Organization Design on Radical Optimist

Ticketing Systems Are an Antipattern for Team Collaboration

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The ticketing system user interface is an antipattern for cross-team collaboration

If your team spends most of its time managing a ticketing system — filing requests, triaging queues, waiting for answers — you have already made your collaboration legible to a machine.

That is not a metaphor. Ticketing systems only work for the kind of work AI handles well: routine, well-defined, known destination, repeatable process. If your collaboration looks like a queue, it can be automated. And it will be.

When Doing Stopped Being Learning

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” — Richard Feynman¹

In the age of AI, every knowledge worker faces the same hidden trade-off: use the tool to produce, or use the tool to understand. You cannot fully do both. How you arbitrage that tension defines what you become.

I. When doing was learning

Before AI, the coupling was tight. To ship software, you had to understand it. There was no shortcut. Writing the code was the learning. Debugging was the understanding. The act of production and the act of comprehension were the same act.

The Fast Track to Incompetence

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI, the Peter’s Principle, and the rise of the Senior Operator

I. The principle, accelerated

In 1969, Laurence J. Peter observed that in any hierarchy, people rise until they reach their level of incompetence — promoted based on past performance until they land in a role their skills can’t support. [1] The ceiling was always there. It just took years to find.

AI has changed the timeline. As a capability amplifier — not a capability builder — it makes you faster and more productive at tasks you already understand. The ceiling stays exactly where it was. The elevator just got faster.

Your Pipeline IS Your Culture

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three questions tell you more about your company culture than any values poster, offsite keynote, or Glassdoor review.

Do you trust your developers? Can any engineer push to production without waiting for approval? Or do you require mandatory PR reviews, sign-offs, and staging gates — telling your people “we hired you, but we don’t trust your judgment”?

Are you actually customer-centric? Are developers talking to customers every week and iterating on what they shipped? Or are they building in the dark for months, guessing what users want through layers of gatekeepers, only to discover they were wrong after a massive big-bang release?

The Dark Side of Authority

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 20:34:04 +0000

Boost your success and team growth by … not deciding!