by Jose Medina, PhD | May 19, 2026 | Learning & Improvement |
In Brief Over a year, I interviewed 19 Australian founders across 15 industries for my PhD research. I was trying to understand what made some workplaces hold people while others kept leaking them. The findings broke down into seven specific patterns. None of them...
by Jose Medina, PhD | May 19, 2026 | Learning & Improvement |
In Brief The same problem coming back means you’re treating a symptom, not the cause. Deming distinguished between common-cause variation (in the system) and special-cause variation (signals). Single-loop fixes follow the existing rules; double-loop questions...
by Jose Medina, PhD | May 19, 2026 | Learning & Improvement |
In Brief When your best people go quiet, it’s almost never about motivation. Ideas dry up when sharing them has stopped being rewarded. Hierarchy, performance pressure, and a blurred purpose all kill contribution. The fix is rebuilding the safety to suggest, not...
by Jose Medina, PhD | May 17, 2026 | Learning & Improvement |
TLDR Hiring rarely fixes a problem that’s been around for more than one person. When the same dynamic returns with a new face, the problem was never the person — it was a pattern the business is producing. The fix is a different kind of attention, not more...
by Jose Medina, PhD | May 14, 2026 | Learning & Improvement |
TL;DR Most weekly meetings work on the wrong 6%. Deming estimated that ~94% of performance comes from the system, not individual effort — but a typical status meeting only addresses the latter. Status meetings Plan and Do, but skip Study and Act — which is why running...
by Jose Medina, PhD | May 14, 2026 | Learning & Improvement |
TL;DR Most teams fix visible problems without touching the rule that produced them — that is single-loop learning. Double-loop learning asks what about the way we work caused this, and changes that instead. If new people in the same roles produce the same outcome, it...