Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Beyond OKRs: Radhika Dutt on the Performance Trap and the Puzzle Mindset

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 27

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Are your goals helping you adapt—or just perform?

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Radhika Dutt joins Mike Jones to expose the hidden trap of OKRs and KPI-led management. Drawing on her latest work and the OHL Toolkit, Radhika introduces a radical shift: move from setting performance targets to setting puzzles.

They explore how metrics create fragility, why freedom of action matters, and how to scaffold real learning without losing direction. From military concepts to corporate leadership, this is a sharp critique of goal setting gone wrong—and a practical alternative for those ready to rethink success.

📥 Download the OHL Toolkit

🌐 Visit Radhika’s Website

🔗 Connect with Radhika on LinkedIn

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why OKRs often create performance theatre
  • Puzzle setting vs puzzle solving
  • How scaffolding enables experimentation
  • Freedom of action without losing control
  • Rethinking what good leadership looks like
  • The danger of mistaking metrics for outcomes

🎧 Keywords: OKRs, KPIs, leadership, complexity, adaptability, performance theatre, puzzle mindset, experimentation, scaffolding, radical product thinking, Radhika Dutt

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Radhika Dutt (00:00)
in the corporate world, we have this black and white thinking.

which is this is an A level player and this is a C level player, As opposed to actually there are people with different skills and abilities and how they learn is different.

Goal setting doesn't work in complex problems.

If there's one right answer, go for goal setting and targets. if you're solving hard problems let's focus on puzzle setting and puzzle solving then. Why are we applying a methodology that doesn't work for complex problems?

Mike Jones (00:26)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (00:30)
when a measure is used for evaluation, the more it's used for evaluation, the more it's likely to be gamed and therefore corrupted,

Mike Jones (00:45)
Welcome back to the strategy meets reality podcast. It's great to have Radhika Dutt on. It's been a pleasure. I'm so glad to have been. We had an initial chat quite a while ago and I've been really waiting to have this conversation because I think it's to be fascinating. So welcome Radhika to the podcast. Thank you for joining me.

Radhika Dutt (01:01)
Thanks for having me, Mike. And I too have been super excited about having this chat since our previous conversation.

Mike Jones (01:07)
Awesome, so just for our listeners, just if you have to give us a bit of background about yourself and a bit of context of what you've been up to lately.

Radhika Dutt (01:13)
So my background is that I'm an engineer by training. did Mandegrad and Grad at MIT in electrical engineering ages ago. And since then, I've been doing such a wide range of things. I've worked in so many different industries from broadcast, telecom, media and entertainment, robotics. I mean, just it's been all over the place, right? And I have been a product leader and a speaker and consultant.

Mike Jones (01:19)
Hmm.

Radhika Dutt (01:38)
And in 2021, I released my first book, was Radical Product Thinking. And that talks about, you know, all the hard lessons on how to build great products, just lessons that I'd learned along the way, having caught what I now call product diseases and the tons of mistakes that I made. And then realizing that I'd learned from those hard lessons. But, you know, is there a way we could give people a clear

and systematic process for building world-changing products. So that was radical product thinking, and there were some radical ideas in there that we can get into. But what I'm working on now is my second book. And this second book is about why goals and targets backfire and what actually works instead.

Mike Jones (02:09)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm, and that's what really intrigued me about our conversation. I really wanted to pull apart because I've, I think last time I spoke to you I was like, I've got this article I'm writing about this stuff, but I still haven't released it because I don't think it's quite there. But I think I agree with but what do you think the challenges around sort of the goal setting, the traditional sort of OKRs, KPIs, all the other God knows how many different.

messages we try and put on people.

Radhika Dutt (02:46)
You

Yeah, you know, and it's I really empathize with that challenge because it took me a long time to articulate what is wrong with goals, targets, OKRs or for those, if you're lucky enough to not know what OKRs are, objectives and key results. But but the point is, you know, it's all these different methodologies for goal setting that are really relabeled and it makes it seem like, these are new and innovative things. But the reality is these are old ideas just repackaged and renamed, right?

Mike Jones (03:00)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (03:16)
⁓ So it took me a long time to articulate the problem with this. And why did it take me so long? Because I kept thinking, you know, we've all been so entrenched with this idea that goal setting is how you build great businesses that questioning that, instead of questioning that principle, we question ourselves. say, there must be something wrong with how I'm setting goals. That's why it's not working. Right. ⁓ And so here are some observations.

Mike Jones (03:17)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yes.

Radhika Dutt (03:41)
And if you've seen any of these observations, know that it's not you as a listener. Like this is a fundamental problem with goal setting and targets. And this is what research shows. So some of the problems that I've observed is, let's even start with sales. You know, I have seen that when you have targets, what it incentivizes you to do is first of all, to show the good numbers, because you want to look like a good

Mike Jones (04:07)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (04:07)
performer. And even if there isn't a bonus tied to it, you know, even if you're in engineering and sales, it doesn't matter. You want to look like a good performer. And so when you have a target, your incentive is to say, ta-da, I hit the target. What you're doing, whether it's, you know, deliberately or even subconsciously, is you tend to want to ignore the bad metrics because you say, you know, want to show you, look, look, I hit the targets.

just subconsciously you tend to ignore those bad numbers and just sweep them under the rug. And what it does in an organization is it atrophies the experimentation, learning and adaptation muscle because that muscle requires you to look at those bad numbers, play detective and say, huh, I wonder what happened there. You know, what was wrong? So the example that I was giving with sales, I was working at a company where we dominated the movie industry video editing business.

Mike Jones (04:53)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (05:00)
Our video editors were used in every single Oscar nominated movie, every movie that won an Oscar, et cetera. And we kept hitting sales targets. But if you just looked under the hood and what was happening, the reality was our low end market was getting eroded. The medium tier two. And the way we were making our numbers was by going after the high end and then the extreme high end, et cetera.

Right? So numbers hide a lot of sins. And so if you're a listener, you might have seen this in your organization that salespeople, very often you're seeing everyone scrambling, like, how do we make these numbers? What can we pull in from the next quarter? Right? And you'll see the experimentation muscle atrophy. How often do you see someone in sales going like, we lost this deal.

Mike Jones (05:27)
Okay, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (05:49)
Let's really take some time to reflect what happened there. You know, let's play detective. I have not seen that. I always say, let's just move on. Next deal.

Mike Jones (05:54)
No. Yeah.

It's all that gaming, isn't it? It's like, you want to be that high performer, like you said, but also it's that sort of thing where you go, I know it's red, but I need to report it green because I don't want to have that difficult conversation. I don't want to, you know, be in that awkward situation. And it does it. I've always thought the biggest challenge that we have is trying, how do we get more critical thinking into businesses?

And, but everything we do sort of doesn't demand or drive critical thinking. It, it, demands us to just follow the sort of status quo and, we spend more time trying to mask and cover up things rather than try to have that actual honest conversation about how do we deal with it? What's going on?

Radhika Dutt (06:38)
so many interesting points to unpack there. know, one thing I hear from people who use OKRs or any sort of KPI system, right? They say, we have these meetings to review our KPIs and it feels like we're all talking at each other rather than actually having meaningful conversations. And that's one of the things that, you know, in the methodology that I've been using instead that

Mike Jones (06:57)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (07:02)
that's completely changed teams in the kind of meaningful conversations it leads to. And the other thing you said there, right, is this inherent phenomenon of wanting to game numbers. Like people tell me, yeah, we sort of spend the end of the month just finessing numbers so that we can prepare for these meetings. There's Campbell's law from anthropology that predicts this behavior. They've seen this over and over in anthropology.

Mike Jones (07:08)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (07:29)
and Campbell's law states, when a measure is used for evaluation, the more it's used for evaluation, the more it's likely to be gamed and therefore corrupted,

and therefore no longer a good measure for evaluation anymore.

Mike Jones (07:43)
Yeah, I like that. And the other challenge, and it'd good to get onto your approach, it's the strategy. come up with, how they do it anyway is a bit wrong, but they come up with a plan. They have all these measures to say that they're going to deliver these milestones and these plans. But then people become more fixated on the measures.

than they do with what's actually happening around them, what's actually changing. So they miss all the opportunities or risks because they just get fixated on the numbers. It's almost like a dog chasing the bone. And that's it, or bull. But yeah, do you often see that?

Radhika Dutt (08:17)
yes. And I think there are two aspects to this, right? So one is the number chasing. And this also relates to, it's not even malicious, it's that you want to prove that the strategy is working. And what you really need is for people to genuinely question with curiosity and openness and ask the question, is this working? know, are we?

Mike Jones (08:32)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (08:41)
actually making progress with the initiatives that we've outlined. Instead, targets force people to show progress with those same initiatives. And there's a second piece of this, which is when you set a strategy and then you set OKRs at the beginning of the year, what you're not allowing for is the learning and all of this information being adapted based on new information coming in from the front lines. So what happens is, you know,

Mike Jones (08:48)
Yeah, yeah,

Radhika Dutt (09:08)
OKRs or goals are set from this lens of, know this is what progress means, this is what it means, like this is the solution and this is what progress towards the solution look like. And in reality, the moment you start your initiatives, you discover there are things working or not working. And that's where you need to adapt. But by the way, to this, a lot of OKR experts will tell you, well, the solution to this is simple.

Again, you're just doing OKRs wrong. What you need to do is set OKRs. Is to set OKRs every quarter. That's what allows you all the space for learning. But, you know, I've heard someone say this to an executive and they just laughed saying, you know, it takes us so long to coordinate OKRs across the whole organization at the beginning of the year. If you made me do this multiple times a year, we would just die.

Mike Jones (09:39)
Ha ha ha, course.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (10:01)
It's a

lot of process and overhead that doesn't actually lead to results. Like when a system isn't working, why don't we question, what do we do instead? Why are we trying all sorts of ways to stay fixated in this idea that goals are still the right solution?

Mike Jones (10:18)
Yeah, I totally get it. And that's what happens. And God forbid you challenge OKRs and stuff like that because it's become sort of a cult now. It's like you dare challenge it because the cult will come after you. And I always say, when you get to a point that you now need a person or a team to look after that thing, it's gone too far.

Radhika Dutt (10:29)
you

Mike Jones (10:40)
Because that's too much corporate energy. It's like, we call it pathological or to pieces in systems terms. And all that means is when we get a problem like, we've got to do OKRs. They aren't going right. Why you need to do more OKRs? What we then do is we put someone senior in charge of it. then because they're senior, they want a team and then they create this team. But this team then forgets that they're there to do this job. So they become self creating. Before you know it, you just create this massive bureaucratic team.

Radhika Dutt (10:40)
you

Mike Jones (11:04)
that just zap resources from where you need it from just to do something that doesn't, isn't really effective because I'm on the same agreement with you. Soon as you start enacting your strategy, things are going to change. Every time you do something, we're not too sure how it's going to work. So we need to be adaptable. If you create this massive structure to try and measure the hell out of everything, it's not going to work unless you're in maybe

I don't know, it may work in manufacturing or something, I don't know, but something's a bit more stable and predictable, but still, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (11:37)
Let's

talk more about manufacturing, But I want to address your point that you just made. You know, and I see the Formula One poster behind you. I'm a Formula One fan too. You know, when you're working on a strategy as a leader, what you really want is you want the feel on the ground. You want to know this feel and how much grip and traction you have so that you know how fast you can take the turn.

Mike Jones (11:46)
Yeah, yeah. ⁓ cool.

Mm-hmm.

Radhika Dutt (12:04)
And what happens

Mike Jones (12:04)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (12:04)
is, you when you set goals and targets, what you're hearing from the front lines is the information that you're hoping to hear that everything is going well. So you don't have a good sense for the actual road, the traction, the grip, et cetera, right? And so you're not driving as fast as you possibly could because you don't have that grip on the ground. You don't know what is reality. So that's one piece of it. And the other point that you made is, you know, maybe this works in manufacturing. So let's talk about

where do goals and OKRs work actually, right? And for that, we should look back at history and where did goals and OKRs come from? Like, why is it even so entrenched in our psyche? Why did that become the way to manage a workforce? And, you know, even though OKRs, they seem like a new thing because John Doar publicized it in 2018. Larry Page, the time, founder of Google, you know, he was saying OKRs, it's a secret to

Mike Jones (12:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (13:00)
Google's success, et cetera. By the way, like anonymous Googlers instead often joke that we just created OKRs and publicized them so that all of our competitors are going to fail.

Mike Jones (13:11)
Yeah,

Radhika Dutt (13:17)
Yeah.

But, you know, so OKR seemed like a new idea. But if you look back at history, actually, was, and John Doerr says this in his book, it was Andy Grove from Intel who instituted OKRs at Intel in the late 70s and 80s. So where did Andy Grove come up with OKRs? And the answer to that is it was from, it was basically a small tweak to management by objectives.

which was Peter Drucker's revolutionary set of ideas from the 1940s. That is really key, right? From the 1940s, then we made small tweaks in the 1970s and 80s. And from that, like, we haven't really changed in the 2020s, right? Isn't that crazy? For 75 years, there's an idea that's unchallenged. And so if you go back to what was Peter Drucker solving for?

Mike Jones (13:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (14:09)
the antilisin manufacturing in the 1940s. He was working with General Motors at the time. And the workforce that they had was primarily an unskilled workforce that was doing repetitive tasks on an assembly line where there was very little automation at the time in the 1940s. And so in the 1940s, goals and targets

Mike Jones (14:15)
Yeah, of course.

Radhika Dutt (14:34)
were a great way to work because you set goals together with employees and there's one right answer to how you install tires. There's one right way and so I can tell that Andy is a better performer than Bob because Andy did 45 tires, Bob did 40. Great, I get the clear picture of who's a good performer or not. Now you take the same concept of goal setting and let's take the complex manufacturing setting of Boeing's manufacturing floor.

Mike Jones (14:54)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (15:03)
We are manufacturing an airplane and it requires skilled labor. It's no longer just fully automated, like all the tasks that they're doing, they're actually hard engineering things that require skills. And then you see the kind of manufacturing and quality issues that you have, where you have panels flying off of planes and we wonder why. Goal setting doesn't work in complex problems.

Mike Jones (15:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (15:29)
And that is what research shows. If there's one right answer, if you're crunches at the gym, if you're doing stuffing of envelopes for a campaign, go for goal setting and targets. If you're not solving, sorry, if you're solving hard problems that are more like puzzle solving, well, let's focus on puzzle setting and puzzle solving then. Why are we applying a methodology that doesn't work for complex problems?

Mike Jones (15:29)
Hmm.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes. And I think that's the trap that, know, reason why we took back this podcast that the trap is that everything's linear. the, the world is predictable. The world is stable and we know it's not, but we try to enforce, management stuff or measurement stuff or tools that are either only suited for that real stable life.

It doesn't exist or it's context free and we try and put other contexts into our work that doesn't seem to work. But you've got, and you mentioned it there, you talk about puzzles. I quite like that idea of puzzles because it leads to sort of critical thinking. explain, you in, cause I got the privilege of having a sneak preview of your chapters. So you talk about objectives, hypothesis and learning.

So please tell me more, because I only got a sneak preview. I want to know more.

Radhika Dutt (16:44)
Yeah. So the methodology that I've been trying out, because by the way, my original approach used to be I would tell leaders OKRs aren't working, let's not use them. And they would say, well, that's the devil I know, what do you propose instead? And I didn't have a good answer, right, until I had to come up with something that works for the workforce of today, like for solving puzzles. And so instead of OKRs, objectives and key results, I came up with

Mike Jones (16:57)
Yeah, true, true, true.

Radhika Dutt (17:10)
objectives, hypotheses, and learnings. And so the way this approach works is the objectives, instead of just some arbitrary thing we want to do, like the description of an initiative, like build the best web browser or grow the company, I like setting a puzzle using the objective. So let's look at the example of sales. Instead of just setting a target of X million ARR by the end of the year,

What I would say when setting such a puzzle is I'd say, you know, the market expects us to hit X million by the end of the year. But here's the puzzle that I see ahead of us. know, sales grew in the last three years. They've stalled in this last year. What might be going on? And here are genuine things I don't know. Like why have sales stalled? It might be that the market has fundamentally shifted in some way. Perhaps it's that

Mike Jones (17:54)
Mm-hmm.

Radhika Dutt (17:58)
You know, we were selling to the early adopters and we had really gotten good at selling to those early adopters, but we haven't figured out how to sell to the mass market. So maybe our messaging isn't resonating for the mass market. Maybe it's that our product isn't suited for that mass market, right? And so I would invite my leadership team to help me figure out like, how will the different parts of the organization figure out this puzzle?

And there might be things that the sales team can try. It might include, you know, I'm going to test out different messaging. I'm going to see, you know, are we getting to the right sort of decision maker? Is the mass market different in terms of their way of thinking and the decision maker, the strategy to sell into that? I'm going to try different things there. So sales might have their approach to puzzle solving. The product team might look at the same puzzle and say, okay,

Mike Jones (18:24)
Mm-hmm.

Radhika Dutt (18:49)
How do I figure out, you know, how do I sell into this mass market? Are we not selling well to them? Or like, is it not meeting the needs for this mass market, et cetera? And that is how we talk about this puzzle setting and puzzle solving. So that is the objective. So the objective just summarized the puzzle. And now let's talk about the puzzle solving, because in organizations, as we said, you know, that are target driven, that puzzle solving muscle has atrophied. And so in puzzle solving,

Mike Jones (18:59)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (19:17)
That means looking at hypotheses and learnings and really structuring them. So rather than focusing on hypotheses and learnings, let's focus on the structure, which is the three questions of puzzle solving are, how well did it work? So that first question is, notice it's qualitative. It's sorry, qualitative meaning it's not a binary question of have you or haven't you hit ⁓ targets.

Mike Jones (19:41)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (19:42)
It's more of, you know, I want the good and the bad numbers. And so I'm going to define a hypothesis to really be rigorous about this and say, you know, if we try this particular experiment, then here's what I expect to see in terms of the outcome, because here's the connection between the experiment and the outcome. And then I might have leading and lagging indicators.

Mike Jones (19:46)
Yeah.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (20:06)
that tell me whether this experiment is working or not. And this is where I would look at both the good and bad numbers to evaluate how well is this working. So that's the first question, how well is it working? The second question is, what have we learned? And this is where I tell teams, don't just spit out a bunch of numbers and stats at me, you figure out from those stats and all the data, what is actually happening, right?

Mike Jones (20:16)
Hmm

Radhika Dutt (20:31)
And we can talk through a whole example of how we went about this in a company. But what have you learned? Tell me the story and the narrative. And the story and the narrative, by the way, triggers creative thinking. It's the right brain. And then comes the last question, which is based on how well it worked and what you've learned, what will you try next? So if I were to give you a magic wand, what would you ask?

Mike Jones (20:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (20:53)
And that's also the creative problem solving. So I'll pause there. We talked about a lot. This is a way of structuring experimentation, learning and adaptation in a way that gives scaffolding for your team.

Mike Jones (20:53)
Yes.

Yeah, I like it as well because when you're in these complex problems, what frustrates me the most is when we talk about execution or anything, is that our people are so constrained that they don't have any space for freedom of action or critical thinking because they're so just tied down by arbitrary things and they have no flex. I like the way you talk about puzzles and thinking about...

different things and hypothesis, because it always is hypothesis. You're going to go and say, well, the context that we understand now, I suppose a lot of the, what I liked about the objective part, a lot of that puzzles was about context from what we see from our perspective. It's our perspective and there's always going to be darkness that we don't know. That we don't know the full thing so we can assume this, but we never fully going to know. Then we're going to try some stuff.

Am we going to sense and orientate and update what we know to be true? And then we can see what's not working, what is working. And I like the part you talked about that, you know, if you could do it again or you could change something, what would you do? What would you ask for? I think that's really crucial because in the military, we're used to the fact that we do have constraints. And, you know, we have this conversation all the time around this is what I need you to do.

And you get, well, yeah, I can see what you want to do, but I can do this, but I'm constrained by this. If you remove that constraint, I can do this, this and this. Otherwise I can only do this. And that brings a lot more richness in the conversation rather than just, yeah, I can't do it. Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (22:31)
Yes,

exactly. And you know, this is what fascinated me about our conversation before and why I was so eager for this. Like, I think there are so many interesting parallels in what you brought up, like this military example of constraints as well, right? You know, what we don't have in business is so far this scaffolding for experimentation, learning and adaptation. And until now, we've mostly used intuition for that. ⁓

Mike Jones (22:57)
Hmm.

Radhika Dutt (22:57)
And

so because it's only intuition based, some people are good at it and others are not. And you don't have scaffolding to be able to develop skills where you don't have that innate intuition. And what you just said about constraints is as a leader, when you have the scaffolding for your team, this really helps you give

Mike Jones (23:10)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (23:20)
your team live feedback, like continuous feedback in terms of you want to try this next, okay, great. You know, how do we reduce the size of risk that you're taking on in this, you know? Or maybe in this particular case, it's okay to take the risk. It's a brand new Greenfield project. You know, you have the opportunity and the funding to go wild, but maybe, you know, in a different scenario, there are way too many users who are super picky. They will be

Mike Jones (23:48)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (23:48)
absolutely mad if you make any change that they're not going to like. This is too big a thing that you're trying. How can you reduce risk? And that might be a conversation and a negotiation. This gives you the scaffolding for those constraints discussion.

Mike Jones (23:58)
Yes.

Yes. I think in, and that constraint that can really focus people and make you more curious and more innovative because definitely if you've just got everything, could just go, could do this, but where it's really, I always say to people in this stuff is like, yes, we have constraints and constraints are good sometimes. You can be too constrained, but that's the challenge. But

You must always recognize your constraints and challenging where possible, but you must, you must exploit your freedoms. You know, that's where it really comes from. Exploit your freedoms there. And I think that scaffolding needs to be there because you get a lot of leaders, don't know, some drink the Kool-Aid and they're just like, yeah, just do what you want. And they think they're being cool. And then something goes drastically wrong and they...

see all control back again yeah yeah so it can go because it can go a bit a bit sometimes i suppose

Radhika Dutt (24:58)
Exactly. You know, there was one other military parallel that you described for me last time that I've been reflecting on so much. And I think it would be so helpful for listeners if you want to talk about that, the scaffolding in terms of harnessing everyone's skills and sort of that mindset in military. I would love to talk more about, what you said about that mindset. Yeah, go ahead.

Mike Jones (25:21)
Was that what I was talking about, how we give initiative and freedom to people, that we have intent, we have a clear intent. So the clear intent is showing this is what we want to achieve, not how. Be very clear on that. And then we have constraints, but we have the relative knowledge, skills and experience to have the freedom of action. But if they haven't got the relative knowledge, skills and experience, all we then do is bring the constraints in.

Radhika Dutt (25:26)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (25:44)
So to them, feels like they're still being empowered because the constraints are relative to their knowledge, skills and experience. And we build up the knowledge, skills and experience because we train a lot and we make things very realistic to what we're what we do have in the military is very short feedback loops. And we have that all the time. do after-action reviews a lot. And that means then we can...

really build up their knowledge, skills and experience. And as we do that, we widen out the constraints. So they've always got maximum freedom of action.

Radhika Dutt (26:16)
think this is such a powerful thing to talk through. And there was one other thing that you said to me, which was, you know, by doing this, you're able to harness everyone's skills. And there's a whole spectrum of skills in the military. But that's true in the corporate world, too. You have a whole spectrum of skills and competencies. And, you know, in the corporate world, though, we have this black and white thinking.

Mike Jones (26:29)
Yes.

Radhika Dutt (26:43)
which is this is an A level player and this is a C level player, et cetera, right? As opposed to actually there are people with different skills and abilities and how they learn is different.

Mike Jones (26:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (26:55)
They have different levels of knowledge, skills and experience. And how do you build that and harness everyone's skills is really the mindset that we need to adopt, right? And instead the focus that we have in the corporate world is

I'm going to continuously evaluate you. I might give you, a five, and here I'm going to give Adam a three, or Tyler gets a four rating. It's all about ratings and rankings so that it's with this mindset of, if I'm having layoffs, I know who to fire. But what you really need in operations is, how do you harness the most from each of these employees? Evaluations are less important than developing

Mike Jones (27:28)
You

Radhika Dutt (27:37)
talent in your entire organization. And so how do you go about developing the knowledge, skills and experience? And this is exactly the framework that you need where, you know, as a manager, as a leader, you give teams the scaffolding for experimentation, learning and adaptation. And what I've noticed is when I give teams this, I can observe very quickly, like as they experiment and they come back with these learnings of how well did it work?

What have you learned? What are you going to try next? I can see the depth of their thinking in this puzzle solving. And a really interesting realization for me was there were a couple of people from these big named companies like Google and Amazon. And their ability to think through this, how well did it work? What have you learned? What will you try next? Was actually very shallow compared to someone else who didn't have that experience.

Mike Jones (28:19)
Hmm.

Radhika Dutt (28:31)
but they were deep thinkers, they were able to solve this puzzle. And as they got better at it, I was able to give them increasingly more freedom. Just, you know, go forth, solve this puzzle. And, you know, even the feedback loops, I was realizing I could give them more and more freedom to do that. And it gave me a way of giving really clear feedback to the other people who I needed to develop in terms of what I wanted to see. We had to start with smaller puzzles. We had to keep building that skill set.

Mike Jones (28:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (28:59)
And you know, sometimes it leads to hard conversations too, where you say, you know, I think this just isn't quite working out. It's not a great match of skill sets. And this is what true accountability is, where I truly see the depth of someone's thinking, how well they're learning and adapting and solving a puzzle, as opposed to just evaluating and giving numbers and seeing performance theater so that everyone wants to look like a high performer.

Mike Jones (29:25)
Yeah. And that's, there's so much to unpack there. I'm just like, where do I go? Where do I start? you're right. And I think when we go back to think about, curiosity, critical thinking, how I want to give people freedom of action, it is a skill anyway, in the sense of, it's something to be developed. And actually by this, and that's why I love the, you know, you know, what went well, you know, what could you do next?

really getting them to think and bring it in. You're building that muscle. And I think that's what should be encouraged, to give people the maximum freedom of action, them the right scaffolding, give them that development, give them that space to experiment, have that conversation so we're learning as we go through. But also we need to ensure that we actually do it.

But we tend not to, we tend to, I joke with some of the organization, it's like they've created a revolving door that, you know, these are really critical thinking human beings because they have a life outside, they have a home, they got family, and they seem to navigate their problems quite well at home. But as soon as they come into the organization, they get that revolving door, they come in, they lose all ability to think for themselves, do anything.

and they become really like learned helplessness because the organization's created it. They've learned over time that what's the point in thinking, what's the point in doing this because I won't be listened to. No one cares if I can solve a problem and I just got to make sure that I get these numbers done and that's it rather than actually challenging people.

Radhika Dutt (30:44)
Mmm.

What you say is so important. You know, I felt this when I've worked in companies. And when you're a person who really cares about your work, what happens is this, everything that you just described becomes really demotivating. It becomes demotivating because you can see the performance theater under you. You feel like you care about the quality of your work. And it results in two things. Either you get demotivated and you feel like I really want to

Mike Jones (31:15)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (31:23)
don't want to deal with this anymore, right? And you disengage. Or, you know, for as long as you can, when you're a passionate employee, you feel like you're doing double work. One to show numbers and one, and the other is the actual work that you feel like you need to do to do the right thing for the company, right? And so you keep doing that until you just burn out as a high performer saying, okay, I need to find somewhere else where I can, I feel like I'm...

Mike Jones (31:41)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (31:51)
I'm doing meaningful work.

Mike Jones (31:53)
Yeah. And that challenge of always feel that you have to report upwards. And I think that's, that's another thing with the KPIs is that they spend vast amount of their time trying to report upwards rather than actually have that time to meaningfully do their work and to experiment or to do, and it's hard to experiment when you're in that very defined goal or KPI because

If you do something and suddenly your KPI is now red, then it's like the whole organization has a heart attack and then more control, more processes, more reporting goes on top. So it becomes an even more relentless sort of syphathian environment where it's just meaningful endless tasks in no ends. Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (32:26)
I'm

Yeah, you know,

on that point, right, about what if your experiment leads to something really bad? There's a really interesting thing I learned from booking.com in how they do this experimentation. They have what you called constraints and you know what I've been calling scaffolding, but they have this constraint where if you're running an experiment on, you know, let's say whether this

XYZ experiment leads to a conversion or not, they might have scaffolding saying that if the number drops below 96%, we will not implement that experiment. So you're allowed to experiment on a small scale and see how it's affecting the numbers. And any experiment that's looking like it's going to make things fall below 96%, you immediately abandon that experiment.

Mike Jones (33:24)
Mm.

Yes.

Radhika Dutt (33:32)
So there's that sort of scaffolding. And even with such scaffolding, you have to be very careful. There's another company where, you know, those product manager was telling me that they looked at conversion rates and they were looking at such numbers and, you know, they implemented an experiment. actually, it looks like that experiment. So let me tell you exact details so it makes sense. they

Mike Jones (33:57)
Yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (33:58)
thought that if we show you the logo of a healthcare insurance option that you are selecting, then by showing you the logo, you're more likely to either, that you're more likely to convert. And so, of course, that hypothesis makes sense. But when they tried it out, they were actually seeing that the conversion was dropping. So that's really strange.

Mike Jones (34:22)
Okay.

Radhika Dutt (34:23)
Why was it dropping? So what was cool was this product manager, instead of just abandoning the experiment, went into this question of how well did it work? Well, it's not working well. That's surprising, given my hypothesis. What did we learn? So they dug into what they learned and they discovered that ⁓ it actually was because the user was discovering that, ⁓ this healthcare insurance plan just would not work for me at all. Like, I know this plan.

Therefore, they dropped out of the queue. So the point was, it's not that it was lowering conversion. They were dropping out because that wouldn't have worked for them anyway, that just this drop off would have happened later in the queue, right? And so for the people who wanted it, it was leading to better results. So it's fascinating puzzle solving. Like we have to really look into numbers before we abandon experiments and say,

Mike Jones (35:01)
Alright

⁓ right, yeah. Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (35:19)
What did we actually learn and what will we try next? And so what they tried next was we need healthcare insurance options for these other people who knew that it would not work for them. Why was it not working for them? They needed something like this.

Mike Jones (35:23)
Yeah.

And that's, there's two things that I think really crucial when you're trying to deliver things in a complex environment. One is the fact that you can abandon a project. I see in organizations, hundreds and hundreds of projects that started, they never finished, but they never abandoned. They're just there. They just linger around, but they take resources and time and energy. And no one has the

rights or decision rights to just say, do you know, this is just not working for us for these reasons. And the other thing that's really good is again, that testing and probing, instead of just saying, oh, it hasn't worked or just saying, oh, we're just going to carry on with it. Is that actual, well, why hasn't that worked? And what can we learn from that? And it's that learning that it's shaping options.

Maybe that's not working, but actually if we do this like they did, go, well, if we provide other things that can help us. And I think that always acting in a way to try and increase your options, I think is really important.

Radhika Dutt (36:36)
Yeah, I so agree.

Mike Jones (36:36)
Yeah, that's really good.

Yeah, we're solving the world here now. So we just need to convince all the MBA executive management courses to stop teaching this stuff. gonna be all right.

Radhika Dutt (36:42)
But

But see, even

with that, I have empathy for leaders because a lot of this sounds scary, right? It feels like, even the words puzzle setting and puzzle solving, it sounds playful. It almost sounds like, I just leaving my team off in the playground? Go figure this out and come back when you're done playing, right?

Mike Jones (37:05)
Hmm.

Radhika Dutt (37:08)
And that's really, and hopefully for everyone listening, you realize that that is absolutely not the intention at all. It's more like the military of this is constant training and practice and exercise so that you're building that muscle, the skills, knowledge and experiences you were saying. You know, one thing that I was reading a lot about Andy Grove from Intel and what made him so successful at Intel.

Mike Jones (37:30)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (37:34)
And what Walter Isaacson, you know, what he credits for Andy's just incredible innovation and changing the face of the semiconductor industry was not OKRs, right? John Doerr says it was because of OKRs. What Walter Isaacson said was it was because of his paranoia obsession with never getting complacent. And he really kept instilling this idea of constant experimentation, learning and adaptation in his

entire organization. And there were so many facets to that, that, you know, aren't as simple as ⁓ an OKR framework, just set, you know, goals and targets, right? It's not as simple a framework. So what did Andy Giegrove do? One thing was he made it easy for anyone to challenge each other's ideas, including his own ideas. He didn't have a corner office.

Mike Jones (38:22)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (38:24)
He had a cubicle along with everyone else. That was the same size cubicle so that anyone felt comfortable with confronting him and saying you're wrong. And they would look at data to say, you know, why do you say that? And, you know, people felt like they could take ownership and tell him things. They constantly experimented. You know, when ⁓ Intel's memory business was starting to decline,

It wasn't out of the blue that they became leaders in microprocessors. It was 10 years of experimentation before microchips actually was what became Intel's main business, Microprocessors. The one other thing about how he thought about all of this was he had such an intuition for it, for this experimentation and adaptation was

Mike Jones (39:02)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (39:12)
You know, when he wrote the book, only the paranoid survive, you know, he didn't offer a scaffolding or this guide for how do you do experimentation, learning and adaptation? What he said was it is super important that you build a muscle for do for doing this because you can't one fine day just have this muscle when you're desperate and you know, your market is tanking. can't then one fine day develop this muscle and suddenly start experimenting. You have to have been

building this muscle all along. And it reminds me of your military analogy that, you you're constantly training and building that knowledge, skills and experience because you can't one day just get into war and know what to do. Right. So for leaders, too, we have to do the same thing. Like we have to constantly build this muscle so that one day when you do need to pivot, when you do need to figure out how do you switch from this market that's tanking these experiments that are not working instead of just letting them run.

You know, you're able to put the do not resuscitate order on it and say, here's what we do instead.

Mike Jones (40:11)
Yeah. And I think to take that is scary, like you said, for leaders, because we're going against the grain about everything they've been taught, especially when we go, you know, we want experimentation. That takes, you know, a bit of fat in the system. And we want a bit of fat in the system, but we're so used to, right, everything's got to be turbo efficient, really efficient, because this metric says this and we...

Radhika Dutt (40:30)
you

Mike Jones (40:34)
If they're going, and this is the problem, because they gamify the KPIs, they go, well, you're efficient, we can cut more. And you can be more efficient. But the more you do that, there's no focus on anything else other than just surviving. Like, let's go on a bare bones to survive. And it doesn't give people that cognitive capacity to think about tomorrow or think about experimentation. They're just so worried about trying to survive through today.

Radhika Dutt (40:41)
You

Mike Jones (41:01)
and they don't have that capacity to train or to do anything else. They're going from one meeting to another. So it's like a structural thing that we need to build in, but it's so important because that gives you that resilience as an organization.

Radhika Dutt (41:16)
Yeah. And what you said about, you know, thinking, taking the time to think, reflect, et cetera. What I see increasingly, and this is an increasing danger with AI, what AI is really good at is optimizing numbers, right? It's really good at optimizing numbers. And what I see is as that gets even better at optimizing numbers, it creates this temptation for us to abdicate

Mike Jones (41:31)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (41:43)
that thinking, reflection, et cetera, to AI. You think about it, optimize, and come back to me with what I need to do instead, and figure out how do I optimize for these numbers. Whether we're doing it by using AI for whatever algorithms that we're using within our tool, et cetera, it's this black box that figures out how to optimize for whatever stat that you're

you want to optimize for, but it doesn't lead to better results. And to this, right, a lot of people might actually say, well, how do you know that? Like, maybe there are metrics that you can optimize for, and that is going to give you long-term business results. And I want to share an example where here's a metric of, you know, something that you can think through and say, okay, if I pursue this metric, this should give me better results. And yet that's not the case. So the example that I want to share is that of dating apps.

So what happened with dating apps? In 2013, Tinder came out and Tinder launched the swipe left and swipe right functionality. And it sent the user engagement metric through the roof. Now all of a sudden, they had gamified intimacy so that you could swipe left and swipe right and people stayed on for hours swiping left and right.

Mike Jones (42:44)
Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (42:58)
And so everyone else saw this, like all the other dating apps, and they said, whoa, we now found the elixir for increasing our user engagement numbers. So everyone copied the swiping left and right and various forms of it, right? Like of just heart versus not, whatever the example is, but it was basically the same thing. So what happened? Everyone in the short term,

Mike Jones (43:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (43:24)
managed to boost their user engagement numbers. But what happened in the long term? And here's the puzzle that they completely missed out on. In the long term, because we were gamifying intimacy, it created a toxic dating environment. People, it had dehumanized interactions. Now all of a sudden, the person that you were thinking about dating was just this image on a screen that you could swipe left and right and you're done with them.

Mike Jones (43:38)
Mm-hmm.

Radhika Dutt (43:50)
And it created this toxic dating atmosphere where so many people were burnt out of dating that it created a slump for the entire industry. And in fact, Bumble recently, they just laid off 30 % of their entire staff. The entire industry is in a slump. And so what did they need to do instead? Instead of...

Mike Jones (44:05)
Okay.

Radhika Dutt (44:10)
just optimizing for user engagement numbers or figuring out monetization, just optimizing for monetization, what they should have focused on was puzzle solving. How can we make dating a better experience while also making money? And that would have been more sustainable in the long run. What AI does is that it accelerates this curve of

Mike Jones (44:25)
Hmm.

Radhika Dutt (44:36)
you know what Cory Doctorow calls end shitification, where platforms go to shit. It just makes that curve just a shorter curve to end shitification. And so it doesn't necessarily lead to better business results in the long term if we abdicate that thinking and puzzle solving for just optimizing numbers using AI.

Mike Jones (44:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think it comes back to my earlier point around people get fixated on the measure. But that comes back as the outcome, what we actually trying to achieve. And that's where people lose track of that and they just get focused on the measure and the outcome is really important. And when you start to bring these measures, you've got to have that ability to step back and think, OK,

what is actually happening as we're acting, what is changing the extent of what we expecting to see versus what we're actually seeing and what's contributing to that because we just then go to metrics and then we've seen it time and time again where you have metrics where have perverse outcomes. So we have counter behaviors that we didn't want to see but they've been incentivized by the measures. And I liked in your, the chapter summary as you gave me,

can't remember the lady's name from MIT that changed from titles to impact. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (45:50)
⁓ yes.

That was a personal example of, yeah, how, of the person who's my role model. Do you want me to tell the story really quickly?

Mike Jones (46:00)
please. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Because I think it highlights quite nicely what we're talking about.

Radhika Dutt (46:04)
Yeah, I think, yeah, so to summarize the story, right? It's really, how can we apply all of this in our personal lives even? That we don't challenge the definition of success. That, you know, we, even in our personal lives, we think about always chasing some target, you know, it might be income targets, or it might be how we rise in the corporate ladder. And that's kind of how we define success.

Mike Jones (46:16)
Mm.

Radhika Dutt (46:29)
And when we take a step back for a moment, and this is where I think about my role model, it's not someone anyone else has heard of, except for maybe a few international students at MIT. But she's my role model. Kate Beatty is her name. She's now turning 86. And here's why she's my role model. When I used to sometimes walk to my classes, her office was just right off of the corridors. And her title, her job title,

Mike Jones (46:41)
That's it,

Radhika Dutt (46:54)
was a host to, or hang on, program coordinator for the International Host Student Exchange. She was basically helping coordinate exchange students, or not exchange, international students having a family to go to during Christmas or Thanksgiving or one of these holidays. And so not a title that was big or anything, but when I was walking through...

the corridors to go to my classes. Every once in a while, if I would see her door open, I would walk in and say, I just wanted to say hi. And she would never tell me she's busy. She would always welcome me in and just ask me how things are going. And I'd tell her what's going on. And it turned out she was like a mom to all the international students at MIT. And when she was retiring, there were

grown up people crying at her retirement party, people who traveled distances to just go to a retirement party. Why is that, right? She had made a huge impact on hundreds of students. And then, you know, imagine the students and the impact that they went on to make in their lives, in their personal lives, the lives that they touched, right? That is why she is my role model because it makes me remember.

that success isn't always sort of what society ingrains in you, all these ideas that are so traditional. You can define success by reflecting on just what is it that you want to contribute? What is the legacy you want to leave behind? And it's not a legacy necessarily by having millions of users using your app. It might be a legacy of what is the personal connection that you leave behind? How many people want to go to your retirement party? ⁓

Mike Jones (48:20)
Hmm.

Yeah,

Radhika Dutt (48:35)
Don't take that as the target to measure success against.

Mike Jones (48:37)
Yeah, Measure success. And that's my point is that bit about what we perceive success is or what we perceive should be in a lot of times strategy, well, most of them aren't strategy, but they'll say, we want to do the best at this. But it's the same with everything else, where it's not in the pursuit of we call it viability. So what is it that we need to be viable? And it's...

There isn't a thing, it's not something you can use best practice for. It's about that being really curious about the external environment and what we're trying to achieve, what we want to achieve. But to get there, it's not a linear path. It's not something that we can just put a metric on and say, well, as long as we get, you know, a thousand likes on LinkedIn, then we're successful. you know, as you see LinkedIn, I write on there because I like to write and think.

But if I then took the measure of how many likes I've got, then you'd be thinking, I could get loads of likes, but it doesn't actually translate to anything. And I think it's your approach around the critical thinking, the puzzles, like what are we trying to solve? And like the early example you said earlier about, actually you can get people in from all different departments and that open approach to it that then...

Radhika Dutt (49:31)
you

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Jones (49:52)
gets people the courage and I suppose the excitement as well about experimenting. Because we're curious, we want to experiment. Experiment all these little experiments that we can shut off if it's not working or we can really boost in if it is. And then more importantly, all that is that reflection afterwards. I think that really grounds everything.

Radhika Dutt (50:10)
Exactly. And

so here's one very practical tip for leaders, something I tried just yesterday in a meeting. We were talking about a particular experiment that we wanted to try. And I had to bring the conversation back to why are we trying this experiment? So as a leader, here's one thing that you can do. Just talk about it as a puzzle. So I reframed it as a puzzle saying what we're really trying to solve for is, you know,

we want the user to take this difficult manual action, which sounds so annoying to do. What is the gratification that they get from doing this? What's the puzzle? The puzzle is, what is the reward for them? They need to feel this reward quite quickly. Otherwise, there's no reason to do this manual work. So by framing it like this puzzle, all of a sudden, we started having so many different ideas within the team. The moment you use the word puzzle and say,

and define kind of what is the puzzle that you're trying to solve.

Mike Jones (51:07)
Yes. I think that keeps them curious rather than saying what tends to happen and I suppose it comes back to scaffolding I was talking about with the intent. It's what you want not how. I think that's the problem. I think too many people get the recursive level too low and they're trying to define the solution too high and that gives no freedom of action, no curiosity.

And people then just go, well, why are you doing this? I don't know, I just got told to do this. And they know it's not gonna work, but they then have that feedback to challenge it and say, that's not right. Yeah, so I think that's really crucial to have that freedom.

Radhika Dutt (51:42)
There's so much in this conversation that I've loved. you know, in fact, as I'm writing this book right now, we're going to have to have a follow up conversation so that there are pieces that I want to write up as parallels between military and everything that I'm talking about with OHLs. Just maybe as we start to wrap up, one thing I will share for leaders, I talked about that one practical tip. Another one is you can download the OHLs toolkit.

Mike Jones (51:50)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Radhika Dutt (52:07)
which is in a Google Slides format or a PowerPoint format. And you can start to use this approach of puzzle setting and puzzle solving using how well did it work? What have you learned? What are you going to do next? It's a free download and I'll share the link afterwards.

Mike Jones (52:19)
Yeah, please, and I'll link that into the notes. But just to wrap it up, is there something you want to leave the listeners to go away and think about from this episode?

Radhika Dutt (52:29)
One thing I would suggest is, when you want to apply this, think about it as this mindset of bringing puzzle setting and puzzle solving in a genuine way. Make sure that this is genuinely how you're thinking about it. one thing I would suggest is try out the OHL's approach, using this approach of setting a puzzle or thinking about the initiative that you maybe worked on as a puzzle, and then try out for yourself.

How well did it work? What have you learned? What will you try next? And by doing that, you can present it to your team even so that you can start to bring about this mindset. What I will say is make sure this whole effort to puzzle set and puzzle solve is genuine. Don't just take all of your targets and then sort of disguise them as puzzles, Because that just won't feel like genuine puzzle setting and puzzle solving. And the last thing I'll leave people with is...

You're really welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I genuinely love these conversations. I'd love to hear your experiences as you use OHLs. And by the way, if you share with me how you're using OHLs, it might just make it into the book as a case study. And it's a book that I'm still working on. It'll probably come out towards the end of 2026 or early 2027.

Mike Jones (53:43)
Awesome. And I really like that point about being genuine. I you've got to embody it yourself as a leader. If you want people to genuinely believe that it will make a difference. But I'll link Rallika's details and the bit to the free download for you so you can have that. And if you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did, please like and share to your network so they can get the value of Rallika's work. And Rallika, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on.

And I'd love a follow-up conversation once the book is launched and people are getting the great value from it.

Radhika Dutt (54:16)
I'm really looking forward to that. Thank you for having me on. This was such a wonderful conversation.

Mike Jones (54:20)
Awesome, thank you.