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

🟨 The word that quietly turns manageable situations into mental gridlock

🟦 A scaling failure most teams won’t see coming - especially with AI

🟥 The moment competence becomes a liability

I was on a bus somewhere between Falmouth and Ocho Rios, half-listening, half-zoning out, when our tour guide said something that made me stop scrolling and open my notes app.

“In Jamaica there are no problems, only situations and solutions”

At first, it sounded like tourist optimism.
The kind of thing that you’d see on a t-shirt between the shot glasses and sunscreen.

But later that day, it kept resurfacing in my mind.

Because when I’m stressed, I notice how quickly I reach for the word problem.
And how heavy everything feels the moment I do.

A problem comes preloaded with pressure for a solution.
It asks to be fixed immediately.
It quietly assigns blame.
It collapses your field of view.

A situation just… exists.

Same facts.
Same constraints.
No emotional tax up front.

Lately, I’ve been catching myself mid-spiral and renaming what’s happening. Not to minimize it - but to describe it more accurately.

Deadlines slip.
Systems break.
People disappoint you.
You disappoint yourself.

Calling those moments problems never helped me act better.
Calling them situations sometimes does.

It creates just enough space to ask a better question:
Given where things are right now, what’s the next reasonable move?

If I’m honest, most “problems” I complain about are situations I don’t want to sit with long enough to understand.

But I stop trying to find the perfect solution to the problem
and start looking for a next step to move things forward.

📎 Takeaway: Changing the noun doesn’t remove difficulty - it removes paralysis.

—🗃️—

While waiting for a flight in Miami, I wandered into one of those shared airport libraries - the kind where books drift from city to city.

One title jumped out immediately: Turn the Ship Around!

I had just stepped into a management role, and delegation wasn’t theoretical anymore. I could feel the ceiling: the only way to scale output was to stop being the bottleneck.

Delegate faster. Run in parallel. That’s the leverage.

Early in the book, Marquet makes a point that changed how I think about delegation:

Authority almost always moves faster than understanding.

This is why delegation fails so often - not because people are careless or lazy, but because responsibility gets handed off before comprehension catches up.

AI makes this failure mode impossible to ignore.

AI is exceptionally good at execution. That makes it tempting to delegate earlier and more aggressively. Let the agent run. Ship faster. Scale output.

But delegation to AI doesn’t reduce the need for technical understanding.
It raises it.

The dangerous phase isn’t when AI is wrong.
It’s when it’s usually right and no one remembers how the answer was produced.

When humans stop understanding a system - its assumptions, limits, and failure modes - they lose the ability to judge its output. And once judgment disappears, errors stay invisible until they’re expensive.

In systems where execution is cheap, judgment becomes the bottleneck.

And judgment is technical.
It lives in the details.
It can’t be outsourced.

📎 Takeaway: Delegation doesn’t reduce the need for competence - it concentrates it.

—🗃️—

The most dangerous moment in my career wasn’t when I didn’t know what I was doing.

It was when I knew exactly what I was doing and stopped paying attention.

I was running a routine database migration. Something I’d done dozens of times before. Same commands. Same muscle memory.

I hit enter… then froze.

Wrong project.
Wrong environment.

One more step and I would’ve wiped the wrong database.

Nothing bad happened. But only because I caught it at the last possible second.

What bothered me afterward wasn’t ignorance.
It was familiarity moving faster than awareness.

That’s the failure mode Marquet describes in Turn the Ship Around! His submarine crews weren’t making mistakes because they lacked training - they were making them because expertise pushed action onto autopilot.

His solution was deliberate action.

At moments where mistakes can’t be undone, the crew would slow down and verbalize intent - explicitly stating what they were about to do before doing it.

Not to prevent errors caused by ignorance.
But to interrupt errors caused by familiarity.

Since that near-miss, I’ve added friction where the cost of being wrong is high. Before irreversible actions, I run a quick Irreversibility Check:

• What exactly am I about to do?

• Where am I about to do it?

• Where will the effects show up?

It’s not about distrust.
It’s about restoring awareness at the moment habit wants to take over.

📎 Takeaway: Deliberate action is what replaces “oops” when mistakes are expensive.

—🗃️—

Closing Thoughts

All three notes this week circle the same tension from different angles.

When things feel like problems, we rush.
When authority is delegated without understanding, we rush.
When actions are familiar, we rush.

Speed feels like competence.
Confidence feels like progress.

But again and again, the real failures don’t come from not knowing what to do.
They come from moving too fast inside systems that don’t forgive mistakes.

Calling something a situation creates space to think.
Delegating well requires judgment to rise at all levels, not disappear.
Deliberate action inserts awareness exactly where habit wants to take over.

None of these ideas are about slowing everything down.
They’re about being precise about where speed is dangerous.

Thanks for reading Verstreuen! 👋 

Until next week
-GH

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