In this episode, Carl B. Watson, Ph.D. and Megan Alexa Watson discuss:

• The "interesting, but not important" trap: special projects that succeed or fail without ever mattering because no one defined whether the underlying problem was worth solving in the first place
• Practical ways to gauge importance of emergent work, from "cage match" trade-off questions to sorting work into must-do, strategically central, and peripheral priority buckets
• Design's concept of "problem finding", the idea that deciding which problems are important enough to solve is an increasingly important core leadership task as emergent problems proliferate
• How organizational culture can encourage, or suppress, employees’ judgment and adaptability
• Why organizations over-reward launches and deliverables while under-rewarding valuable experiments that don't produce a win, and how that discourages the risk-taking emergent problems require
• Why squading is not a substitute for prioritization or for under-resourcing a team, and how to tell whether a problem needs a cross-functional squad or should stay with existing subject-matter experts

Key quote: “Part of the problem in organizations is experiments are set up to only succeed, which means you limit dramatically the possible information that you can get out of an experiment. It's not a true experiment. It's a validation exercise. And so those problems become really, really small and really, really, uninteresting. You squeeze all the usefulness and the value out of the project so that you can ensure its success, and that is actually, that's tragic if the problem is really important.”

About the show:
The Watson standard is a podcast for leaders who want to change their organizations without losing sight of people, purpose, or principles along the way.

Explore the human and organizational side of change: how leaders develop, how organizations evolve, and how to stay grounded when the work gets complicated.

She helps people change. He helps systems change. Together, we’re helping to change work for the better.

About the hosts:
Carl Watson, Ph.D., is the founding principal of Madrona Strategy Works, where he advises leaders on enterprise strategy, organizational design, culture, and leadership-team effectiveness. His research explores how organizations adapt and thrive amid uncertainty and change.

Megan Alexa Watson is a leadership development and talent management executive with deep experience helping leaders navigate complex organizational challenges. She is currently focused on stewarding senior leaders through the individual change required to drive strategic and AI transformation at scale and speed.

Check out all episodes at https://www.thewatsonstandard.com
Follow the show at LinkedIn: https://twspod.com/lnkin

Rapid advances in AI and other disruptive forces are compressing planning cycles and challenging traditional approaches to leadership. Carl B. Watson, Ph.D., and Megan Alexa Watson explore how leaders can provide enduring direction while enabling continual experimentation, learning, and adaptation.

In this episode, Carl B. Watson, Ph.D., and Megan Alexa Watson discuss:

• How to balance long-term strategic direction with the need to adapt in the moment 
• Why an aspirational, mission that is an" adaptive challenge", and specific, bold, and never fully finished - keeps people motivated through constant pivots better than a prosaic goal does
• How leaders can reward learning and successful experimentation, not only the delivery of an expected result 
• Why managers must define outcomes collaboratively, distinguish outcomes from deliverables, and create smaller increments of success 
• How faster information flows and AI mean we need to push insight and decision-making toward the edges of organizations 

Key quote:
 “You can actually improve your leadership by seeking to understand the choices that people are making through direct observation. Because things are moving so rapidly, the organization's information pump is too damn slow.”

About the show:
The Watson standard is a podcast for leaders who want to change their organizations without losing sight of people, purpose, or principles along the way.

Explore the human and organizational side of change: how leaders develop, how organizations evolve, and how to stay grounded when the work gets complicated.

She helps people change. He helps systems change. Together, we’re helping to change work for the better.

About the hosts:
Carl Watson, Ph.D., is the founding principal of Madrona Strategy Works, where he advises leaders on enterprise strategy, organizational design, culture, and leadership-team effectiveness. His research explores how organizations adapt and thrive amid uncertainty and change.

Megan Alexa Watson is a leadership development and talent management executive with deep experience helping leaders navigate complex organizational challenges. She is currently focused on stewarding senior leaders through the individual change required to drive strategic and AI transformation at scale and speed.

Check out all episodes at https://www.thewatsonstandard.com
Follow the show at LinkedIn: https://twspod.com/lnkin

In organizations with fewer resources and constant change, leaders increasingly move people to problems instead of hiring for them. But "flexible deployment" and "squading" break down fast without real sponsorship and honest prioritization. The hosts unpack what separates these models when they work well from when they quietly demoralize teams.

In this episode, Carl B. Watson, Ph.D. and Megan Alexa Watson discuss:

• The difference between flexible deployment (moving an individual into an existing team) and squading (standing up a temporary, cross-functional team)
• How to spot the difference between useful structure and "comfort-creating" structure and why clarity matters more than certainty
• Why leadership sponsorship, not just individual negotiation, determines whether deployed talent can actually get work done
• The hidden cost of failing to prioritize, and why letting multiple teams chase the same problem breeds conflict and demoralization ("a thousand flowers bloom")

Key quote: “Getting deployed into something different – when you potentially have cultivated an identity of self, connected to certain types of work – can be pretty jarring. It can disrupt what you've come to understand about your value to the organization.”

About the show:
The Watson standard is a podcast for leaders who want to change their organizations without losing sight of people, purpose, or principles along the way.

Explore the human and organizational side of change: how leaders develop, how organizations evolve, and how to stay grounded when the work gets complicated.

She helps people change. He helps systems change. Together, we’re helping to change work for the better.

About the hosts:
Carl Watson, Ph.D., is the founding principal of Madrona Strategy Works, where he advises leaders on enterprise strategy, organizational design, culture, and leadership-team effectiveness. His research explores how organizations adapt and thrive amid uncertainty and change.

Megan Alexa Watson is a leadership development and talent management executive with deep experience helping leaders navigate complex organizational challenges. She is currently focused on stewarding senior leaders through the individual change required to drive strategic and AI transformation at scale and speed.

Check out all episodes at https://www.thewatsonstandard.com
Follow the show at LinkedIn: https://twspod.com/lnkin