Welcome to the 2025-Q3 Quarterly Quality Contributions topic to the Commonplace forum. This is part of our goal to make Commonplace the best location on the web for business discussions.
You can find all historical quality contribution threads below:
Commonplace High Quality Contributions - 2025 Q3
Cedric, Iām sure I speak for many of us when I say how happy we are for you and your family. Your daughter is so lucky to have you as a dad. Enjoy every moment of your time away from here, with her!!
- @cedric ās follow up with Tiny CEO Andrew Wilkinson, after calling Tiny a fraud, caused some ruckus.
If it turns out that youāre able to turn the company around, I will be the first to publicly sing your praises and say that I got things wrong. But the holdco isnāt looking good yet. Perhaps things are going better in the fund. I am patient; I know such things take time. A decade should be more than enough time to see what kind of story Tiny is.
I think perhaps we under-appreciate how scary and difficult it is to stare at a blank page and try and evaluate what to do next. Which is why full time jobs evolve into being busy all the time with meetings and why solo creators find themselves keeping busy with the thing they enjoy doing or feel naturally good at.
- @minhthanh3145 had a great insight that innovation needs some stability to embed the changes it creates into larger systems.
The problem with The Self as the Platform is that it doesnāt have any system that slows down changes, which often exists when people get together and form a stable group. I think the future isnāt replacing human coordination entirely, but using AI directness for rapid iteration at the individual level while maintaining human systems for the decisions that affect broader organizational form.
The idea behind this is that rather than taking dramatic swings to win the game that might cause defeat, you instead play to accumulate small advantages and find ways to strengthen your position and maximize your options. When done well, you create positions where it is easy for you to find good moves, and even when the opponent does something that looks scary, there will always be a refutation.
- @Brian_Knoles gave a great overview of how he operationalised risk into making his project delivery more predictable, using the Cynefin Risk system.
Our risk assessments and de-risking were moderately successful. We had some wins in dodging some scope bullets by experimenting earlier, and we found clever workarounds to risky items early on in a project or two. We used timeboxed experiments whose goal was updated information about the risk (as opposed to āworking codeā). Note that this actually meant more total work, so in some sense we were trading a bit of margin to reduce risk. For us, a good trade.
Chancellor is mad and the whole book reads as someone blaming his firmās garbage performance on low interest rates. Rates have gone up a lot since he wrote the book and his returns are still garbage, ~4% annualized i.e. lower than risk-free interest rates. He wrote the book in the tail end of the ZIRP era and one of his points is that all the stock wealth/market gains are fake, and since then rates have gone up a lot and the S&P 500 & NASDAQ are at all-time highs because FCF generation is at all-time highs.
But the importance of that task should in a way relax you. Because it takes some pressure off. You and the (potential) client already share a main goal: that you should gain a useful picture of what is going on for them. And that starts by getting them relaxed and talking about themselves. Not about you and your skills or recommendations, not yet.
- @minhthanh3145 also gave some great advice on the same thread, using his experience consulting in South East Asia.
We explicitly refused to teach programming fundamentals because their business teams genuinely didnāt need to know that level of detail. Instead of generic Agile training, we proposed teaching business teams how to work effectively with Product Managers, how to conduct proper discovery, and how to communicate requirements in language that makes sense to developers ā essentially, how to speak at the right level of abstraction instead of just saying āgive me this feature.ā
- @justin shared one of my old time favourite papers, showing how people go mad when they see what actually happens in a business.
In one case, a finance manager noticed that his role was on the wall but that it was not connected to any other role on the wall. He had been producing financial reports and sending them to several departments because he understood them to be crucial for their decision-making process; however, no one had identified his work as an input to theirs.
If you have any others you want to signal boost post them below in thread.