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Have You Ever Asked a Doctor for a Refund?
It’s perhaps a strange question to ask but I am curious. A doctor diagnoses a condition, explains what is happening, recommends a course of treatment, and sends us on our way. We may follow the advice diligently. We may follow some of it. We may ignore it entirely. Yet if our condition fails to improve…
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A Blank on the Map: The Cost of Premature Certainty
In Blank on the Map, explorer and mountaineer Eric Shipton describes an expedition into a region of the Karakoram where the maps contained large areas marked simply by what was not known. There were mountains, valleys, rivers, and glaciers already there, but they had not yet been explored or accurately recorded. The blank existed on…
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Human Beings are Messy Data Sets
This is one of the reasons alignment is so difficult, whether in families, teams, businesses, or entire organizations. Systems are relatively straightforward. A process follows a sequence. A policy establishes boundaries. A workflow defines how something should move from one stage to the next. If something goes wrong, you can often trace the breakdown, identify…
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Conversion of Knowledge of Acquaintance into Knowledge About Is a Risky Exercise
My WHY, according to the WHY Institute, is Make Sense. When I first encountered the WHY.os framework, I remember feeling a strange sense of recognition. The WHY Institute describes a WHY as the fundamental motivation that drives a person’s behavior, decisions, and way of seeing the world. In their model, the WHY is expressed through…
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Stop Trying to Create Perfect Stability
When I first read Thriving on Chaos years ago, what remained as a foundational thought, was not any particular model or management technique. It was the challenge buried inside the title itself. Most people spend an enormous amount of energy trying to create conditions that feel permanent. Businesses do it. Leaders do it. Entire industries…
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What Happens when your Business is Operationally Efficient but Emotionally Flat?
I was listening today to a conversation around relevance and customer experience and I started to think about just how many businesses have become incredibly efficient at producing transactions while slowly losing their ability to produce feeling? There are businesses where everything technically works and yet the entire experience feels emotionally flat. Then there are…
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How Do You Determine Right Action in Your Business?
Determining “right action” in business is less about a single correct move and more about aligning your daily activities with a clear strategic foundation. It involves moving from “chaotic activity” (busy work) to “meaningful progress” (targeted action). This usually involves examining whether actions dovetail with the core purpose of the business, employing the use of…
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Jumping to conclusions without fully understanding the problem is one of the most expensive habits in business
The brain is wired for speed, not accuracy. Faced with uncertainty, pressure, or the need to appear decisive, it reaches for the nearest explanation and calls it a conclusion. That conclusion often feels logical, even strategic, but it is frequently built on incomplete information, unchecked assumptions, or surface-level observations. The result is a quiet but…
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How one Restaurateur took Making a Reservation & Transformed it into a Unique Experience
I first came across Erin French in an episode of Be My Guest with Ina Garten, and what stayed with me wasn’t just the food or even the setting, but the way Ina Garten spoke about Erin’s restaurant. Almost like it existed slightly outside of the usual restaurant world, tucked into a quiet town in…
Clarity BEFORE Execution. Structure BEFORE Speed
If you could better understand one thing about your business right now….
Most costly decisions begin with
an inaccurate understanding of the situation.
I help leaders understand what is actually happening before major decisions are made or
resources are invested in solving the wrong problem.
Giselle Hudson | Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor | Sensemaking for high-stakes business decisions 