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

🟨 Value Capture Is a Fight Against Entropy

🟦 The VC² Timeline: When Strategy Breaks Down

🟥 Why Truth Has to Feel Safe Before It Can Be Shared

Creating value is hard.
Keeping it is harder.

Look at almost anything over a long enough timeline - a city, a company, a relationship, or even just a closet - you’ll see the same force at work: entropy.

A tidy closet saves you time each morning. Fewer decisions. Less friction.
But over time, entropy creeps in. You toss something on the floor. You tell yourself you’ll organize it later. Later never comes.

Eventually, the closet stops saving time.
You’re digging through piles just to get dressed.

The value didn’t disappear all at once.
It eroded.

That’s the lesson here: value decays by default.

As Hamilton Helmer puts it, strategy isn’t about clever ideas - it’s about sustaining value capture despite entropy. Whether it’s a structured SOP for your business or just the discipline to keep the closet clean, the underlying requirement is the same:

You need a strategy to maintain value creation.

Because without active maintenance, entropy wins by default.

Order isn’t a one-time achievement.
It’s a continuous act of resistance.

 📎 Takeaway: Without disciplined strategy, even the most valuable systems decay.

—🗃️—

I keep coming back to a simple mental model for how businesses evolve over time:

First you create value. Then you earn the right to capture it.

The arc usually looks like this:

• Invention & exploration: discover something valuable

• Validation: prove other people want it

• Defense: build a moat so it can’t be copied overnight

• Harvest: capture returns from what you built

This progression is natural. Healthy, even.

But there’s a trap that often appears at the Harvest stage.

As value capture intensifies, creation can stall. Curiosity gives way to control. Innovation gets sidelined in favor of extraction. The business shifts from building value to rent-seeking - squeezing existing assets rather than creating new ones.

This isn’t sustainable.

Eventually, entropy wins. Competitive pressure, market shifts, and customer fatigue catch up. Without ongoing creation, the engine stalls. The business decays.

The goal isn’t just to capture value.
It’s to create and capture value together, continuously.

When those two get out of sync - when you stop building and only extract - decline accelerates. The moat that once protected you can become a prison.

Strategy isn’t static. The most resilient companies understand the VC² arc not as a one-time playbook, but as a repeating loop.

Create → Validate → Defend → Capture → Create again.

If you find yourself harvesting too long, ask:
“What am I building next?”

Because the minute you stop creating value,
you're already on the path to losing the ability to capture it.

 📎 Takeaway: Sustainable strategy depends on balancing value creation and value capture - over and over again.

—🗃️—

Another kind of entropy shows up in teams: information asymmetry.

I recently joined a project where leadership leaned on pressure instead of trust. The result wasn’t speed or excellence - it was short-term thinking, growing technical debt, and tense conversations. People weren’t collaborating; they were protecting themselves.

By contrast, the best teams I’ve worked with shared one thing in common:

Honesty felt safe.

Not because expectations were low,
but because truth was the baseline.

One powerful idea from Get the Truth is this:
People are more willing to tell the truth when it feels like relief, not risk.

When leaders listen and describe problems clearly - without sugarcoating or exaggeration - they reduce internal stress. They signal that it’s okay to talk about reality without punishment.

That permission creates a starting point for real progress.

Fear distorts signal.
Truth restores it.

Just like in any system, when information stops flowing, teams begin to break down. Whether you're managing a product, strategy, or people - accurate, honest communication is essential. Without it, small issues quietly compound until they become major failures.

Fear accelerates entropy.
Truth slows it down.

 📎 Takeaway: If you want better information, make honesty feel safe - and useful.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

This week reinforced something simple but uncomfortable:

Nothing valuable sustains itself.

Order has to be defended.
Value has to be renewed.
Truth has to be made safe to tell.

Strategy isn’t a one-time insight - it’s an ongoing discipline.
And most failures don’t come from dramatic collapse, but from neglecting the quiet work of maintenance.

Entropy is always working.
The question is whether you are too.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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