Writing Board Meeting Minutes

We celebrate holidays with rituals that become routines: gathering with family, sharing meals, giving gifts, expressing gratitude. These routines give structure and meaning to our lives. But here's what I've noticed over the years: while the routines remain, the actions often need to evolve. My family still spends time together at Christmas, but now we visit our adult children rather than them visiting us. The routine endures; the execution adapts. Organizations work the same way. Every organization has five fundamental routines that define how work gets done: how we treat people, use information, manage conflict, allocate rewards, and make decisions. These routines have been studied by Nobel laureates and organization scholars for decades because they form the operating system of any enterprise. The challenge is that many leaders struggle to recognize when their routine actions have become outdated. Not evolving these actions causes organizations to get stuck responding to historical expectations rather than current realities. This helps explain why failure rates remain stubbornly high, with even Fortune 500 companies seeing 40 to 50 percent turnover every decade. In my latest article, I offer a diagnostic that business and HR leaders can use to assess whether their organizational routines need updating. Just as holiday traditions adapt across generations while preserving what matters most, organizational routines can evolve while maintaining their essential purpose. What routines in your organization might need fresh actions to match today's context? How do you know when it's time to update how things get done?

Last week Anthropic released its latest Economic Index. A key takeaway is that frontier models performance is heavily dependent on the context they can access. For example, the report notes that for Claude to develop a sales strategy for a key account, it needs more than CRM data. It also needs the tacit knowledge held by account executives, marketers, and external partners—knowledge that rarely lives in structured databases. In Anthropic’s words, “All else equal, lacking access to such contextual information will make Claude less capable.” Anthropic also found that when API customers rely on Claude for complex tasks, they tend to provide it with lengthy inputs. Relying on employees to paste sprawling context into prompts slows adoption, degrades results, and frustrates teams. The report warns, “This could represent a barrier to broader enterprise deployment for some important tasks that rely on dispersed context.” For years, we’ve heard the mantra: AI is only as strong as its data. But today, the bigger limiter is context. AI is only as strong as the organizational context it can securely access: across your data, processes, tools, and the tacit knowledge of your people. Without that complete map of your organization’s collective intelligence, even the most powerful models hit a wall.

How to learn something fast when nobody else around you has the full context or the time to guide you? I face this challenge every time I start a new project. Navigating ambiguity and gaining historical context in a short period of time can be challenging, but are often required for product managers. Here are 5️⃣ strategies I’ve tried and worked: [1] Seek knowledge from multiple sources Reach out to different team members, stakeholders, and SME to gather their perspectives and insights. Each individual may hold a piece of the historical context, and by triangulating information from various sources, you can start forming a more complete picture. [2] Find the experts to do a “knowledge dump” & focus on building relationships Identify key team members who have the most historical context. Schedule a knowledge-sharing session with them and be a sponge. Establish mentorship or buddy relationships with these experts. Encourage open dialogue to uncover crucial information and gain a shared understanding. This is seriously the best 80/20 way to learn. [3] Conduct thorough document reviews Go through any available documentation, including research plans, reports, meeting minutes, and previous strategy docs. These documents can provide valuable insights into the project's evolution, decisions made, and key milestones. Look for patterns and recurring themes to identify critical aspects. Crunch on time? Turn on accessibility mode and let the documents “speak” to you during commute or ask in-house AI tools (security and privacy granted) to summarize them for you. [4] Be curious, ask questions, and take notes This sounds basic, but it’s actually very effective. The most basic questions are sometimes the most important ones and worth documenting to help create leverage for your new project or product area. These unfamiliar terms, acronyms, or concepts? Make an organized FAQ. Create a centralized repository where you record key research insights, milestones, important decisions, and other contextual information. This will serve as a reference point for you and others in the future and your eagerness to learn will help you shine and build credibility with the new team. [5] Embrace a learning mindset. Prioritize and adapt. Approach the ambiguity with a learning mindset, recognizing that you won't have all the answers immediately. Embrace chaos as an opportunity to learn and be open to adjusting your understanding as you gain more context. Seek feedback and validation from others to ensure accuracy. Identify the most critical areas where historical context is essential, such as understanding dependencies, risks, or ongoing challenges. Prioritize your efforts accordingly to address those areas first, while being adaptable and open to refining your understanding as new information emerges. #ProductManagement #Careers #Leadership

Context Is Everything 🌍 So much of what we hear about on LinkedIn regarding the L&D industry is framed as if it applies to every organization equally. But here’s the truth: it doesn’t. Even the best frameworks and models — including my own in The Trusted Learning Advisor — aren’t universal playbooks. We can do everything “right” and still fall short if the organization doesn’t enable us to win. If the C-suite doesn’t support us, credibility only goes so far. If the business isn’t ready to prioritize learning, even the best-designed solutions won’t land. And if the culture resists change, L&D can feel like pushing water uphill. At BDO Canada, our team is fortunate to be respected as Trusted Learning Advisors — seen, listened to, and invited into strategic conversations. But I’ve also worked in organizations where L&D was stuck in order-taking mode, not because the team lacked skill or strategy, but because the context wasn’t there to support success. That’s the big mistake we often make in our profession: assuming one-size-fits-all. The reality is, L&D is always contextualized. Success depends on the maturity of the organization, the appetite of leadership, and ultimately, the value we can prove we’re providing in that context. 👉 What do you think? How has your organization’s culture or maturity shaped the way L&D is perceived where you work?

A new VP introduced "radical candor" - direct feedback, public disagreement, transparent conflict. Exactly what worked at her last company. Six months later, she was isolated. The team nodded, said feedback sessions were "really valuable," then kept operating as before. By month nine, she was gone. Her mistake wasn't the strategy. It was assuming the environment would cooperate with it. 👉The Generic Leadership Trap Most leadership advice is context-free. "Be transparent." “Create psychological safety.” "Empower your team." All of it sounds right. None of it tells you whether it will work here. Every environment has unwritten rules that override your written ones, historical patterns that resist your direction, invisible incentives that reward behaviors you're trying to eliminate. 📍Leaders without context clarity treat these as obstacles to overcome. They're not obstacles. They're the terrain. 📌 What Context Clarity Actually Is The ability to read the system you're operating in, not the system you wish you were in. What is the real history here? What happened the last time someone tried to change things?  - What does this system actually reward? ❓What are the unspoken rules? "We don't challenge the CFO in meetings." "Engineering always wins." "The CEO's opinion is the last opinion." ❓How does power actually flow? Not the org chart. Who influences decisions? ❓What is this environment optimized for? Speed or stability? Innovation or risk management? You can't change what something is optimized for by wishing it were different. 📍The Cost of Context Ignorance When leaders ignore context, they fail slowly. Your initiatives get quiet resistance. People say yes and do nothing. You become "the outsider who doesn't get it." Even if you've been here for years. You waste influence on unwinnable battles. 📌 The Test Can you explain why your last three decisions failed, not because of your execution, but because of the environment's response? If you can't, you're not reading the context. You're just reacting to it. 📍Leaders with context clarity: Work with the grain of the culture, not against it. Plan moves based on what the system can absorb. Translate generic leadership advice into local strategy. They stop trying to lead the organization they wish they had. They lead the one that actually exists. 👉 Context clarity is what makes leadership intelligent. You can have perfect identity clarity, know exactly who you are. But if you don't know where you are, your clarity just makes you confidently wrong. It's the difference between conviction and naivety. Between vision and delusion. Context clarity ≠ Context Acceptance. Tomorrow, I share more. ---- This is a framework I’ve developed over a decade of working with leaders and companies globally. In this 21-minute solo episode of Overnight Wisdom, I break down the three clarities. Whether you lead 2 or 2000, have a listen and let me know what resonates. 🎧Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dvr8zGUr

Are You Solving the Right Problem? As leaders & professionals, we're often under pressure to act quickly when challenges arise. Our instinct—or perhaps muscle memory—is to dive straight into solution mode. But over the years, I've found that one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is: Are we solving the right problem? Consider the hybrid workforce. Organizations often roll out solutions like employee engagement activities, gift cards, virtual celebrations, enforcing video-on policies during calls, or hosting virtual team-building sessions. While these seem like good ideas, they may serve as quick fixes that don't address the real issue. So, what's the actual problem? ❓Is it a lack of engagement? ❓A drop in productivity? ❓Struggles with team cohesiveness? ❓Or could it be something deeper, like communication barriers? ❓Disconnect between leadership and employees? ❓Or even more fundamental issues like trust and culture? Getting to the heart of the problem is crucial. 🛠️ 3 Steps to Identify the Right Problem: Observe and Listen: Start by carefully observing the symptoms. What are the visible signs that something's not working? Gather data and listen to feedback from your team. This will help you understand the nature of the issue. Ask Deep Questions: Go beyond surface-level explanations. Use techniques like the "5 Whys" to dig into the root causes. If engagement is low, ask why—several times over—to uncover the core issue. The real problem often lies beneath the symptoms. Understand the Context: Consider the broader organizational environment, team dynamics, and culture. What seems like an issue in one area might be a symptom of a deeper problem elsewhere. Context is critical to accurate diagnosis. Once the right problem is identified, solving it effectively requires careful consideration. 💡 3 Considerations When Solving the Problem: Engage Multiple Perspectives: Involve diverse voices from across the organization. Different perspectives can reveal angles you might miss and lead to more robust solutions. Collaboration ensures broader acceptance and better outcomes. Resist the Quick Fix: It's tempting to go for quick solutions, but they often only address symptoms. Focus on sustainable solutions that tackle the root cause. This may take more time, but the long-term benefits are worth it. Reflect and Iterate: After implementing a solution, reflect on its impact. Did it address the problem effectively? Be prepared to iterate and adjust as needed. Continuous improvement is essential for long-term success. The most successful leaders don't just jump to solutions—they take the time to define the problem accurately. By doing so, they create a foundation for meaningful, lasting change. So, before you dive into solving what seems like an urgent issue, ask yourself: Am I truly solving the right problem? #Leadership #OrganizationalDevelopment #ProblemSolving #HybridWorkforce #Culture

The image “Chief Context Officer,” came out of the last Qlik Connect, held in April 2026, and it was also a topic of discussion on the Data Voyagers podcast with the Women Who Qlik group, which already signals how relevant this conversation is becoming among data and AI leaders: 1. The shift of value and the rise of context For years, competitive advantage was built on the ability to capture data, organize information, and more recently, synthesize knowledge, which required significant investment in architecture, engineering, and modeling. But the rise of generative AI is fundamentally shifting this dynamic by reducing the time of access and synthesis, making these capabilities available, fast, and, from a strategic standpoint, less differentiating. When that happens, value does not disappear, it migrates to a more sophisticated layer, which is the ability to build context, meaning the capability to frame the right problem before searching for answers, define clear semantic boundaries, understand causality beyond correlation, and exercise discernment in an environment where plausible answers are abundant, but truly useful ones remain scarce. 2. Context as architecture and organizational capability Context is not an abstract idea, it materializes in very concrete elements within organizations, such as well-defined semantic models, consistent metrics across domains, governance that ensures meaning rather than just control, and architectures that preserve lineage, reliability, and interpretability throughout the data lifecycle. This is why the conversation around Data & AI Literacy must evolve, because it is no longer just about teaching people how to use tools or understand models, but about developing a more advanced capability to read and interpret context, which includes questioning assumptions, identifying biases, understanding data limitations, and translating all of that into decisions that truly make sense for the business. 3. The strategic thinking and the new leadership responsibility A recurring problem I still see, even in mature organizations, is treating AI as the starting point rather than as a means, which leads to disconnected initiatives that are difficult to scale and often deliver limited impact, while organizations that are progressing consistently start with clearly defined business problems, establish measurable success criteria, run short-cycle experiments, and use AI intentionally as a lever for results rather than as an end in itself. In this context, the idea of a Chief Context Officer should not be interpreted as a new role, but as a strategic responsibility that increasingly sits with leadership, especially those in data and AI, because the real differentiation will not come from who builds more models, but from who ensures that everything is connected to the right context, at the right time, generating real and measurable business impact. #dataandAILiteracy

Context is king. Everyone says this about AI. Fewer realize it’s just as true for people. I used to think leadership meant telling people what to do and leaving autonomy in the how. But that leaves intelligence untapped. Real capability comes from understanding the broader context. When people see the why, they don’t just execute. They develop instincts, test approaches, and fit solutions to real situations. People build judgment by testing choices against real context, not by being told what’s right. This is also how you grow business acumen on a team. Give richer context, and you help people learn how business leaders really think. My personal team mission is to build what I call a CEO factory. Teams where people gain the autonomy, skill, and judgment to someday run companies themselves. The progression: 1️⃣ Share context directly in team forums so everyone hears the “why” 2️⃣ Bring people into senior meetings to absorb context firsthand 3️⃣ Teach leaders to get even more from decision meetings with pre-meeting hypotheses and post-meeting debriefs This is also why the best AI systems need more context. Not just data, but subtle human signals. Sam Altman’s $6.5B bet on Jony Ive’s always-aware AI device makes sense: Is the CFO stressed? What’s really on the GC’s mind? You rarely know which detail will matter most ahead of time. What’s really stopping us from sharing more context? Maybe it’s not that we don’t think it matters. It’s that we’re not ready for people to see how messy and uncertain our decisions actually are…

I recently had the pleasure of co-facilitating an Organization Design Masterclass for the portfolio organizations of one of our clients at ProGrowth People Solutions, alongside my dear friend and fellow expert, Rushabh. As we deep-dived into the scaling journeys of these startups, one reality became crystal clear: What worked for 10 people actively breaks for 100. Most startups hit a Growth Wall where simple decisions suddenly require three meetings for approval, and founders find themselves firefighting in the operational weeds instead of steering the strategy. This isn't just a culture problem - it is a Design Problem. The Reality of Org Evolution: 1. The Physics of Scale: Your business complexity grows on a curve, but your structure usually grows in steps. When that gap - the Org Design Lag - gets too wide, you hit the Friction Zone where communication overhead stalls actual work. 2. The Glue that Changes: The implicit trust that powers a 20-person Commando Unit must transition into robust Processes & Metrics for a 80-person Tribe, and eventually into Distributed Decision Making for a 150+ person Village. 3. The Strategy Lag: To scale effectively, your structure must lag your strategy—but only by a little. If it stays stuck in a Stage 1 operating system while your business is Stage 3, burnout and internal politics are inevitable. What is your Burning Platform? The attached document provides the full context setting on why this is a non-negotiable aspect of organization building. If you look at the second-to-last slide in the deck (Slide 6), you'll see four common Burning Platforms: 1. The Founder Bottleneck: Every decision waits for me. 2. The Invisible Layer: Communication breakdowns and meetings to schedule meetings. 3. The Talent Mismatch: The Loyalty Trap, where early heroes struggle in scaled roles. 4. Operational Friction: Bureaucratic processes or failing hand-offs. If any of these resonate with your current journey, give Rushabh or me a shout. We would love to brainstorm with you and see how we can solve these structural frictions together. 🤝 #OrgDesign #Scaling #StartupGrowth #Leadership #ProGrowthPeopleSolutions #Founders #PeopleStrategy #PranaVentures

One of the common missteps senior leaders make when joining long-established organizations is assuming that change must be immediate—and that their past success gives them all the answers. They arrive in a 25- or 30-year-old company, bringing a strong pedigree, experience with well-known brands, and a solid track record. Often, they’re hired specifically to “drive transformation.” But instead of first observing, understanding, and absorbing the company’s culture and history, they begin diagnosing what’s “wrong” right out of the gate: 1.     “This process is outdated.” 2.     “There’s too much resistance to change.” 3.     “We need a mindset shift—urgently.” But here’s what they often miss: The company has survived—and often thrived—for decades. It didn’t get here by accident. Its practices, however imperfect, are shaped by years of experience, adaptation, and people working hard to keep things moving. 1.     Every process—no matter how old—solved a real problem once. 2.     Every “inefficiency” may have cultural or relational significance. 3.     And every legacy system comes with a story, a reason, and a rhythm. Great leaders respect that. They don’t walk in with a wrecking ball. They walk in with curiosity. They listen more than they speak. They seek to understand before being understood. 👉 A case in point: A mid-sized, 30+ year-old company recently brought in a senior executive from a globally known brand. He came in with confidence—and quickly started proposing sweeping changes based on what had worked in his previous roles and what he felt was right for this company. But there was no data behind his recommendations. No effort to get stakeholder buy-in. No attempt to understand the business or the culture that existed before he walked in. He was let go within three months. Not because his ideas were wrong—but because his approach lacked context, empathy, and collaboration. ✨ Change is necessary. But change without context is not transformation—it’s disruption without direction. Leadership is not about imposing transformation. It’s about enabling it—thoughtfully, collaboratively, and with respect for what came before. Have you experienced something similar in your career? Would love to hear your thoughts. #SanjeevaniEffect #Leadership #OrganizationalCulture #ChangeManagement #LegacyMatters #NewLeader #Transformation #HRLeadership #RespectTheJourney #ContextIsEverything #TheSanjeevCode