This is my 3rd (calendaric) year writing this publication and following the tradition I started last year, it’s time for another annual reflection on the learnings I shared. Beyond the broad thematic focus of this publication, I did not have any pre-planned specific themes in mind as I was writing posts. I keep a running list of topics and articles that I find myself thinking about, so taking time to reflect on the whole year and identifying the emergent themes is a really fun exercise. For me at least 🙂

I started this year with some existential concerns about this publication. I wasn’t sure whether this habit will survive the substantial professional pivot I made at the beginning of year. But it turned out these concerns were unsubstantiated. On the contrary, things that happened at work enabled me to write richer, more in depth posts; while topics that I covered in these posts ended up informing actions I’ve taken at work. Your classical win-win.

Last year, the themes ended up being: “Org and Role Design”, “Systems and Processes”, “Culture, Values and Principles”, and “Leadership”. While the themes are never a perfect fit for the content, I also try to avoid brute-forcing the content fit by always having an “Other/Misc” category.

While last year’s themes are not a terrible fit for this year’s topics, I decided to go with  slightly more nuanced themes:

Future of the firm – macro takes on the core of this form of organization in light of other macro trends

• The future of the firm
• Participatory organizations: overview & taxonomy
• Phyles and Neo-medievalism
• Solving societal problems 2.0
• Redefining Capitalism
• Coase Theorem and Network Effects
• Doing things that really don’t scale
• Management moonshots

Personal development – a meta-insights of this year, was seeing how intertwined personal development and organizational development really are

• How to make sense of cognitive biases
• Just don’t call it “leadership”
• Polarity management
• Codex vitae
• Vertical leadership development
• Unintuitive Things I’ve learned about management
• The Agile leader
• SCARF

Organizational phenomena – important insights about organizational behavior that should inform organizational design

• Flawed self-assessment
• The organizational lag
• N squared
• Behavior Science is starting to transform the way we run organizations
• 2 minutes on relationships
• Shorter feedback is not always bett
• Heuristics vs. best practices

Org design blueprints – holistic examples of “organizational blueprints”

• The OS canvas
• Deliberately developmental organizations
• Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners
• FLOX

Applied organizational improvement – more bite-sized pieces of potential organizational innovations 

• From engagement to “skin in the game”
• Are resumes better than a coin flip
• Learning from failure #2
• Buffer’s salary formula

Decision Making – since decision making is so core to what an organization does, I figured it deserves its own category

• Jeff Bezos on decision-making
• The two statistical tools that are worth paying more attention to
• Forget RACI, SPADE will pay off in spades

Bizzzzzness – org design is a means to promote the broader purpose of the organization. But there are other lenses to look at the same problem which serve as important context that feed into effective org design:

• The elements of value
• Minimum valuable problem
• Goals: connecting strategy and execution
• Technology-enabled Blitzscaling
• Time management > task management
• The “future of productivity” series
• Make enterprise tools great (again?)
• Network Effects 101
• From purpose to leadership and back again

Other – no need to make all post fit. These were the ones that didn’t fit any of the other themes:

• OrgHacking’s guide to mission-driven companies
• Takeaways from the responsive.org unconference
• A deep dive into Musk-world