The Problems With Habits Developing good habits is not the best path to happiness, productivity, success or any of the other things self-help books seem to think you want or need. Don’t get me wrong, having “good” habits is certainly a nice-to-have. All else being equal, I’d rather have “good” habits than “bad” habits…

DAOs are complex and frequently chaotic environments. As a new organizational technology, there are very few best practices that have permeated across the ecosystem. Everyone is rapidly experimenting and learning on their own. It’s a tumultuous and exciting time for those of us who are energized by the potential of…

A year has always felt impossibly long. Something that happens in January and something that happens in December have always felt like they were on opposite ends of an infinite divide. This was even more true when I was a child and the endless expanse of a summer vacation felt…

Thoughts on starting fresh in a new domain, keeping a beginner’s mind, and looking to make an impact — The Ready exists to change how the world works — to realize a more adaptive, equitable, meaningful, and human way of working. This has meant partnering with some of the world’s largest and most well-known organizations as they strive to remove decades of organizational debt to become better versions of…

Most years (2017, 2018, 2019) I like to take a look back at the tools I found myself using and reflect on the extent to which I’m satisfied with them. While it’s certainly a good practice to be deliberate with the tools I choose to learn and use, this is…

One of my favorite ways to practice minimalism is in the way I prepare for, pack, and approach travel. There’s a phrase that’s thrown around in this domain that I think captures it well; “traveling lightly.” I had some recent trips where I tried to make that mantra the focus…

The Final Review — This article originally appeared on SamSpurlin.com. At the end of May 2021, my colleagues at The Ready consented to a proposal I brought to our monthly Governance Meeting called Sabbatical Policy. Roughly five weeks later, I shared on Slack the output of a writing exercise I used to get clear…

For the last week I’ve been on sabbatical from The Ready. I have approximately 15 more weeks to go. What follows is a slightly cleaned up and elaborated version of an ICBD* exercise I shared with my colleagues before I signed off for the next few months. We generally use…

Why the organization that got you here won’t get you there — As organizational transformation consultants, we’re often invited to help functions, departments, and teams of all kinds within massive enterprises recover from failed strategy implementations. Regardless of the industry or organization, the narrative of each failure follows a familiar arc. A “new strategy” is developed over several months of backbreaking creative…