“The temptation… is to have our performance management system be one that rewards people for outcomes. You rang the bell, you got the million dollars or the big deal you signed. Good for you, bonus, promotion… That is the death of radical innovation. Because if I'm asking you to do things that have a one in 100 chance of success, and then you get rewarded on the basis of a yes… you will very quickly learn to pretend you're doing radical innovation.”

…hub and spoke might imply, a highly top down process. Discovery is mostly a bottoms up process. It's very hard to dictate. So you have to create some structure and guardrails, but then let people be pretty free range within those guardrails, or they won't ultimately find things that are unexpected.

…have to have just enough boundary setting to keep things moving forward, but not so much that people can't be creative. And we've seen that a lot. We've talked a lot about improvisation and how that mindset helps in improv. They have some rules, and that's what allows for that creativity. Right.

And you have good evidence that will happen. It's harder from a management point of view to measure those kind of things versus did you ring the bell or not? That's a very binary, easy thing to do. So you have to have more flexibility and openness as managers, I guess, as well.

Yeah. And this is a struggle to this day at X. It is so much harder to train managers to hold people accountable to habits rather than to outcomes that they routinely will try to find ways to hack the system so that they can reward people for outcomes or they'll gripe about their performance…

I really like this idea of rewarding people for habits, not for outcomes. I really want to dive deeper into this notion of failing fast and looking how to kill projects. Can you share a little bit about that? And you do some kind of celebration, the Dia de los Muertos that I'd love to hear a bit…