TBM 348: Shared Understanding At Scale

Leaders waste time when they build deep cascades of goals or models that no one interacts with. The post shows how a personal health plan can explode into five-level trees that look impressive but collapse under the weight of unnecessary layers. The real signal lives in the top-level North Star and the concrete actions you repeat daily; middle layers become stale without rituals that reinforce them.

The article contrasts an unfocused email blast with a focused one, a hierarchical telephone game, and a flat weekly review (WBR). It proves that volume isn't the problem-lack of structure and translation layers are. Specific, narrow requests raise the signal-to-noise ratio, while universal dashboards fail because they try to serve every role at once.

Scaling information flow requires shared interfaces, lightweight structures, and reliable rituals. When teams know how to read a view, when to dig deeper, and which role-specific lens to use, they can review hundreds of initiatives without drowning. Role-specific, task-coupled dashboards, not one "big picture," let leaders make timely decisions.

Practical takeaways: collapse middle layers that you never use, design surveys or status formats that translate raw data into actionable patterns, and embed rituals that surface the right metrics at the right cadence. Ask yourself whether each model serves a decision point or is just slideware, and redesign it accordingly.