There’s a particular kind of organisational dysfunction that really been bugging me this year – when everything looks right on paper, yet nothing quite works in practice. This week’s Build pulls together three articles exploring critical gaps that separate intention from reality in how we build companies. What makes these gaps so dangerous isn’t that they’re invisible, it’s that we seem to have become remarkably skilled at pretending they don’t exist at all.
RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #1
Want a better work culture? Change your team conversations.
Gustavo Razzetti argues that culture change fails not because of poor strategy but because organisations focus on top-down comms rather than the quality of daily team conversations. He introduces the concept of ‘conversational debt’ – the compounding cost of avoided discussions – and identifies three patterns that keep teams stuck: avoidance (believing conversations won’t change anything), blame (focusing on fault rather than solutions) and groupthink (prioritising harmony over talking honestly to each other at work).
My take:
The conversational debt concept is useful because it quantifies what most founders probably realise is going on but can’t measure – that every avoided discussion doesn’t disappear. Instead it accumulates a debt until the gap between what everyone knows and what anyone will say becomes the unwelcome defining feature of your scale-up’s culture.
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RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #2
Why almost every value stream example you know is wrong
Jurgen Appelo’s article proposes that traditional value stream definitions are dangerously narrow. They start too late (with customer orders) and end too early (with delivery rather than validated impact). He suggests extending value streams earlier to capture early market signals and competitive positioning and onwards to include impact validation.
My take:
Two gaps going on there – the bit before anyone asks for what you make/do (where others are already shaping demand) and the gap after you ship (where you claim success without showing results). If you’re wondering why perfectly executed work can produce disappointing results, this article might be useful food for thought.
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RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #3
From control to presence: the essential leadership shift
Jeroen Kraaijenbrink looks at how traditional leadership’s emphasis on control – analysis, efficiency, decisiveness – worked in stable environments but now creates distance and disengagement in organisations. He describes a ‘leadership split’ where thinking dominates feeling and doing dominates being, arguing that the shift required is not from strong to soft leadership but from pressure to presence.
My take:
The ‘leadership split’ creates perhaps the most consequential gap of all: the one between the leader you present and the person you actually are. What makes this gap so damaging for founders is that their organisations inevitably replicate it, creating cultures where everyone performs competence whilst privately experiencing fragmentation. The distance between public confidence and private uncertainty becomes the unspoken norm and an uncomfortable place to be for founders.
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Build ditches startup hype to deliver raw, practical wisdom for founders about leading high growth businesses. Just straight talk from a fractional COO who’s seen every mistake, every shortcut and every hard truth founders have to face between start-up and scale-up.
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