Puzzles, Not Goals: Rethinking How Teams Succeed with guest expert, Radhika Dutt

Radhika Dutt (00:03)
When you think about goals versus puzzles, I’m going to ask you two questions. Just sense for a moment how you feel when I ask you these two questions. Right at the end of each question, just notice what feelings are triggered in you.

So the first question is: what are your goals for your company this year?

And the second question: what are the puzzles that you want to solve for your company this year?

What’s the difference in the feelings that you sense?

Blake Schofield:
Yeah, I think for goals, there’s a pressure and an importance. And for puzzle setting, it’s more creativity and curiosity.

Blake Schofield (00:43)
Real leadership, real life, real impact. No more choosing between your career and your life. Here you’ll find honest conversations, science-backed strategies, and inspiring stories to help you thrive at work and truly enjoy your life outside of it. I’m your host, Blake, and I’m honored to help you create more impact with ease.

Blake Schofield (01:18)
On today’s episode, we have Radhika Dutt. She’s the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, and her methodology has been adopted in over 40 countries. She’s an entrepreneur, speaker, and product leader who’s participated in five acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded.

She’s currently an advisor on product thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore and works with organizations from high-tech startups to multinationals on consulting and training. She graduated from MIT, and she’s now working on her second book, which explores why goals and targets backfire and what actually works instead.

You know, we had a great winding conversation talking about companies and their responsibility to consumers, how the world of AI is impacting big businesses today, and then how to really look inside an organization—how to start to shift how we think about achieving goals, to bring in curiosity, to help work through uncertainty, and to learn how to adapt in a way that enables us to start to create even better results, more impactful results, as the world of work and the world in general continues to change.

Blake Schofield (02:36)
Radhika, welcome to Impact with Ease. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you today.

Radhika Dutt (02:40)
Thanks for having me here, Blake. I’m excited to be here.

Blake Schofield (02:43)
I love to start with learning a little bit more about you, your journey, and how you ended up doing the work that you do today. Would you mind sharing?

Radhika Dutt (02:54)
Yeah, so my background is that I started off doing electrical engineering at MIT and then launched right into the startup world. Our first startup was right out of the dorm rooms at MIT.

And, you know, that all sounds glamorous, but I’m going to give you the real scoop on this, which is that it sounds great, but the reality was we made so many mistakes, and we caught what I now call product diseases.

I’ll give you an example of one that we caught. This was back in 2000 when we were starting that first company. Our vision was “revolutionizing wireless,” which sounds all grand, but we were so focused on being big, on scaling, etc., that we didn’t have clarity on what’s the problem we were solving. And this is the product disease I now call hero syndrome.

But, you know, there are so many other product diseases like this, and my journey has basically been that I’ve worked in so many different industries—from broadcast, media, and telecom to robotics, even wine, government. It’s been a wide range.

And I’ve worked at different sizes of organizations, and I’ve seen the same product diseases over and over. So my first book, Radical Product Thinking, is really about all the lessons from those mistakes that I’ve made, and how we can build world-changing products while avoiding those product diseases that are fatal to innovation.

That came out in 2021, and now I’m working on my second book, which is about why goals and OKRs don’t work and what actually works instead.

Blake Schofield (03:57)
Awesome. There’s so much I want to dive into your work, but before we do, I want to maybe dive in a little bit more to you and what led you into MIT and what really led to your passion around products and business.

Where did that start? Was that something you kind of just accidentally ended up in, or were there things from your childhood and as you went through things that really started to direct that path for you?

Radhika Dutt (04:24)
Well, growing up, I was good at math, I was good at science, and my dad said, “Oh, you should apply to MIT.” And I was like, “What’s MIT?”

So that was when I was in high school. And then, you know, I remember—this was back in the day where you get those paper brochures—I remember getting that paper brochure in the mail about MIT, and I remember looking at that, and I was just so fascinated. It was all I could dream about.

And then, you know, I just so happened to apply, and then I got in.

But if I think back to my time at MIT, I studied electrical engineering, yeah, but at heart, electrical engineering isn’t my passion. Let’s say I even liked quantum mechanics and all of that, but honestly, if you asked me today, if you gave me a blank slate, what would you study? I would study linguistics. I love languages. I speak nine languages, and I would study linguistics.

So did I always want to study engineering? No. I think sort of the Asian parenting thing is, you know, doctor, engineer, or disappointment.

It’s sort of—

And this is very inherent in our culture, I would say.

So I guess that’s where some of this journey came about.

But I will say that I’m so grateful that I studied electrical engineering, because in building products and this whole mindset—even everything that I describe in Radical Product Thinking—this mindset of engineering the change you want to bring about really systematically, that really came about from my education.

This way of thinking that you can engineer change.

Blake Schofield (06:10)
It’s so interesting. I think we’re at a really interesting time where so much is changing from a society and a culture and a macroeconomic status, and so much is changing from technology and business.

And with that comes uncertainty, and also with that comes incredible opportunity to do things that we’ve never been able to do as individuals, as teams, as organizations, and as a society.

I guess I prelude by saying I’m excited to dive deeper into this with you, because my gut is that you and I may approach things a different way, but have seen some of the similar patterns and opportunities in terms of how we’ve structured doing business, where the consistent barriers and challenges have been.

And that in a world where we can begin to automate, and already are automating so many basic functions and tasks, we really have an opportunity as individuals, as leaders, and as organizations to radically learn how to collaborate and engage and bring about far greater results than we ever have before.

You’re shifting how we think about leadership and how we think about business and what those structures can look like. Is that perhaps true?

Radhika Dutt (07:05)
Yeah, so true. And there’s so much that I want to unpack there.

You talked about the opportunities, things changing, and I think what comes with it is also responsibility.

Right now, I’m reading two books simultaneously. One is Careless People, and the other is Mindf*ck. And both of those books are just downright scary, right? Just the way we go about throwing products into the world, but we don’t think about it as the change that we’re creating through those products.

There’s an opportunity for us in building products quickly to also think about what is the change we want to engineer in the world. And when we don’t think in that way, then we release things that create unintended consequences.

So there’s a whole lot of mindset shift that is needed.

You know, just so much has changed recently.

I think for a long time—until I would say the ’80s, even the early ’90s—we could get away with just building products and technology and this naive optimism that technology was going to make the world a better place.

We can no longer afford to do that.

We’ve seen consistently that progress—like technological progress—does not mean societal progress. It isn’t necessarily better for society.

It is just such a—it’s really high time, let’s say—it’s high time that we need to be able to shift our mindset to say we can’t just throw change into the world. We have to engineer that change.

Blake Schofield (09:05)
What I hear from you is one of the principles that I really believe in and know to be true, which is everything comes down to intention.

And technology is a tool, just like any other tool that we’ve had in the past. Tools are impersonal. It all comes down to the individuals that are using that tool. What is the intention behind what they’re creating?

So what I know to be true, and what I believe to be true, is that technology can be used for good and for evil in the same way that human beings do that in life with every other tool and every other thing that exists.

So this greater understanding of, if we want to move into progress as a society, that it won’t be the tool that gets us there—it will be the humans, the individuals that have to create that themselves.

But the tools enable us, I think, to do things that we haven’t been able to do before, should we choose to use them in that way.

Radhika Dutt (10:10)
See, I’m going to differ with you on that a little bit.

Here’s my take on it.

I think in saying that it’s up to the individuals, what we’re really doing is shifting blame and responsibility almost from the corporate world to individuals.

That, you know, I’m going to build something, and it can be used for good or bad, but it’s up to you to decide how you use it, right?

Blake Schofield (10:45)
Yeah, that’s interesting. Thank you for asking that, because I would clarify that I don’t believe that corporations are devoid of responsibility.

When I say individuals, I look at corporations as a conglomerate of individuals, and I believe that the leaders of each organization have incredible responsibility to really understand, with intentionality, the culture they’re creating, the products they’re creating, and the second- and third-order consequences of the decisions that they’re making.

In ways that, to your point, organizations in the ’80s or ’90s or before weren’t really capable of seeing, and the impacts are so much larger now as a result of things.

So I absolutely believe each individual needs to be responsible for their own choices and understand the ripple effect of those choices.

But each organization—especially the leaders of those organizations—hold far more responsibility in a lot of ways than we ever have.

And I think that’s part of what’s created so much strain and stress and anxiety across leadership today—the speed at which things are moving and the level of responsibility to navigate through all of that with really very little to no training, and having to figure it out on the fly.

Radhika Dutt (12:10)
Yeah, see, this I really agree with.

And what happens when we create products is essentially the role we take on is almost like a doctor.

A doctor looks at a patient and says, “I see you have this problem, and I’m going to prescribe this pill for you.” You don’t then say, “Oh, what happens to you and how you use it—good luck and God bless.”

And similarly, when you’re in a company—whether it’s an entity as a company or it’s all the individual leaders—we take on the same role.

We say to people, “I see you have a problem, and I’m prescribing my product for you.” We can’t then say, “How you use it, good luck and God bless.”

You know, this happened with the opioid crisis, where basically pharma companies were saying, “Well, if you get addicted, that’s because you’re using it incorrectly,” which is not true.

But this was how they were often deflecting blame, and this is what I often see in the corporate world.

But I think, again, a mindset shift there is we vote with our labor for the world that we want to produce.

We vote with our labor.

And when you think about it in that way, to get back to something you said, we have to reflect on what it is that we’re doing—what is that intention—and are we being true to that intent?

Because if you don’t reflect on that, how do you know if you’re casting the right vote for the world you want to create?

Blake Schofield (13:33)
I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book—I think the name of it is The Revenge of the Tipping Point. I read the original The Tipping Point years ago, and then I read The Revenge of the Tipping Point.

And in there, he actually talked about the drug crisis that happened and the ways in which human psychology was utilized to generate a lot of money for the organization at huge detriment to society.

And so I agree with you that when you begin to understand that business isn’t just about creating value and serving people with a solution, it’s also about what’s the ripple effect of that.

And are you taking responsibility for the results that you’re creating—positive and negative?

Radhika Dutt (14:24)
One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how companies are using AI versus kind of how to think about it instead.

So first of all, what I observe a lot of is just there’s this FOMO that we have to be using AI, and there are all these companies talking about how they’re AI-first.

Well, what does that even mean, right?

AI-first is not exactly a strategy.

And the way I talk about AI is when you talk about your vision, your vision should be really grounded on what is the pain.

It starts with: whose problem are you solving? What is their problem today? How do they solve it today? Why is the current world for them unacceptable? And then what is the world you envision?

And then finally, the last part—this is where you’ve earned the right to talk about your product—is how will your product bring about this world for your people?

Blake Schofield (15:00)
So when we think about AI, you know, AI is just a means to an end.

You still need this clarity on whose problem are you solving, what is their problem, why is the status quo unacceptable, and then you can say, what is the end state I envision.

By the way, in all of this, you still cannot say AI.

The only place where there is a potential to mention AI is that last part, which is how you’re bringing about this world.

And if there is a genuine reason for AI to bring about the rest of what you just talked about, then great—use AI.

But AI-first doesn’t mean you launch AI and throw it at people and say, what are they supposed to do with it?

Similarly, when you think about strategy, I talk about four elements of strategy.

The first question is really centered on who’s the persona and what is the pain that makes them come to your product.

The second is, what is the solution to that pain point.

The third question is how do you deliver on the promise of that solution—that’s where your supply chain, your logistics come in.

And then the last question is around logistics and the business model.

What you notice is, again, the only place where AI belongs is where you talk about the capabilities—how do you deliver on the solution.

It’s not the solution itself being AI.

To be able to deliver on the promise of the solution, maybe there is AI involved, and that’s going to make that solution that much better.

That’s the only place—that third column of capabilities—where AI belongs.

When we have this idea of solutions that are centered on what we want—like, “Oh, I think this is exciting”—this is how we destroy companies.

It has to be centered on who’s the person who needs this, what do they need, and what is the solution for them.

Then you can use your technology, your products, etc., to deliver that.

Blake Schofield (17:00)
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

I think it’s an interesting discussion, because what I know to be true is when we make decisions from a place of fear or FOMO, they almost never are the optimal outcome.

And there’s so much anxiety and fear in the market—worries about tariffs and everything that’s shifting and inflation and consumer expectations, and those expectations are increasing.

And then you layer in technology and this fear that you will get left behind.

And so when I look at what I see, which is employees and leaders who today—44% are more stressed than they were in the height of COVID, a burnout rate that’s impacting eight out of ten—it’s a perfect storm.

Because if you have leaders that are looking at the scenario and they are driving business decisions based off of that FOMO, based off of that anxiety, and they’re putting all of this pressure on their team to optimize all these systems and processes to be AI-first, but they’re losing the real focus or the real opportunity…

If you step back 30,000 feet and you say, wow, there’s a lot of change coming.

AI has the opportunity to help us do things in a much more impactful, much more expedited way—test in ways we’ve never been able to test.

And we’re in a circumstance with more uncertainty than we’ve had, and the speed of change now is much faster.

There’s opportunity and there’s risk in that.

But if you’re not stopping to get really clear on what is that vision we want to be in five years and why us—how are we going to win?

How can we look at our customers and our team and say, what is the foundation of our value system, our culture, and how we believe we stand out?

Double down on those things, and then look and say, based on what we want to create, how do we need to start structuring the organization and implementing technology to bring that to fruition?

To me, a lot of what I’m seeing is that piece is really missing.

If you look at every business that’s ever innovated and really stood out in the market, it started with what you’re saying—a clear vision for what you were creating and the problem you were solving in a much better way than what your competition was doing.

Radhika Dutt (20:32)
Oh, what you said is so, so true. I couldn’t agree more.

And one of the ways in which I think we project our anxiety and fears onto the whole team is through the goals and targets that we set.

In many ways, I think this whole fear that we have—that we’re getting left behind—what we’ve been taught in business schools and just all resources, they tell us the way you achieve results, the way you drive your team, it’s all through goals and setting these aspirational targets.

Now, you know, it’s OKRs—objectives and key results. Set aspirational OKRs, and then Google says, for example, that’s how we achieved all of our results. It was the secret to our success.

This is the kind of mindset that we have.

So when you talk about burnout, one of the things that I found is when we set goals and targets, what happens often is we create this feeling in our teams.

By setting these external targets, we make them feel like you’re running this marathon, and right after you’ve hit the finish line, here’s the next marathon you’re running.

And it is completely exhausting.

Which is why you see this high burnout rate.

And it has a double whammy.

It’s not just we’re burning out people—we also don’t achieve great results.

Because OKRs or goals, targets, etc., they come at it from a place of “I know what is the problem and I know what is the solution.”

Basically, there’s all this change happening, and when you set goals and targets, what you’re saying is, “I know that to deal with this change, this is exactly what you need to deliver, and if you just do that, that’s going to be a measure of success.”

But if you step back—and just like you’re saying—I think if you reflect, the reality is we don’t necessarily know those answers starting out.

And so how do you deal with that?

A lot of people say, “Well, the answer is simple. You might set goals in January, just revisit your goals at the end of the quarter, and then the quarter after that.”

And I’ve heard this being proposed to an executive at a large organization, and he just scoffed, going like, “Yeah, we would die if we had to revisit our goals every quarter, because it takes long enough to do that at the beginning of the year.”

So what do you do instead?

And this is what I’m writing about in my next book—that we need to shift from a mindset of goal setting to one of puzzle setting and puzzle solving.

So what do I mean by puzzle setting and puzzle solving?

First of all, when you think about goals versus puzzles—I’m going to ask you two questions. Just sense for a moment how you feel when I ask you these two questions.

Right at the end of each question, just notice what feelings are triggered in you.

So the first question is: what are your goals for your company this year?

And the second question: what are the puzzles that you want to solve for your company this year?

Blake Schofield (23:28)
What’s the difference in the feelings that you sense?

Yeah, I think for goals, there’s a pressure and an importance.

And for puzzle setting, it’s more creativity and curiosity.

Radhika Dutt (23:40)
Yeah, this is exactly what I keep hearing in my workshops and my talks that I do.

And invariably, people bring up the word curiosity.

When you are more puzzle-driven, you’re willing to stay in the problem space for longer.

You know, when you have goals—and I’ve done this with companies—because we were driven by all of these goals and targets for the product, we instantly wanted to jump to the solution.

So we were looking at data and going like, okay, data is saying that tech-savvy people are using this product. Data is also saying that people are complaining about this feature—that filtering is difficult. Done. Let’s jump to the solution. Let’s design better filters.

But when we move to puzzles, it’s a different mindset.

So instead of all of these targets for different product metrics, the puzzle we set was: okay, we see that only tech-savvy people are using our product, but why?

What are the needs of those tech-averse people?

How do they work?

How is their way of working different from this tech-savvy user?

And therefore, what is it that we don’t understand?

Why aren’t they using the product?

And we opened up the possibility that maybe it’s not the filtering at all.

So what did we learn?

As we started talking to our customers, the puzzle became a little clearer.

It turned out that the people who are not tech-savvy work in very different ways.

They don’t do lists. They don’t like filtering.

And so we designed a completely different workflow for them.

Then we said, okay, now we have another idea.

We said, “Oh, tech-averse people are probably going to love automation. I’m going to skip a bunch of steps for them.”

Because if they don’t like the technology, if I can just make it easier, we automate—we should be done.

So then here’s the puzzle solving.

Because we talked about puzzle setting so far—puzzle solving means asking three questions.

So you have an idea, then you ask three questions.

The first is: how well did it work?

The second question is: what did we learn?

This is where I say don’t just throw out lots of metrics—tell me what the metrics are telling us.

And then the third question is: what will you try next?

So let’s look at this example.

We built this new workflow as a prototype that we could test, and we added automation.

How well did it work?

The answer: the workflow—people loved it. They hated the automation.

What did we learn?

We thought they would love automation. It turned out that the tech-averse people hate magic.

They don’t trust technology.

So all the automation made it feel like this is magic. They felt like, “I don’t have control.”

They hated it.

So now we know how well it worked. We know what we learned.

What will we try next?

We realized, okay, the workflow is working well. We’re going to use this workflow, but we will not add automation.

What we’ll do instead is guide you step by step, and you click buttons that make you feel like, “I’m in control. I’m moving to that next step.”

We give you this process where you can predict every next step that’s happening, where everything is coming from. You know exactly what you get.

And so in the end, this is how we went from sales that had stalled in 2023 to doubling sales in 2024.

And we kept solving these puzzles, and we doubled sales again in 2025.

And we reduced customer churn from 26% to 4%.

So this is what we need—not the fear and anxiety.

You get a much more motivated team when you take this approach of looking at it with curiosity and shifting this mindset from goals to puzzles.

Blake Schofield (27:21)
What a beautiful example to really be able to understand that.

And what I always love is that proven principles always exist. We might call them different things, we might approach them different ways, but a lot of what you speak about are some of the tenets that I learned as I worked with Dr. Jeff Spencer, who’s a former Olympian and a nine-time Tour de France mindset coach.

He had an entire methodology about how to achieve your goals, no matter how hard.

Obviously, he knows how to do it, and it’s helped some of the highest achievers that have been out there—Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong—he was working with them at their peak.

And one of the things that he really took me through was what is the traditional way that we’ve learned how to achieve goals.

I come up with this vision of what I want. I, at the beginning, decide how long it’s going to take and what needs to happen, and that’s it.

And I make this plan without actually knowing if it’s achievable, because I’ve never done it before.

And then I stick to it, and then I get frustrated when it doesn’t go the way I want it to go, and I become rigid.

That is absolutely how I was taught to do goals.

That is absolutely what you’re talking about.

That is what organizations traditionally have been taught.

And while that is absolutely not the most effective way, it definitely works better when you’re basing it off of a lot of years of history, because then at least you have some data to believe it’s true.

But I believe more and more we’re moving into circumstances where we don’t have that data and a lot of uncertainty, and those old ways of doing goal setting don’t work anymore.

And so what I love about what you said about puzzle setting is it mirrors some of the things that I teach, that I have learned through working with my coaches and going through this journey.

Which is this idea of not going all in on what you think it is before you allow reality to start to show you what’s working and not working.

It’s much more about curiosity.

It’s about testing and allowing reality to show you where the opportunity is and where it’s not showing up.

And then being able to use that data to figure out what’s the right next one to two steps to take based on what I know today.

And over time—like what was happening with you guys—that curiosity, that willingness to say, okay, I have this goal, but how I’m going to get there and how long it takes is probably not known because we’ve never done this before.

But we’ll start with these little tests.

We’ll start looking at what reality is telling us.

We’ll be curious about it, and we’ll take one or two steps to learn more.

And over time, that process—as I’ve found and been living this way for a number of years now, and have taught my clients as well—there becomes an overwhelming evidence of, “Hey, this is the right step.”

And we now know it.

And I know we’re going to win because the evidence has stacked, and the things that we’ve done have made it so clear what it takes to be successful.

So when I hear your puzzle setting and how you guys approach that, to me it’s such a beautiful mirror, I think, of a lot of the same proven principles.

It is absolutely a shift in how we look at achieving things.

It is absolutely a shift in helping people feel more comfortable with not creating this set target, which is how we’ve been taught, but instead to measure your progress on a more consistent weekly or monthly basis for what you’re learning.

And are you getting closer in solving that problem?

Radhika Dutt (31:13)
So true.

And it also offers scaffolding.

So it’s not this—if I were just to say to leaders, “Don’t do targets,” which, by the way, I tried it—it doesn’t go well.

So just starting at that point or starting with that position doesn’t work, because it’s downright scary to say, “Well, you’re talking about puzzles, but how do I know that this isn’t like, oh, you know, go off to the playground, play around, come back when you’re done?”

That’s a huge fear that leaders have.

And instead, this is a flexible approach, but it gives you scaffolding.

It gives you both control and the ability to course correct as people present this information to you in terms of how well did it work, what have I learned, what will I try next.

And you get a true sense of what’s happening on the ground.

As opposed to when you set a target, the incentive for people is to show you what you hope to hear.

And this is something that Andy Grove, the legendary Intel CEO, talked about in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.

He says leaders are always the last to know.

Why?

Because when you set a target, the mindset is, “I want to evaluate—have you or haven’t you achieved this goal?”

It’s very binary.

And so everyone wants to show you, “I am a high performer. I have achieved those numbers.”

So you’re going to be the last to know what’s actually happening.

And so what you want to invite is the good and the bad.

You want to say, how well did it work?

You hear all of it.

What did you learn from this?

Then I know how deep is this person’s thinking in terms of analyzing data.

And then in terms of what they want to do next, this is my opportunity to be able to see their plan and course correct.

And having the scaffolding, I know who to delegate how much to.

Someone who has less in terms of skills, knowledge, or experience, I might give them more handholding.

Because I can see what they need.

And for someone who shows me, like, “Wow, you really got this,” you know, tell me where I can be the obstacle remover for you.

But, you know, off you go.

Come back, and let’s stay aligned and sync up as often as you want.

This gives you the scaffolding to be able to offer that to your team and delegate more—delegate more effectively.

Blake Schofield (33:12)
It’s an interesting thing, right?

The larger the organization, the more important it is that you have goals and measurements, because you have to align resources behind it.

And so the methodology that you talk about, depending on the scale of the organization, how that plays out may need to play out in different places.

But I love the concept of being able to share, which is what I know to be true—that the old methodologies of setting goals and sticking to them, when those goals are set without data or knowledge, and we are not learning as we go and we’re not course correcting as we go, is the biggest risk for organizations, period.

And to your point, if we’re incentivizing people to stick with a plan that is now obsolete because we see that the measurements that we had will not get us the result that we want, we really have to stop and say, is this process and the way that we are going about business and looking at success really working for us?

Or can we set the goals and build in a more flexible process, especially at the beginning, as we’re learning and iterating?

To your point, to say, this is what our hypothesis was, here’s what’s showing up, what are we learning, how are we adjusting?

Because what I’ve seen consistently to be true is if you really want to create exponential results and growth, you have to get rid of the 80% of things that you’re doing that only drive 20% of the results.

And you have to double down on the 20% of things that drive 80%.

Most people are unwilling to cut out all the stuff that doesn’t really do much and really get to the heart of what matters.

When you can put your efforts behind the 20% that actually drives the business and what makes you successful, and really start serving your clients or being successful as a leader, and you can put more energy and effort behind that, that’s where you can create exponentially larger results than you could ever by just trying to slightly improve.

And I think that so many times people are doing all of these small adjustments instead of actually looking and saying, what is draining our resources, what isn’t working, and how do we double down on what really does?

And so I’ve really enjoyed this conversation with you so much, because I think again, when we talk about how do you future-proof your career and how do you future-proof your organization, we have to start thinking about how are we working and how have we been doing things.

And not just are we implementing technology and AI, but have we really optimized how our leaders and our teams are working together?

And are there systems and processes and ways of working that fundamentally shouldn’t come with us—that we can improve and look at differently to get even better results in the future?

Radhika Dutt (35:57)
When you say that, right, a lot of that requires reflection.

And that’s the piece that we rarely ever have time for in an organization.

So one of the reasons I have the scaffolding of how well did it work, what have we learned, what will we try next, is by using this approach, you sort of naturally create space for reflection in the organization.

As a team, you talk about these things, and this is where you realize what you need to double down on versus what am I going to do differently.

This is the piece that we just don’t have.

What happens in organizations when you have goals and targets is it’s one of two things.

Either things are going well and you’re hitting the goals, in which case you go, “Oh, phew, we’re hitting goals. I can relax a little bit,” and this is what Andy Grove talks about—you start to get complacent.

And the other option is you’re not hitting goals, things are not going well, and then it leads to frantic activity.

Everyone is trying to figure out, how do I show you that I’m a high performer, that I’m hitting whatever numbers?

But this frantic activity doesn’t necessarily translate into meaningful results.

There isn’t that reflection component.

Everyone is just running around wild.

And so this is where, if you take this puzzle setting and puzzle solving approach, whether things are going well or badly—and in reality this is what always happens—you set a vision, you set a strategy, but man plans and God laughs.

So nothing ever goes according to plan.

And so things might be going well or badly, but what you need is the puzzle setting and puzzle solving so that you can constantly reflect, try things, figure out what’s working well, what’s not, and then plan your next action.

And that unlocks the next puzzle that you can start to figure out.

And you keep going at this so that in an organization where you’re puzzle-driven, you never get complacent.

Blake Schofield (37:57)
You know, what’s interesting as you talk about that—what’s the reaction when business isn’t good and we’re not hitting things?

What I know to be true is then you have people in survival mode.

And what I think is so important—and why I talk about this so much—is that our frontal cortex, which is our creative and problem-solving part of our brain, literally shuts down.

And so when you have organizations like that that are in panic, of course people are going to seek safety and protect themselves, and show that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing.

And when that happens, we go into this protectionist mode, and we can’t see the reality or the opportunity in front of us.

And so as we move more and more into AI and shifting consumer demands and all of these pieces, one of the things I consistently talk about is how important it is that leaders and teams have these skills to be able to understand and actually replace the things that are creating those triggers and misalignment for them.

So that when there is stress or things don’t go as expected, or they’re learning a new way of setting goals that feels uncomfortable—because they want to know that they can add value, and it feels scary to not know if you can add value if you’ve been able to have metrics that you know—

Is to be able to develop those leadership skills now.

Organizations need those leadership skills alongside the structural and organizational changes, alongside the technology.

Because if you’re not supporting your team in being able to understand how to navigate uncertainty, how to work through those triggers, how to communicate effectively and build trust, it won’t succeed.

And so we can’t just expect that people are going to develop these tools on their own.

We have to come in and help guide them to do that as well.

Radhika Dutt (40:00)
So here are some practical takeaways to add on to everything that you’re saying.

One thing for our listeners is, you know, you could as a leader just start to use this approach of how well did it work, what have I learned, what will I try next—just to role model this for your team to be able to think in this way with curiosity.

You know, take an initiative and define what was the puzzle that this initiative was trying to solve.

And you can define this starting with—it’s the three O’s that I talk about.

There’s a whole framework—the framework is called OLA, which stands for Objectives, Hypotheses, Learnings, Adaptations.

OLA is easier, rolls off the tongue.

The “O” for objectives is what you use to set the puzzle.

And it’s three O’s.

So the first thing is, what’s the observation?

So here’s the problem statement.

It might be that sales grew in the last three years but have flattened in the last year.

Open questions—why might that be happening?

Is it that something has fundamentally shifted in the market?

Did we know how to sell to the early adopter but not to the mass market?

So there might be some open questions.

And the objective is the summary of this problem and this puzzle.

And so as a leader, you could set the puzzle even in retrospect for something, or you could use this to look ahead.

Instead of objectives and key results, you can set the objective as this puzzle.

Then the second part, which is puzzle solving, you can role model this for your team.

Take an initiative and talk about how well did it work, what have we learned, what will we try next.

And by doing this, you’re creating space for your team to be able to share such learnings openly.

There’s vulnerability in saying, you know, we don’t know all of these answers, but we figured it out together, and here’s what the process looked like.

So now you can go off and repeat this and come back to me with similar answers to how well did it work, what have you learned, what will you try next.

Blake Schofield (42:35)
I love that suggestion.

I know that change starts in really small, day-to-day, incremental changes.

So the idea of test it, create a puzzle model, get feedback, see how your team responds to it—you’re going to see where there’s openness or where there’s friction and resistance.

At the end of the day, I believe so strongly that the change that we need to make as individuals, as leaders, as organizations can’t be done top-down.

It also has to be done bottom-up.

It is a full team sport, right?

It is collaborative, and it’s through that collaboration that we will find the shifts that will enable that opportunity for everyone to succeed.

And so I love the idea of being able to test that, because it gives you that opportunity to get that collaboration in real time and see how it’s responded to.

And just start to take some small steps to empower your team to feel that they have a voice in that change and that they can participate and be a part of that.

I think that that is so incredibly important today, where there’s so much pressure, is to empower every single person in the organization to see that they can and are part of creating that change.

It’s not just being pushed upon them, but it’s really an opportunity for them to get creative, find new ways of doing things, and it helps surface the challenges when things aren’t working.

I love it.

Radhika Dutt (43:58)
You’re exactly right.

And what really works, in my experience as well, is both the top-down and bottom-up.

So regardless of where you are in the organization, you can start to take this approach, and you can even roll this out within your sphere of influence.

Because, you know, even if you’re a mid-level manager, whether you’re a CEO, or even if you’re an individual contributor, you can use this.

For example, with your product team, you might be rolling this out as, “Here’s what I’ve learned from this initiative—what we tried, what we learned, what we’ll try next.”

So you can use this.

And one of the things that I found is that it adds purpose to your day.

So it just makes work less soul-sucking for you.

Blake Schofield (44:30)
Radhika, it’s been such a pleasure having you, and sadly our time has already rolled a little bit over, so thank you for staying a couple minutes longer.

With that said, for those that are listening that would love to follow you or learn more about your work, how can they find you?

Radhika Dutt (44:45)
You can download the free toolkit—it’s on radicalproduct.com—and I will share the link afterwards so we can include it in the show notes.

And I’m working on my second book, so if you want to share with me your experience as you use OLA, you’re welcome to do that.

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, tell me your story, and it might just make it into the book as a case study.

Blake Schofield (45:00)
Oh, that’s so fun. Thank you so much for joining.

And for those of you who made it all the way through this twist-and-turn conversation, where I think we really covered so much about business, AI, leadership, and where the world is moving—thank you.

I encourage you, take a test, try to solve a puzzle, or go back and look at an experience that you had and run it through this methodology and see how you might be able to bring that curiosity into the work that you’re doing.

Blake Schofield (45:20)
Most successful people don’t realize they’re in burnout because stress and exhaustion have become so normalized.

But burnout is actually a sign of deeper misalignment between how you’re wired to thrive and how you’re actually working and living.

Fix the misalignment and everything changes.

Blake Schofield (45:42)
Take the free quiz at impactwithease.com/burnout-type to discover your burnout type and get next steps to reclaim your energy, lead with confidence, and create more ease in your life and career.