Welcome to Verstreuen, meaning “to scatter.” Each week I share highlights from my Workframe system, the process I use to turn books and notes into structured insights. Here, scattered ideas find connection and become something worth sharing.

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🗃️ This Week’s Highlights

This week's notes come from 26 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 How the clearest teams require the least control

🟦 The hidden system behind “unreasonable” experiences

🟥 Why blind agreement creates the most expensive failure

I’ve always found that starting with the end vision helps me set personal goals. When I know what I’m aiming for (even loosely) it becomes easier to decide what not to do.

But it wasn’t until recently that I started experimenting with this idea beyond myself.

What surprised me was this: a clear end state wasn’t just an execution enabler - it was an exploration enabler.

“Begin with the end in mind” is often misunderstood as a call for more planning, more prescriptive instructions, and tighter control. I’ve come to believe the true definition is the opposite.

When the destination is clear, teams don’t need a step-by-step map. They can explore. They can test. They’re free to notice better paths than the one you would’ve drawn upfront.

I saw this play out recently when I gave a team a clear end state for a product experience I knew was possible - I’d seen it work well elsewhere. What I didn’t give them was the solution.

The first approaches were clever, but messy. Overengineered. Technically impressive, but brittle. It was genuinely hard not to step in and prescribe exactly how I thought it should be built.

But given enough clarity and space, something better emerged: a much simpler solution that reduced complexity, made the system more flexible, and ultimately created a better experience for users.

Not because I designed it - but because the system was allowed to learn.

That’s the real tradeoff:

If you over-specify the path, you get compliance.
If you clarify the destination, you get intelligence.

Vision is a direction, not a GPS route.

The job of leadership isn’t to design every move.
It’s to define what success looks like and let the system find its way there.

 📎 Takeaway:
Clarity of the end state enables emergence.

—🗃️—

Service is about doing what’s expected.
Hospitality is about exceeding expectations - intentionally.

Black and white means the job gets done with competence and efficiency. The process works. The plate arrives at the right table.

Color is what makes people feel something about the experience.

I got the opportunity to experience this recently at dinner.

We were at a restaurant I’d always wanted to visit - sweeping views of the Manhattan Bridge framed perfectly by large windows that pulled the city into the dining room. The food was excellent. The setting beautiful.

But what made the night memorable happened before we even ordered.

As soon as we sat down, without asking, we were each handed a glass of champagne to celebrate our special day.

That moment wasn’t accidental.
It was designed.

The system wasn’t there to enforce rigid behavior - it was there to create small, repeatable surprises. Moments that went just beyond expectation in ways that felt human, not scripted.

That’s the real distinction.

Getting the plate to the right table is service.
Adding color to the moment - something unexpected, intentional, and human - is hospitality.

The champagne wasn’t a rule.
It was a choice.

A system designed not just to execute a good meal, but to create moments people feel and remember.

Service makes sure nothing goes wrong.
Hospitality makes sure something goes right.

 📎 Takeaway:
Service is the outline.
Hospitality is the color that brings it to life.

—🗃️—

Most solutions start as ideas in our heads.

And in our heads, they’re only simulations - approximations of reality.

They feel coherent. Logical. Complete.
But simulations hide unknown unknowns - the things you can’t possibly see alone.

That’s why the most important collision with reality often happens before anything is built.

It happens when other people interrogate the plan.

Blind obedience delays that collision. It optimizes for speed and agreement, not understanding. Everything looks fine - until a hidden assumption shows up later, when it’s expensive to fix.

Questioning isn’t rebellion.
It’s how planning becomes intelligent instead of just sequencing assumptions.

When people are encouraged to ask why, assumptions surface sooner. Weak logic is exposed earlier. The team builds a shared mental model of the problem - not just a list of tasks.

Don’t protect ideas during planning.
Let them be questioned.

Not to slow things down
but to make sure you’re solving the right problem together.

 📎 Takeaway:
Planning isn’t about certainty.
It’s about exposing assumptions early.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

What ties all three ideas together is this:

Clarity isn’t about control.
It’s about creating the conditions for learning.

Clear end states let solutions emerge.
Well-designed systems give people room to add human judgment.
Questioning during planning lets teams collide with reality early - while it’s still cheap to change.

The common failure mode is mistaking alignment for intelligence.
The real work is building systems that think, feel, and learn together.

That’s what scales.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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