Notes on Resilience 142: Redefining Performance, with Radhika Dutt
What if the performance metrics we've relied on for decades are actually undermining our success?
Radhika Dutt, entrepreneur, product leader, and author of Radical Product Thinking, challenges conventional leadership wisdom by revealing why traditional goals often backfire and introduces a compassionate approach to leadership through puzzle-setting and puzzle-solving frameworks.
This eye-opening conversation explores how our current performance measurement systems originated from 1940s assembly lines, yet we continue applying them to complex knowledge work with predictably poor results.
Radhika shares real-world examples from her 25 years of experience, including how companies can appear successful by their metrics right up until they suddenly fail. The culprit? Performance theater, where employees are incentivized to highlight wins and conceal problems, leaving leaders with a dangerous illusion of progress.
The solution: Puzzle-setting and puzzle-solving.
Rather than asking: What are your goals?, leaders can transform engagement by asking: What puzzles do you want to solve? This simple shift creates psychological safety and genuine enthusiasm. Her practical OHLs framework—Objectives, Hypotheses, and Learnings—provides the structure for implementing this approach without the anxiety of abandoning familiar systems.
Ready to transform how you lead?
Radhika Dutt is is an entrepreneur, speaker, product leader, and author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter which introduced a methodology now used in over 40 countries. She is also currently Advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator), and does consulting and training for organizations ranging from high-tech startups to multinationals on building radical products that create a fundamental change. She is now working on her second book, Escaping the Performance Trap: Why Goals and Targets Backfire and What Actually Works.
Download the free OHLs toolkit at radicalproduct.com and start creating a more engaged, transparent, and truly compassionate workplace today.
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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji
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