Depthfinding: Sunshine Zone - Artifacts, Org Charts, and Metrics

Summary

Podcast Summary: At Work with The Ready

Episode: Depthfinding: Sunshine Zone - Artifacts, Org Charts, and Metrics

Hosts: Rodney Evans & Sam Spurlin
Release Date: February 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode, the third in the “Depthfinding” miniseries, dives deep into the “Sunshine Zone”—a metaphorical layer representing the visible, surface-level aspects of organizations, such as org charts, metrics, and strategy decks. Rodney and Sam use the oceanic metaphor to examine why organizations often overemphasize obvious, easily measured artifacts while ignoring the deeper, more meaningful dynamics that drive real performance and change. Through stories, real cases, and reflections, they challenge listeners to critically examine the value and limitations of Sunshine Zone artifacts and discuss more generative ways to set and revisit organizational goals.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Sunshine Zone Explained [03:06 - 05:36]

• The Sunshine Zone represents the most visible, transparent layer of an organization—think org charts, goal sheets, public strategies.
• Its name comes not from depth, but from how much "light" (i.e., attention) gets through—it’s “dead easy, super obvious” but actually where the least action happens in the ocean and in organizations.
• Humans, and by extension organizations, are drawn to this space because it’s comfortable and low-risk, but “what’s coming to get you is not up there. Like, your org chart will not actually kill you. Stuff from below that you can’t see is what’s coming to rip your arms off.” — Rodney [05:21]

Why the Sunshine Zone Gets a Bad Rap [05:36 - 09:03]

• Many organizations over-index on the Sunshine Zone, leading to a disconnect between artifacts and reality.
• Rodney points out two main drivers of negativity:
  1. Dissonance: The gap between official artifacts (e.g., org charts) and lived experience is frustrating.
     • “It doesn’t feel like real life. Yeah. And so it’s annoying that you have to, like, salute it even though it doesn’t actually, like, help you in any way.” — Rodney [06:36]
  2. Targets as Strategies: Uninspiring goals like “hit this revenue number” or “EBITDA” are common, often detached from meaningful action.
     • “It’s so empty as the unifying metric for an organization to just have it be a completely cognitive target.” — Rodney [08:25]

The Problem with Cascaded Goals & Performance Measurement [11:32 - 16:41]

• Real-life case: An ops/HR leader asked to cascade financial goals throughout the organization felt discomfort about imposing top-down, abstract targets.
• This traditional goal-setting process (pillars, workstreams) emphasizes performative alignment rather than practical impact.
• The result: Employees “sandbag” their goals, aiming to look good in annual reviews rather than pursue meaningful progress.
  • “We have all kind of, like, blessed the piece of paper that we’ve written all of this stuff on. And now we’re going to go pretend that these are relevant and accurate for the next 11 months of our work.” — Sam [12:55]

The Artifacts of the Sunshine Zone and Their Limitations [15:30 - 16:41]

• Sunshine Zone artifacts are often “descriptions of descriptions of descriptions of work, not actual work.” — Rodney [15:23]
• The cycle: Create goals in a stressful sprint, ignore them, then scramble before the next review. The complexity of real work outpaces these static artifacts.

Practical Alternatives for More Effective Goal Practices [18:01 - 22:03]

• Team Operating Rhythm: Instead of only annual targets, establish shorter, reviewable outcomes (monthly, quarterly, or half-yearly).
  • “They have to live in the meeting where you talk about project work.” — Rodney [19:36]
  • Teams need tangible, conversation-driven check-ins on goals.
• Embrace Feedback Loops: Human reflection is essential—“You are the loop.”
• Acknowledge ‘Run the Bank’ Work: Most goals focus on change/innovation, neglecting excellence in core operations, which is equally important.

The Tension Between Novelty and Core Work [22:03 - 24:19]

• Culture prizes visible, novel initiatives (“change the bank”) over maintaining standards (“run the bank”).
• Recognition and praise are often reserved for new ventures, but sustaining high-quality operations is essential—this imbalance can demotivate teams.

Sunshine Zone and Deeper Zones: Twilight & Midnight [24:19 - 26:51]

• When issues arise, organizations repeatedly try to fix Sunshine Zone artifacts instead of examining underlying system or behavioral patterns.
• Real organizational issues often lurk in the less-visible “Twilight Zone” (team habits, operating models) and “Midnight Zone” (fears, unspoken motives).

Using Depthfinding as a Tool for Change & Managing Up [25:35 - 26:51]

• “Can you use something like depth finding to say, great, we need this thing in the Sunshine Zone. ... But in order for it to work, we gotta look at some of the Twilight Zone stuff. And we have to look at what this is bringing up for people in the Midnight Zone.” — Sam [26:04]
• The model is useful for “managing up”—inviting leaders to broaden their focus beyond the visible artifacts.

The Perils of Delegating Sunshine Zone Problems [26:51 - 29:34]

• Big, thorny Sunshine Zone ambitions (strategy, culture) are often delegated to specific individuals or teams (e.g., Chief Strategy Officer or Chief People Officer), but these problems require organization-wide engagement.

The Need for Specificity in Goal Setting—and the Risk of Vagueness [29:34 - 31:17]

• Leaders sometimes avoid specificity to escape accountability—but this undermines performance.
  • “If you’re unwilling to hem yourself in and you’re unwilling to make the rules of the game explicit, that’s bad.” — Rodney [30:56]

What Happens in the Midnight Zone When Sunshine Zone is Over-Indexed [31:17 - 36:55]

• Individuals and teams play it safe, prioritize performance over experimentation, and avoid the “ugly sounds” of learning and growth. Rodney uses her cello lessons as a metaphor: learning something new requires enduring messiness.
  • “You basically refuse to sit there and listen to ugly sounds… I think that’s real Midnight Zone stuff around goals.” — Rodney [33:09]
• Organizational cultures that never create “practice spaces” for mistake-driven learning limit their growth.

Messiness as a Pathway to Value [36:55 - 41:45]

• Group working sessions, cross-functional goal setting, and making data visible, even before interpretation, are all “ugly” but necessary steps to real progress.
• Forcing these interactions can feel uncomfortable or even spark resistance, but they often surface breakthroughs.

The Case for “Unachievable” Goals [42:25 - 44:08]

• Critique of “achievable” SMART goals—sometimes real value comes from stretching for a goal you don’t yet know how to reach, then adjusting systems and learning as you go.

The Upside of Sunshine Zone Done Right [44:08 - 46:00]

• Sunshine Zone artifacts can be motivating, creative, and positively “slap” when used well—they should express ambition, clarity, and openness to discovery.
  • “There is still the opportunity for Sunshine Zone things that slap, are creative as hell, are motivating and kind of create a wake of positive Twilight Zone and Midnight Zone stuff.” — Sam [43:33]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On why surface-level goals fall short:
  “It’s so empty as the unifying metric for an organization to just have it be a completely cognitive target unrelated to anything else.” — Rodney [08:25]

• On the danger of performance orientation:
  “In many organizations, we're on stage from the very first meeting to the very last meeting. There is no time for ugly sounds.” — Sam [33:49]

• On the messiness of real work:
  “Sunshine Zone is inherently … performative. …But, like, that messiness… creativity requires messiness.” — Rodney [36:55]

• On making real change:
  “If you are someone who is in the role of setting the goals or approving the goals, and you’re unwilling to hem yourself in … you should not expect good performance if you’re unwilling to take on the risk and the vulnerability of defining what good performance is.” — Rodney [31:07]

• On collaborating towards understanding:
  “Colin … just brought a bunch of information… he showed it to us and was like, what do you make of it? …That is messy, that is ugly sounds, man.” — Rodney [39:00]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Sunshine Zone metaphor and transparency: [03:06 - 05:36]
• The allure and limitation of visible artifacts: [05:36 - 09:03]
• Case: Cascading financial goals and the pain points: [11:32 - 16:41]
• Short-term goals and feedback loops: [18:01 - 22:03]
• Execution woes and alternative rhythms: [16:41 - 22:03]
• The value of focusing on core work: [22:03 - 24:19]
• Using Depthfinding for managing up and broader change: [25:35 - 26:51]
• Specificity vs. ambiguity in goal setting: [29:34 - 31:17]
• Learning, "ugly sounds," and Midnight Zone lessons: [31:17 - 36:55]
• Practical messiness and forcing valuable conversations: [36:55 - 41:45]
• Purposefully ambitious (perhaps “unachievable”) goals: [42:25 - 44:08]
• When Sunshine Zone gets it right: [44:08 - 46:00]

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Summary Takeaway

Rodney and Sam make a clear case that most organizations give too much power to surface-level, easily measured artifacts—org charts, metrics, and neat goals—while neglecting the more ambiguous, messier, and more meaningful drivers of real change. Sunshine Zone artifacts are not inherently bad; they’re necessary, but only powerful when balanced with regular reflection, honest cross-functional conversations, a willingness to embrace messiness, and support for the underlying human experience. Ultimately, lasting progress demands attention, courage, and the design of systems that invite both clarity and learning through experimentation.

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For those struggling with the “carousel of ineffective meetings,” aimless strategy decks, or never-ending performance reviews, the episode provides both practical tips and a philosophical challenge: Go below the surface, tolerate the mess, and make the Sunshine Zone serve as a beacon, not a barrier, to deeper organizational progress.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy, our merman friend, Merlin.

[B]

Rodney. That's going to be quite the abrupt introduction considering I don't think they're going to get the preamble of us talking about swimming for about 15 minutes now. People just think, I'm a merman.

[A]

He's a mer person. It's cool. Welcome back, everybody, to At Work with the Ready. This is a podcast about modernizing organizations as the future of work meets the present moment.

[B]

This is the third episode of our miniseries on depth finding.

[A]

And before we dive in, as always, we're going to do a check in round. Sam, what you got?

[B]

Rodney, what were you really into as a child?

[A]

The first thing that comes to mind is make believe. Okay, I was make believe.

[B]

Broadly.

[A]

Broadly. But of course, because I'm like, so bossy. I wanted to play make believe with my friends. I wanted to be in charge of the story and the roles that everyone played. It was very important to me that I was always cast as an animal. Like, I always wanted to be like a horse or a dog, not.

[B]

So you were director and talent?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, for sure.

[A]

And I grew up in a place where we had a lot of woods and it was before the Internet. So our parents let us go in them because they didn't know that or they didn't care that kids got snatched. And so I feel like my childhood is primarily marked by making up games and worlds with my friends in the woods for like many hours at a time. And there were even woods in the back of my school that we played in. Like, we were just in the woods at all times.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What about you? I can't wait to hear what you were really into. My mind is already racing.

[B]

I spent a decent amount of time in the woods doing similar type things. I would say, maybe the way I would describe it is pretending I was in a video game potentially. You know, casting spells and stuff. But the example that came to mind for me when I wrote this check in is that I was really into hockey. Still am. Collecting hockey cards, which I don't do anymore. But what I loved to do was take my hockey cards and type them into a spreadsheet so that I would have them in my spreadsheet so that.

[A]

I would have them.

[B]

And then I also really liked to physically organize them in different ways. So here's like all of this team or all of this player or like all of this position. And I have a distinct memory of always trying to get my mom to come do this with me because I thought it was fun. And I couldn't understand why she didn't think it was fun. And to her credit, she definitely did occasionally. But she also was able to kind of beg off every. Every once in a while.

[A]

That's amazing. And I feel like you like to organize things and are very good at, like, turning something into a sharp Kanban board or like a sharp, you know.

[B]

Yeah. Cool.

[A]

All right. That was fun. That was really fun.

[B]

All right, Rodney, so what are we talking about in this, our third episode of Depth Finding?

[A]

So today we're going to focus on the Sunshine Zone. Like the last episode. We're not going to stay in the Sunshine Zone and just do an episode about that. We're going to talk about a couple of cases and how the other zones relate. But just a little explanation of the Sunshine Zone to get us started. The thing is about the Sunshine Zone is that it is very shallow. And when I talk about these things, I am pulling these directly from how oceanographers say this. I didn't make this shit up. So it's a very shallow depth of the ocean, and you can see it from above and below. And I think that's really interesting. Part of the metaphor that we haven't talked a lot about is the idea that the reason these zones are named the way they are is less about their depth, and it's about how much light gets through. And we have so many clients that talk to us about transparency that I think that having a metaphor that. That really explains transparency is cool. So if you think about the fact that you could orient what depth you're at just by how transparent it is, the Sunshine Zone is like the dead easy, super obvious one.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The other parts of it that I want to say here is, like, people think that because they can see it, that it's the most important and that it's like the most alive. And actually in the ocean, the least action happens in the Sunshine Zone. It's where there are the fewest fish. It's where there's the least interest. Basically, it's just this sort of, like, superficial, very obvious. Well, and it's where the humans like to be. We like to float more than we are comfortable diving. And so I think part of our love of the surface layer is our own love of the obvious, easy to understand part of anything, whether that's an organization or your New Year's intention or the ocean.

[B]

Right, right. I want to say there's fewer things that will kill us in the Sunshine Zone. So we're like, we don't handle the depths particularly well physically, at least.

[A]

But what's funny about what you just said, Sam, is like, you're right. And the things that will kill you will kill you in the Sunshine Zone, but that's not where they live.

[B]

Sharks.

[A]

And this is the same in an organization. It's like, what's coming to get you is not up there. Like, your org chart will not actually kill you. Stuff from below that you can't see is what's coming to rip your arms off. Yeah. That's so funny.

[B]

I have a question for you. In my mind, when I think about the zones of depth, finding Sunshine Zone feels like the bad zone to me, which I don't think part of the model is none of the zones are bad. None of them are good. They just are what they are. But I think because most modern organizations over index on the Sunshine Zone, it kind of gets a bad rap. Can you help me kind of reconceptualize it in a more neutral or positive way?

[A]

I think there are two big things that create reasonable negative associations. One is the dissonance. It's like, we've all had the experience of working in an organization and knowing that the org chart that we were given in onboarding to explain how work gets done has nothing to do with real life. And the idea that you have to hold that bullshit in your head and then informally learn how the network operates is so annoying. It's like, well, just don't make me learn that thing. It's so useless. And I think you could apply that to a lot of Sunshine Zone things is it doesn't feel like real life. Yeah. And so it's annoying that you have to, like, salute it even though it doesn't actually, like, help you in any way. And then I think the other big one is that so often what is declared in the Sunshine Zone is, like, some kind of target to be met.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's like, I cannot count on one hand how many conversations I've had with leaders who tell me that their strategy is a target.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And it's just like, first of all, it's so uninspiring. Second of all, it does not feel tied to the sky, really. I think it's really hard to make meaning of that. And also, you know, you and I both are, like, physically active and oriented. It's like, nobody wants the goal. That's just, like, lose 10 pounds.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's the worst of all the goals to have. You know, it's like, much better goals at least for me, are about, like, how much protein I eat and how much I swim and how much weight I can lift and stuff like this. And so much of what's declared in the Sunshine Zone is just, here's your goal weight. Go fucking do it. Like, sort of regardless of what it takes. And I think that feels bad.

[B]

Yeah, I think so. As someone, like, actively trying to lose a few lbs right now, my stated goal is not lose the weight. It is get faster in, you know, a 10k, swim a thousand meters faster. And ostensibly, if I am able to do those things, it is very likely that I will shed some weight along the way. But, yeah, hyper fixating on that is not. Is not the motivational move to kind of get me out the door.

[A]

Yeah. And we see the hyper fixation on a revenue number or on a stock price or I had an entire year at an organization where it was return on equity, and then that didn't work. And so the next year was an EBITDA number. And it's just like, it's so empty as the unifying metric for an organization to just have it be a completely cognitive target unrelated to anything else. Yeah.

[B]

All right, so anything else to kind of tee up the idea of Sunshine Zone before we can start talking about some actual examples to tease it apart a little bit further.

[A]

I mean, this is where I would just say for people going in to this work or this app, like, really pay attention to the relationship between the Sunshine Zone and the Midnight zone. And one of the inspos from this model, which came from my own study when I was doing a lot of coaching, was the act matrix, which is acceptance and commitment therapy. And the ACT matrix, which I've used at the ready many times and I use in my own practice all the time, has a horizontal line and a vertical line. And the horizontal line separates inner experience and outer experience. And I think so much of what happens below the surface of an organization and so much of people's own lived experience and the reason they stay and don't and the reason they perform and don't is so related to this visible, obvious surface layer of what they see and what is held up as being work, quote, unquote.

[B]

Okay, yeah.

[A]

What about you? Is there anything else you want to get in here before we roll?

[B]

I think we'll talk more about, like, what, in the metaphor of depth finding, like, what is the light, and the light is attention. At least that's how I've been thinking of it in a lot of ways. And if you know what Light does when it hits water is that it refracts. And what you think you see in the sunshine zone is actually not 100% reality. If you've ever tried to like scoop a fish out of the water, like everything's slightly, a little bit wamper jawed and there's something there that I can't really articulate that also feels true for organizations. Like we have these artifacts of our sunshine zone and we all think we are seeing them the same way and yet we don't because we're different people. We're bringing different things to what this strategy deck is actually saying. I mean I think it's maybe midnight zone type stuff, but there is something just inherent to how attention light hits water that changes what we actually see.

[A]

That's so cool. I love it when a new thing pops. I will be thinking about refraction for the rest of today. So you had an idea for the case that we talk about today or cross functional problem that we address. And yours is really cool and really interesting and it's from a real life client person who is very beloved to us. So yeah, yeah, take us not, not.

[B]

Made up in my brain the problem or the client real person here. So the kind of presenting challenge. This person is kind of in an ops HR sort of kind of hybrid role. And the leadership of their organization wanted them to figure out like how do we do goal setting? Like how what is our approach to goal setting in this organization? We have set some organization level goals and I want you to figure out how to cascade these go goals across every team, every individual in the organization. And because they had worked with us for a while, they were immediately kind of uncomfortable with the idea of just how do we cascade these quite financial goals into the rest of the organization? Like can we do something a little bit more complexity conscious, kind of have people use their brains to figure out what should my goals be given that we're trying to do this thing over here. And I thought this was an interesting example to talk about because I think goal setting and whether it's for performance management or kind of operationalizing a strategy or somewhere in between, often really lives in the sunshine zone. Like we're literally writing down, here are my goals, here are my team's goals, here's the organization's goals. And we have all kind of like blessed the piece of paper that we've written all of this stuff on. And now we're going to go pretend that these are relevant and accurate for the next 11 months of our work.

[A]

Yeah. And we're going to pretend that we're actually going to use them, which. Yeah.

[B]

Or we're going to probably not explicitly acknowledge all of the Midnight Zone stuff that goes into writing down what you're going to accomplish over the next year, knowing that your boss is going to pull those up during your annual performance review and be like, all right, let's see how you did on these things. Like, I don't know how you can engage in this exercise and not have that be actively working in your brain as you are writing these things down. And at that point we're no longer kind of like articulating useful things that will coordinate the complex actions of hundreds of people, but we're all kind of like sandbagging our way to this conversation. That's going to happen in 11 or 12 months.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, one of my least favorite goal setting tropes, I don't know if this is happening at this organization, but I know it still happens a lot, is like there's some kind of strategy and then it has like pillars or like work streams. People love pillars. I would love to know what consultancy invented those fucking pillars. That is like holding the roof up. You know, they're just like every. Everybody's got four pillars, you know, which like, I don't necessarily dis disagree with, except that it seems like it's an answer to something, which to me is very clearly not. Anyway, that aside, what I often see is like in the goal setting template is like the pillars and then you have to make some shit up about what you're doing about the pillars. And it feels like somehow that is meant to add up to an outcome in a way that I'm just like, what mystical math makes that work? That like if there's one pillar that's about creating financial efficiency and I write a goal that's like, I'm gonna not backfill when people leave. Are we gonna get there? I don't know. It just feels. You know what it is about goal setting is it feels like descriptions of descriptions of descriptions of work, not actual work. It's like to your fucking hockey card example, it's like we want to just put down the categories and we never want to put down like activities or outcomes or impact. And so it's just categories all the way down.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. I think the reason we brought this example is that it's so over indexed in the Sunshine Zone for most organizations. Like the exercise itself is the creation of these goals and, and very rarely do we actually kind of step beyond those to Talk about, well, like, what are we actually trying to do with these goals? Like, what do we think we're getting from this artifact that we are spending a lot of time and turmoil trying to create? And then at least in most cases that I've seen where there's a kind of an annual goal setting process, we have a crazy stressful sprint to make them and then we ignore them for 10 months. And then we all freak out at the end of the year when we're preparing for the performance management on those goals that we've mostly not been thinking about. Not for nefarious reasons, but because complexity, things are changing in the organization and we are not a bunch of fortune tellers who can tell precisely what is going to happen six months from now. And we haven't captured that reality in the goals that now exist in the sunshine Zone. Artifact that we're supposed to treat like.

[A]

It'S very serious business, serious business, capital B business. It's interesting because in the depth finding talk that you and I give, we point to a statistic that like 90 something percent of executives say that they fail to execute their strategy. And to me, we're talking about goals today which are, you know, one altitude lower than strategy. But this is now we're right in the pocket of where the execution goes sideways. And I have fiddled so much with this over the years and I'm not sure that I have it cracked. But like, I think this is where the Twilight Zone stuff becomes super important. Because what you don't want to do is, which I've definitely seen, is just have your goals be something that you are constantly checking in on to see if you're complying with them. So, like, you don't want to use your operating rhythm and to just be like, are we red, yellow, green? What's the next deadline? What the fuck is going on? Why are we late? Because that misses the possibility that your goals need to change. But you also don't want to do what you said and spend all this time making them and then never look at them again. So, like, what are some of the third ways that you've messed around with for how to do this?

[B]

Well, yeah, so this is where the, an operating rhythm comes in to play. And I think the key thing here is that, yes, we have a default operating rhythm that we recommend. You know, if you don't know where to start, start with, you know, something like a monthly retro, quarterly strategy, weekly action meeting, that sort of thing. But there's lots of different types of rhythms. There's Lots of different speeds of rhythm. There's probably musical terminology that I don't know that describes the rhythm at which some tempo that is happening. Exactly. Thank you. So different types of tempo and figuring out what is the tempo that we need, not even as an organization, but as a team, as a division in this organization. What is that tempo for us that's not too fast, where we're always checking in on things that haven't really changed all that much, or if they have changed, it's at a superficial level and we get way too wrapped up in that or so slow that we're not checking in at all about what has actually changed. And that, I mean, that takes experimentation, I think. I think start with a default and then see that feel good or bad. I sometimes talk about an organization having different speed metabolisms. And some of our clients can metabolize an operating rhythm very quickly. Like we. The nature of their work is we just have to be kind of checking in on this stuff pretty quickly because lots of stuff changed very quickly and others for whether it's bureaucracy reasons or nature of work reasons, their metabolism is much slower. And trying to do too much just creates like a backup within their own ways of working. So that's where my head goes first. I'm wondering what you're thinking about.

[A]

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. One is if your goals are annual, which I know a lot of you can't avoid, because hashtag performance management, you have to create something shorter term to steer, whether that's monthly sprint outcomes or quarterly outcomes. My team does half year outcomes because we've realized quarter is too short, annual is too long, whatever. And those things should feel really tangible. And like they have to live in the meeting where you talk about project work. Like they have to be in the board or in a Google Doc. You have to look at them every week, whatever horizon they're on, and then have your conversation about projects and unblocking work or retrospectives or whatever, and then go like, are we closer or are we farther from these outcomes? And if we're farther, is that because they're wrong? Just that conversation is going to get you like 50% of the way there because it is a human feedback loop and there's not. I feel like sometimes when people talk about feedback loops, everybody loves those words, but they think that it is like a mechanism. Feedback loops tend to involve human reflection for now, until the agents do this for us. So for now, you gotta make your own. You are the loop, you know, And I just don't think that that is a habit for a lot of teams. Another thing, and this was actually something that I learned at a bank and it wasn't used, I would say optimally, but it was a cool concept, was like there was run the bank work and change the bank work. And I think in goal setting we 10 to have so much of it be change the bank work is what we write down. And we don't write a goal that's just like, do your job well. Yeah, like don't let quality slip on delivery or on customer experience or on coding bugs or on cycle tower or whatever your thing is. We have a real hesitance to be like, don't sacrifice doing your job that runs this place for doing these other things. And I, I'm curious about the psychology of that because everybody wants to do something different and then immediately is like, oh God, but I already have a full time job. Why is that?

[B]

I think there's something about being attracted to novelty like as human beings. I think that is somewhat ingrained in us. But I think there's also just, I don't know where my mind goes is the nature of capitalism and that if you're not growing, you're dying and it's. So you take that within an organization and if you're not part of the new thing, part of the growing thing, then you're automatically under threat. And I'm not saying that is true or it should be that way, but I think that is often what is going on. And I think it's easier to kind of heap recognition on taking something from 0 to 1 where there once was nothing. We have a thing. Look at all these people who worked on it. Look at how great they are versus like we did a thing. Our business as usual work like 2% better.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And like who gets jazzed about that? Although arguably we should be. And like the stuff that we do, business as usual allows us to invest in and if we lose that, then we can't do the other stuff as well. So there, there does need to be, I think in most organizations kind of a recalculation of where we put time and attention and recognition and praise.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's right. I don't see a lot of teams having conversations when we have an outcome that we're steering toward like week on week or whatever that's like, this is good enough for now, like this is working well enough. Let's just leave it alone. Everybody's so fucking like, we're so optimization oriented that I think it's really difficult. So I say this because that is such a team sport. That is such a Twilight Zone team sport. And I've seen it happen in the team that I am part of, where in a feedback conversation, someone will be feeling away about not having done net new, blah, blah, and the team will be like, yo, you are running the operations of this company very well. Just do that. Like, don't worry. Like, that is more than a full time job. Doing it correctly prevents a huge amount of work in the future. The day will come when we can do something new, but it's not today. This is great. Keep going. And that, that feels, I think, like countercultural in a lot of places.

[B]

Yeah. I don't know how to kind of break that. I don't know if it can be. I'm sure it can be. It's a kind of a group recalibration of what is important.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. And it's like, you know, leaders love to say like, good enough and 80, 20 and blah, blah, blah. But then these are the moments in the Twilight Zone, in the actual meeting where you go, don't keep fiddling with it, it's fine. The other thing about the novelty point that you made, Sam, is I think this is classic. We have a Sunshine Zone problem and we'll try to solve it in the Sunshine Zone. Like, we're not making enough revenue, we're not making enough profit, we're not evolving fast enough. Let's declare a new thing rather than looking deeper.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And that's a cycle that you guys, everybody has to break that cycle and set it. Before I say it all the time, we always go back to the Deming quote of every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it does. And anytime I'm at a client or looking at the ready and there's something amiss, I'm like, it's something in here that we haven't addressed. And it's probably something in the Twilight Zone.

[B]

Yeah, totally. One of the things that I'm learning to really like about debt finding and this came out in a conversation with the client who kind of inspired this topic. We got to talking about how you can use this as a tool for managing up. So the result of this is not like, oh, don't do good work in the Sunshine Zone. Like, yeah, there will always be things in the Sunshine Zone, whether you deliberately make them or not.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But can you use something like depth finding to say, great, we need this thing in the Sunshine Zone. We have this thing in the Sunshine Zone, we're making it. But in order for it to work, we gotta look at some of the Twilight Zone stuff. And we have to look at what this is bringing up for people in the Midnight Zone. And not to do their work for them or like wring our hands about it, but to just be honest about how do we think this Sunshine Zone thing, whether it's goal setting, a strategy or whatever, is actually going to manifest in the behavior and the action that we want to see in our organization? Give me some support here in the Twilight Zone. Give me support here in the Midnight Zone. And now you're having. Having a much more productive conversation than like, how do we make the Sunshine Zone thing prettier or better?

[A]

Or better? I totally agree. The thing about that, Sam, that I think you're not saying is that any pillar or any goal set in the Sunshine Zone cannot be delegated to one person or team to go make happen. And I want to put a fine point on this because it's not just about like HR getting the goal. That's about building the culture and, you know, delighting human or whatever, a delightful employee experience or whatever nonsense. It's like, I see this happen with strategy. I see this happen with innovation. It's basically like anything that's in the too hard category in the Sunshine Zone, they just give to a really, really smart person and are like you. You go wrangle them and you make this happen. And it's like, I don't think the chief Strategy Officer is not an important role or is a role that shouldn't exist. Because I think that like, the skill set that those people and teams have and the remit to do the sensing and think about the direction and blah, blah, blah, I think is important. I don't think you can totally just like hope that that emerges. But you can't just be like, okay, and then you're. You also are responsible for execution, especially at scale. And I feel like it's the same with the chief people officer and culture. They go, we want the culture to be this. I hope this employee experience team has got it so the rest of us can like get back to our real jobs. We just. We can't do that stuff.

[B]

This is part of what makes organizations so frustrating and challenging is like, at least a lot of the HR leaders that I talk to, like, they will agree that they don't necessarily think that just having a people focused outcome or goal is the movement. And also at the same time, if they are kind of handed some goals from on high. And there's not a people thing in there or an acknowledgement that people make this thing happen also are kind of like, so, like. Yeah, I don't know. I think it just goes to show, like, the stuff that lives in the Sunshine Zone is really important. We need to be thoughtful about it, but we can't just leave it at that level. I think if I could, like, sum up the agita that I feel around a lot of Sunshine Zone stuff and how organizations think about it is that there's something about the prettier our Sunshine Zone stuff is, the better we are as an organization. Like, the more, like, we've tied it all up into a pretty boat and it lives here at the Sunshine Zone, which must mean that we're good, right? And you're not good. You've just got some Sunshine Zone stuff that we can.

[A]

You just got stuff. Yeah. It's funny because I also, you know your comment about, like, a culture goal being declared. I feel the same way where on the one hand, I appreciate the accountability that that creates for an organization not to just ignore the human experience or the human cost of doing good work. And on the other side, I'll immediately flip and be like, yeah, but the way to do that is not to, like, have one goal and hand it to HR and be go do this. So, yeah, there is something there where on the one hand, I'm always going to be an advocate for specificity and not using jargon and goals and having them feel really understandable and really tangible. And this is a really big part of creating participatory organizations. Because when leaders are hesitant to be explicit in setting a goal, what is sometimes under that is that they don't want to be pinned down and they don't want to have to define what good looks like, because they don't know. And they want to be able to have an organization or a workforce that's playing how big is the breadbox? And I think that's bad. Just to be really clear. Like, I think if you are someone who is in the role of setting the goals or approving the goals, and you're unwilling to hem yourself in and you're unwilling to make the rules of the game explicit, that's bad. Like, you should not expect good performance if you're unwilling to take on the risk and the vulnerability of defining what good performance is.

[B]

Totally. And you're moving us in this direction. So maybe I'll just explicitly knock us into it. Like, what is going on for folks in the Midnight Zone when We over index on the Sunshine Zone stuff. So I'm not talking about necessarily goal setting specifically, although we can continue to use that example, but just the. The pattern of. Let's hyper focus on Sunshine Zone stuff at the expense of basically every other zone. Like, what sort of Midnight Zone things come up for you when you think about an organization that is hitting that pattern really hard?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, there's so many things. The first one is, so I'm taking cello lessons. I think I've mentioned that on this show. And I haven't taken cello lessons since I was a kid, and I was only doing classical training, and now I'm only doing. Not that. So I'm only working on improvisation and playing by ear, which is very threatening to my ego. And I basically was saying, like, yeah, I don't want to practice. Like, I just. I don't want to practice. And because I was a very accomplished classical cellist, my teacher said to me, yeah, because you're used to it sounding good. And what this is going to require is ugly sounds coming out of that instrument. And you basically refuse to sit there and listen to ugly sounds. And he's absolutely right. And it's so funny, because the previous day I had been practicing and I was doing what I was supposed to be doing for like 10 minutes, and it sounded like shit. And I pulled out like an old. Like a box suite and was just like, I'm gonna this and fucking nail it. Because what I want to hear in my ear is the beauty of my skill in this instrument. And I think that's real Midnight Zone stuff around goals. Like, you want to learn to do this thing, or you want to be able to do this thing. And the journey of building a skill to achieve a different goal than the one you've achieved before is ugly. And the more competent you were in last year's skill, the more resistant you might be to that ugliness. And I have really had to, like, just, like, sit in that. And now I wait until, like, Ed is out of the house. Like, I don't want anyone to hear. I've had to basically create these guardrails so I can make the ugly sounds and my ego can take it.

[B]

Yeah, that's so interesting because there's such a direct analog to what's going on in organizations in the sense that in your cello practice, you have a space where you can practice. And it's not all performance all the time. And in many organizations, we're on stage from the very first meeting to the very last meeting. There is no time for ugly. Sounds like the Twilight Zone. Stuff in our organization is such that I need to be on every single time. And if I need to be on and not make mistakes, then I'm going to play this much smaller game, and I'm going to play that game really well. And then, you know, across an organization, we ask ourselves, well, why aren't we taking big swings? Why aren't we taking risks? Because everybody is having to play perfectly all the time. And as a leader, I would be thinking about, all right, well, where. Where can we actually create some practice spaces? Because I see a lot of treating everything with the highest stakes in a lot of organizations, and that is a unwholesome place for human beings to be. Be.

[A]

It's such a good point, Sam. And it's like, if I think about projects that I advise or have been part of asking people to do a meeting where they're actually making something together. And sometimes there is a real resistance to just saying to a team, look, we need to work on this asset, or we need to do this designer. We need to think about what this agenda. We're just going to get together and in the hour, we're just gonna make it. And people get mad at that idea. And so then they'll be critical of it. They'll be like, that's not real work, and that's a waste of time. And that's blah, blah, blah, which is just, you know, that's just me playing the box suite. And often I'll see people in those situations be like, no, I'll go and make it by myself, and then I'll bring something pretty back here. And to your point, it's because, like, it is just performance. Every meeting is meant to be a box suite. And if that's all you ever want to play, great. But, like, probably you're gonna have to eventually, or you're going to want to eventually do something different, and that's going to require ugly sense.

[B]

Yeah, well. And you may not be able to remember this because you are such a accomplished cellist, but when you were learning the things that you can play amazingly well now, maybe as a small child, I bet you made some ugly sounds.

[A]

I'm sure. I'm sure I did.

[B]

I'm sure. I'm sure she would tell us.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we've, like, put that so far out of our head because for the longest time, if you want to make pretty sounds, you can.

[A]

And. Right.

[B]

I wonder in organizations if your entire career has been in the types of organizations that we often work with or we know where did you even develop the expertise to do the stuff that you think you do really well? Really well? I don't know. Maybe you do. Maybe you're a genius in it and you just can. But I don't know. Like, we need time and space to mess around and be bad and get better and not feel like it's existential.

[A]

And I think this is the root of so much of what happens in the Sunshine Zone. The Sunshine Zone is inherently. It is performative. You know, it's the end result. That's like the polished org chart or op model org strategy or a set of goals or whatever. But, like, that messiness. And, you know, I'm just gonna, like, keep going with this cello example because I think it's right. It's like, as anyone is trying to learn something new, it requires, like, creativity, and creativity requires messiness. And, you know, if you're gonna learn how to improvise or you're gonna learn how to use AI or you're going to learn how to be in feedback with your customers every day or whatever, you're going to learn to do that you've never done before. It requires creative approaches, many of which aren't going to work. So I say this because even in learning how to improvise, the first way that everybody learns and fucks this up is you learn like a lick or like eight bars, that sounds good. And then every time you have a solo, you play it, which isn't really improvisation. It's just a different version of being able to prepare and perform correctly. But, like, I think as adults, we want to get back into the rut of where we're good so badly that we will do anything to be like, oh, this is like this. And now I'm gonna do this because this is the thing I know how to do. And it takes real Twilight Zone shit to not do that.

[B]

Yeah, like, what is one example of a Twilight Zone shit that can help make that shift in an organization?

[A]

Who?

[B]

I mean, I think you gave one already about, like, doing a working session together and, like, relaxing the idea that somebody has to have brought a perfectly polished thing to show the rest of us before we can, like, jam on it together.

[A]

Look, I'll give you a great example from yesterday. We're having conversations right now about growth and how we want to do that differently or similarly than we've done in the past. And I was in a meeting yesterday, and Colin, who's like, our revenue dude, just brought a bunch of information and he put it in a notion board and basically he showed it to us and was like, what do you make of it? That's messy. That's messy. Most people in that role show up to that meeting with someone in my role saying, I did a bunch of analysis. Here's the story, here's the action plan. I'm recommending this. Do you agree? Putting it out there and going, I don't know what the fuck this means. Do we know what the fuck. And the truth is? No, we do not. But the first step of figuring it out is looking at it and thinking about it and being in a conversation about it and asking questions that we don't have answers to for an hour and coming out and being like, okay, well, here are two things we could do next. That is messy, that is ugly. Sounds, man.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

What about you? What kind of messiness do you make your clients do or invite your clients to do? With love.

[B]

Where my head goes, I'm thinking. I keep kind of coming back to this goal setting example. The client of ours was talking about how they want to basically, instead of having this be an individual, exercise across an entire organization, like bring people together in a room, cross functionally, and if we're going to set goals, let's do it in a cross functional, messy sort of way. And I think there's something to that. You know, whether it's like big room planning or kind of forcing cross functional conversations that aren't going to happen naturally, I feel like a lot of my role in our projects is to force or encourage people who normally aren't in a room together on any sort of cadence to get in a room together and just talk about things, make information transparent to each other, rely on the fact that people are creative and want to kind of pull in the same direction on stuff. And just because we are in different functions or different teams or different divisions or whatever, if our work implies that we should be talking to each other, we should be doing that. And I'm kind of gobsmacked how frequently I feel like I'm doing this very simple thing of being like, you all are supposed to be working on this thing together and yet I don't see you ever together talking. Can we just get in a room for 90 minutes and, like, see what comes up? And almost always it is very valuable.

[A]

Yeah, I've definitely gotten my wrist slapped at clients for doing that. Have you?

[B]

Yeah, a little bit, but a little bit. That's. That's what we're there for. Like we.

[A]

Where someone will Be like, why are these people invited? Yeah, yeah. Or like, you know, there sometimes there's a little bit of like, you work over here. Why are you sure. Talking to these people. Why are you inviting these people to these meetings? We didn't ask their manager if they could. Whatever. And I'm like, do you want to get the work done or not, man?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Oh. And sometimes the answer is they don't. They don't want to get the work done. And there's actually other stuff going on, like politically and. And things like that. In that case, I don't know. Usually project's not long for this world at that point.

[A]

Fair enough. I think the other thing that keeps popping to mind about this is a lot of the literature about goal setting I don't particularly enjoy. Because, for example, smart goals, which everybody loves a smart goal. The A is for achievable. And I think that setting an achievable goal necessarily requires you to know how you're going to achieve it. And I think there can be a lot of value in setting a goal that you don't know how to achieve. Now, I don't think that we should just like, take wild swings that are not based in any data or any research or any conversation with customers or the world. But. But I've found a lot of value in being part of teams that set a really ambitious goal that is a little unreasonable, and then the pressure becomes on the Twilight Zone to figure it out.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

And I just think that's a much more interesting stance.

[B]

Totally. I think that's a good example of like, a positive perspective on a Sunshine Zone thing and not just a lot of our conversation. I think for reasons we've already talked about, is about, like, kind of ameliorating subpar things that are happening in the Sunshine Zone. And there is still the opportunity for Sunshine Zone. Things that slap are creative as hell, are motivating and kind of create a wake of positive Twilight Zone and Midnight Zone stuff. That is the real opportunity in the Sunshine Zone, not just like making the bad slightly less bad.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's it. And I think that, you know, goals are just ambitions in writing an idea that an ambition is declared clearly and explicitly and we don't quite know how we're going to get after it. I think a lot of times leaders like that definitely makes them clench up and they think like, well, that's too loose. If we can't. If we can't articulate a roadmap or the journey to get there, then we can't say it. And I just don't think that's right. Like, I just think the sort of bar raising move, again, grounded in something, probably something sky like, is really valuable. And you know, I've said this before, I just fundamentally believe that human beings, given the right support, tend to rise to the occasion. And so I just feel like goal setting is such a good opportunity to not sort of create the culture of lowered expectations inside of a company and to just be like, what if we could do this? Like, what if we could figure it out? And what if we focused in the Twilight Zone on the kind of ugly sound containers, the kind of Midnight Zone support people might need to be in those spaces? What if we really said this is the result we want and we're going to design the system to get it, rather than having so much of the conversation be negotiating the outcome to a point that we can all live with and then ignoring it, which is what I usually see.

[B]

Yeah, I love that. That feels like maybe a good place to actually end. What do you think?

[A]

I agree.

[B]

Good.

[A]

This is fun.

[B]

It was fun. So, three episodes in the can, a few more to go. As always, please like rate and review us on your various platforms of choice. And if you have a gnarly cross functional problem like the goal setting one that we just did an entire episode about, please shoot us an [e-mail] the.

[A]

Music for this miniseries is Yagadang by BG and Coyote Radio. This show is produced by R for friend Jack Van Amber and engineered by Taylor Marvin. Our team at the ready makes it all happen by helping companies solve their biggest cross functional problems out in the world so that we can tell you about it. Thanks so much for listening.

[B]

SA.