The damage from your Q1 goal doesn't show up until Q3, on someone else's dashboard, after the person who flagged it got fired.

Part 2 of the Outcome Trap series. Brian and Om argue why you can't see the trap from inside it: second-order effects land too late to trace, the people who spot trouble get removed, and the truth fractures across team dashboards until nobody owns the whole picture. By the end you'll have questions to ask before any number you set quietly destroys the business.

Listen or watch as we discuss and debate:

• Why Goodhart's Law turns every new leading indicator into another surface to game
• How Sears split into 40 competing units and imploded while every department hit its OKRs
• The Wells Fargo whistleblower fired for 'tardiness' eight days after calling the ethics hotline
• Why Deming's 1986 warning to eliminate numerical goals got ignored for forty years
• Two questions to ask before setting any target

If you've ever been in a company where every conceivable metric was green while the business slowly bleed out, this podcast is for you!.

#OKRs #Deming #GoodhartsLaw

W. Edwards Deming (Out of the Crisis, The New Economics), Goodhart's Law, Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline, The People's Republic of Walmart, Sears (Eddie Lampert), Wells Fargo (Bill Bado), Frances Haugen Facebook testimony, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

LINKS
YouTube: https://youtu.be/BuWgxH8VpRI
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

The thing everyone agrees is the right way to work has quietly produced some of the worst corporate ethics violations in modern history.

Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel discuss and debate how outcome-based goals can and often do go catastrophically wrong - from Facebook to Wells Fargo - and introduce a stakeholder outcome mapping tool you can use immediately.

Listen or watch to understand:

• How outcome-based OKRs quietly enable the worst ethics failures
• The invisible gorilla experiment which illustrates how goals function as mental blinders
• The headlines test for stress-testing your goals
• A stakeholder outcome mapping exercise to surface hidden tradeoffs
• Why the system doesn't need evil people - just good people with bad incentives

This podcast is for anyone who is looking to understand how the efforts of well-meaning and "not-evil" people can and often does go off the rails. It may also be tangentially useful to leaders who are tired of pretending outcome goals are automatically ethical... but you first must WANT to change.

...and if you do like this one, get ready for a Part 2 next where we'll discuss WHY the damage from outcome-based goals is often invisible until it's too late, why organizations systematically destroy whistleblowers, and what Deming figured out decades ago that the tech industry still ignores!

#ProductEthics #OKRs #ProductManagement

State of Product 2026 by Atlassian, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's Ethical Failures Are Not a Bug They Are a Feature by Betty (2021), Invisible Gorilla Experiment, Locke and Latham Goal Setting Theory, Deming

LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Six companies, seven days, same playbook.

Welcome to the modern age where the excuses are interchangeable, the points don't matter, and ALL the strategies are not-so-secretly the same! Listen or watch as Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel talk through this month's round of layoffs and expose why Cloudflare's AI-first cuts and Fidelity's RTO-to-layoff pipeline aren't strategic decisions at all!

What Brian and Om get into:

• Why Cloudflare cut 1,100 workers the same day they reported 34% revenue growth
• How mimetic isomorphism drives CEO herd behavior
• Incentive structures that reward confident memos
• Why your sprint reviews, OKRs, and retro actions MIGHT be running the same play
• A diagnostic for catching yourself performing response instead of executing change

By the end of this episode, you'll be spotting these announcement-as-strategy patterns in real time, maybe even in your own meetings!

#CorporateStrategy #TechLayoffs #ProductManagement

Cloudflare, Fidelity, Coinbase, Meta, Microsoft, Harris School at University of Chicago, Marty Cagan

LINKS
YouTube: https://youtu.be/VTA_y38MXu8
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)