We tell ourselves a lot of stories. The team has a narrative about the work. Analysis pulls the story from the data. Organizations tell the tale of their brands, and culture retells everything in an endless game of telephone. There are many, many stories of who we are, and why we’re here, and what, exactly, we (a bunch of sentient apes on a pale blue dot) think it is we’re doing (putting on pants, clacking away at keyboards).

Narrative makes sense from the noise, and there’s a great deal of power in sensemaking. Stories have moved armies, sent us to the moon, changed how we see ourselves. For good or ill, they’re the one way we have of understanding the world. We’d better consider the stories we’re telling responsibly and carefully.

Here is a story that I tell: through everyday actions, we can foster curiosity, creativity, connection, and collaboration—the tools needed to chip away at our toughest challenges and create our better tomorrow.

What greater magic is there?

Too many organizations find themselves in a frustrating loop of meetings about work, where nothing ever actually gets done.

When we have a bias for action, we shift from the paralysis of possibility (x or y might happen) to the experience of reality (x is or is not working). This creates feedback loops that build confidence and momentum. As we continue to experiment, we stop flinching at failure and begin to learn from it.

Soon, that 30 person meeting will start looking a lot different.

There is a myth about good ideas: they’re hard to come by.

And yet we’ve all seen great ideas wither on the vine. Brilliant strategies get left to collect dust while the team hustles just to keep up with the day-to-day.

When the team finally gets the space to make real change, it’s often undermined from the jump by unaligned stakeholders, not enough resources, bad timing, or a host of other problems. That winning idea, in practice, starts to look like a dud.

The real trouble is that good execution is difficult, and the best ideas often require great execution to be effective. But for our biggest challenges, the stakes are too high to let good initiatives fall apart.

And that is where I come in.