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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • icon picker
            Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
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Chapter 7. Culture
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Chapter 7. Culture

Radical product thinking your organisation

The Radical Product Thinking framework for culture

Work culture is the cumulative experience of your workdays and interactions.
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You experience your workday on two dimensions: how satisfying or depleting it is and whether it feels urgent or not. If you visualize this balance in a two-by-two, the culture you experience is the sum total of how you distribute your mental and emotional bandwidth across four quadrants:
Meaningful Work: This is satisfying work that you do without time pressure. This is where you derive the most enjoyment from your workday.
Heroism: This means doing satisfying work under time pressure. Occasional pressure can add spice to your workday, but too much of it leads to burnout.
Organizational Cactus: This is work that’s not fulfilling but comes with some urgency. These are often processes necessary for the organization to function, but too much of these make your workday feel like a walk through a cactus field: painful.
Soul-Sucking: This represents depleting activities that are not urgent—akin to a chronic infection. Examples include managing up or feeling that you were treated unfairly. A good culture maximizes the time you spend in the Meaningful Work quadrant compared to the other quadrants.
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Meaningful work

Examples of activities that make work feel meaningful for individuals are:
Solving a hard problem, feeling like you’ve achieved something
Seeing changes or seeing progress
Working in a team where you feel a strong sense of belonging
Essentially, work that feels like deliberate progress toward your vision of creating a positive change in the world falls in the Meaningful Work quadrant.
When you’re driven by a clear vision and a comprehensive product strategy that’s translated into a clear rationale for prioritization and execution, you’ll maximize the time you spend in the Meaningful Work quadrant. On the other hand, without a clear direction, individuals often divert their attention to the next quadrant (Heroism) because it feels urgent and more needed.

Heroism

Heroism can give an exciting page to your workday when the time pressure is occasional, but too much time in this quadrant puts you on the fast track to burnout. It detracts from the time you’d spend on strategic long-term work. It’s also not sustainable.
To address the Heroism quadrant, we need to ensure that the workload and the time pressure feel sustainable. This may require changing incentives or the reward structure to decrease time in this quadrant.

Organisational cactus

Organizational Cactus inflicts pain through administrative tasks that don’t feel meaningful and don’t help you make progress toward the vision, but feel urgent. Examples of Organizational Cactus include the following:
Filling out long and tedious administrative paperwork for requesting a new laptop
Requiring approval from many layers of management
Having to engage in back-channel diplomacy to build consensus across a large group on relatively minor decisions
Creating reports and dedicating time to metrics that aren’t useful indicators of progress
The effect of Organizational Cactus is that your organization feels sluggish. If you can reduce the time spent in this quadrant, you have more bandwidth to spend on meaningful work.
Organizational Cactus can also come in the form of process-heavy workflows in large organizations. These processes can help organizations create consistency in how a task is done so that it can be replicated with precision at scale.
To address Organizational Cactus, create a prioritized list of areas where employees feel like they are spending meaningless effort on administrative tasks, permissions, and reporting. You can then create a plan for reducing the time spent in this quadrant.

Soul sucking

Soul-Sucking The work in the Soul-Sucking quadrant is depleting, but it doesn’t feel urgent—it depletes your energy slowly over time. Examples of soul-sucking activity include the following:
Holding back your thoughts when you disagree for fear of repercussions
Spending time managing up
Navigating a toxic and aggressive culture
Feeling like you’re being treated unfairly
Wondering whether your manager will support you in a wider discussion
Frequently, the root cause of toxic behavior in this quadrant is the emphasis in our culture on rewarding individual productivity more than group productivity.
An MIT study published in Science validated this conclusion in organizational behavior. In a study of 699 volunteers, researchers found that the teams that were better at problem solving and demonstrated a higher “collective intelligence” were ones where members contributed more equally rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.
This doesn’t mean that individual performance isn’t important. In fact, some elements in the Soul-Sucking quadrant can result from not holding individuals accountable.

How to use the Culture rubric

Once you begin to see culture as a cumulative set of experiences through your workday, you realize that culture is not just what you intend but how people experience and perceive it. A good culture maximizes the Meaningful Work quadrant and minimizes the time spent in the other three.
This rubric helps you structure a discussion with your team to understand how their time is distributed across the four quadrants. Such a discussion would uncover what makes their work feel meaningful, which activities require too much Heroism from them, which tasks they would characterize as Organizational Cactus, and which interactions feel Soul-Sucking.
A characteristic of high-performing teams is the ability to have these honest and (most likely) uncomfortable discussions so that you’re able to align as a team on the problem at hand and come up with solutions. Without such alignment, culture change initiatives and training often feel like additional work without the promise of a clear benefit.
Once you have a clear picture of your culture and what elements of your culture you need to address, you can create an actionable plan by crafting a RDCL strategy.
The Radical Product Thinking framework for culture
Meaningful work
Heroism
Organisational cactus
Soul sucking
How to use the Culture rubric
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