Seven quick links for Friday afternoon

Your company’s values will be used against you. Values are trade-offs, otherwise they’re not useful for making decisions or shaping behaviour. Provide concrete examples of where company values helped make decisions, what the trade-offs were, and how the values led to better outcomes.

Toward better hypotheses. Experimentation is valuable when we already have a rich set of mental models. However, if our mental models are primitive or don’t highlight interesting variations in the landscape of possibilities, shining a light on them won’t bring much insight.

How to be a SAGE without being a snob: Remove power and authority from relationships; Make others feel included and accepted; Be generous; Create independent, self-directed learners. (Related, 7 marks of mentors who change lives.)

Why you should be afraid of ‘Great Execution’. Poor leadership treats strategy and execution as separate things. They will hand down a strategy to be executed. This leaves them able to claim credit if it succeeds; or blame you for not executing properly. Don’t fall for it.

Fix the system problem, not the people problem. The next time you see a proposal for a restructure, ask if there’s been any attempt to tackle the underlying causes of the problem. Look for any changes to the actual system. If you can’t see any – it’s doomed to fail.

The worst programmer I ever knew. Don’t try to measure the individual contribution of a unit in a complex adaptive system, because the premise of the question is flawed.

Forgetting is actually a form of learning. In experiments with mice, memories were not truly lost, but rather the brain cells encoding them could no longer be naturally reactivated due to interference from new information and experiences. However, the scientists were able to reactivate the forgotten memories by stimulating the brain cells that stored those memories.