blame the leaders? More importantly, does assigning blame actually fix anything? The familiar response from most management consultants to a failing culture is more leadership and team training, better role modelling, clearer expectations and stronger managerial accountability. These may help. But they keep returning us to the same assumption: better leaders are the answer.
Objections Before Complaints: Get It Wrong and Maybe We’re Screwed
We encourage people to speak up at work. But what happens when the person they're speaking to responds unfairly? Imagine you raise a concern about a faulty screw during a team meeting. Your manager dismisses you rudely or simply ignores your concerns. The screw may or may not be faulty. That's one issue. Your manager's behaviour is another. So, you complain anonymously about her to HR. But consider what happens next.
A Standard Solution to a Classic Problem
If a workplace problem is so common that we call it a "classic..", why haven't we developed a standard solution? I recently exchanged comments with Erika on LinkedIn about psychological safety, accountability and the everyday messiness of workplace relationships. Erika argued that psychological safety shouldn't mean avoiding difficult conversations. She emphasised the importance of trust, maturity and people learning to talk directly with one another rather than about one another. I largely agree.
Spatz™: Culture By Default
I think culture is governed by how team members respond when minor behavioural issues emerge. Every team member, on occasion, will lose their cool, interrupt, dismiss an idea, talk down to someone, be overly dogmatic, use sarcasm or simply get their tone wrong. That does not suddenly make them a disrespectful person ie. full of disrespect. It means their level of disrespect has increased momentarily.
Part 2 — It’s the Design Review Process, Stupid
As an industrial designer, I tend to see development as a sequence of iterations. sketches → idea → prototype → test → objection → review → revision → next iteration That is not so different from an assembly line. Manufacturing takes inputs through a series of stages, checks for defects, corrects problems and tries to prevent bad work moving further downstream. Design does something similar, except the thing moving through the system is often an idea. And ideas can carry defects too.
Maybe Anger Isn’t Just an Emotion
We tend to classify anger as an emotion, alongside happiness, sadness, fear and surprise. But I think we may be conflating several different things. Consider the language. We regularly say someone is “getting angry.” Strangely, we rarely talk about someone “getting happy.” Why? Perhaps because anger, particularly in relationships, is often better understood as a process rather than simply an involuntary feeling.
What Deming Did for Production, SpatzAI Wants to Do for Difficult Workplace Conversations
TEN STEPS ON THE ROAD TO EFFICIENT (Seth Godin's Linkedin Post) "Frederick Taylor taught Henry Ford how to do mass production. Deming brought quality, systems understanding and respect for the worker. And operations research brought insight. If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:" Below is a summary of his 10 points and how the SpatzAI concept compares with them:
Chess Board and Onboarding with SpatzAI
I have often compared onboarding with SpatzAI to learning chess. The 20-minute idea originally came from Steve Jobs, who said in 1983 that a great computer should be something you could learn to use in 20 minutes. That idea stuck. You can learn the basic moves and rules of chess surprisingly quickly. Understanding how the pieces move is not the difficult part. The challenge is learning when to make each move, how to respond to another player, and how to improve through experience.
Fail-Prevention vs Fail-Safe
This is a short story about two very different approaches to designing the first generation of commercial jet aircraft. The British de Havilland Comet was the world’s first commercial jet airliner. Its four engines were buried inside the wing roots, close to the fuselage. It was an elegant aerodynamic solution: embedding the engines reduced drag and produced a remarkably clean aircraft.....
The Spatz Escalator Pitch
What is the future of addressing workplace psychosocial hazards? For us, and perhaps for many in this field, the answer is becoming clear: AI-assisted, real-time psychological safety. But what does that actually mean? In our view, it means every team member having a standard toolkit and process that helps make speaking up private, transparent (when required), and consistent.
