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 27 new additions to the Zettelkasten - here’s the three that stood out most to share with you:

🟨 How iteration turns the simple into the complex

🟦 A control freak’s guide to emergence

🟥 Why collaboration works best when people dont understand you

Over the past few months, I’ve been building an app called Mulch - a simple way to keep relationships healthy by showing who needs to be “watered” in your relationship garden.

What’s been most surprising isn’t the product itself, but how it has evolved.

We’ve been building in tight loops:

• Ship a small version

• Put it in people’s hands

• Capture feedback

• Turn that into tickets

• Batch those tickets into weekly releases

• Repeat

That’s it. No grand architecture, no perfectionism. Just a vision and a simple process, iterated quickly.

But after the MVP, the loop started doing part of the designing for us.
“Obvious in hindsight” improvements surfaced naturally - like quick-add contacts, interactions, and daily logs. Things I used to overthink up front now get added through clear user feedback.

I’ve stopped trying to anticipate everything and started focusing on building the machine that builds the machine - the rules, cadence, and structure that let the product evolve in conversation with real world use and user needs.

Building Mulch has felt less like engineering and more like tending to something alive and growing.

Set the conditions, maintain the rhythm, and the system grows on its own.

 📎 Takeaway: Outcomes you couldn’t have predicted become obvious once you’ve created the conditions for them to appear.

—🗃️—

We rolled out a new streaming architecture MVP (minimum viable product) at work this week that was intentionally “minimum”- lightweight enough to ship quickly yet structured enough to extend later. Within hours of real-world use however, a flaw appeared: messages were occasionally arriving out of order between servers, scrambling the output.

I would’ve been embarrassment and frustrated but instead I chose to roll with it:

This wasn’t a failure.
It was the system telling me exactly where the frame needed reinforcement.

This is the uncomfortable tradeoff in emergent design:
you temporarily surrender precision and control so the system can reveal what actually matters.

Adam Savage calls this “baby fat” - intentional slack that gives a system room to grow into its final form.

It’s faster, and it saves you from engineering hypothetical edge cases that might never happen. But it only works if the initial frame is sound and extendable.

You can’t steer every behavior a system will exhibit.
But you can shape the environment that guides what emerges.

And the moment you stop trying to control every outcome, you gain leverage over something far more important: the inputs that compound.

 📎 Takeaway: Don’t design every detail - design the draft that lets the right details emerge.

—🗃️—

Lately I’ve been thinking in metaphors, and one that keeps resurfacing is what I’ve started calling framing style management.

Imagine a house under construction.
The architect defines the load-bearing walls, the flow of space, the boundaries. But the wiring, insulation, plumbing — that’s shaped by the people on the ground responding to real constraints and real creativity.

The architect provides enough vision to guide, but enough openness to let expertise and interpretation shape the result.

The architect gives direction,
not detail.

That’s how I’ve been approaching collaboration.

I’ve built enough prototypes over the years to know my ideas are limited by my own experience. What I find magical is when someone misinterprets one of my ideas and builds something better.

Emergence through collaboration is the highest form of leverage:
returning more than you put in, because other minds remix your scaffolding into something new.

Framing management gives people constraints, direction, and purpose - but leaves the exact implementation open enough for surprise.

And most of the time, surprise is where true brilliance lives.

 📎 Takeaway: Don’t design the whole thing. Design the frame. Emergence can only work when others have room to reinterpret your vision.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

The through line this week wasn’t just about product or engineering or collaboration.
It was about life.

Over the past few weeks, life has felt like it’s running on double speed
A new project I’m still finding my footing in.
A relationship entering a new season.
People around me settling into careers, roles, foundations

It’s a strange tension - everyone around me seems to be establishing themselves while I’m preparing to step off the predictable path and into something more unknown.

And the truth is:
I don’t fully know how to hold all of it.

But what has helped is the very principle I wrote about above - designing for emergence.

Not everything is within line of sight - sometimes you have to take a leap to find the true horizon.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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