How planning a refresh of a portable garden cart at Lake Roland park became a lesson in systems thinking

It's not about telling everyone everything. It's about what happens when people can finally see where they fit. For too much of my career, I worked with leaders who operated on a strict need-to-know basis. The message that came down was some version of: "Leadership wants x. I'm not sure why. Can you just figure out a way to do it?" I may have understood the task, but I had no idea what I was actually solving for. And without that, I couldn't bring anything to the table beyond

Productivity tells you what a team produces. Health tells you whether they can keep producing. These are not the same thing — and only one of them predicts burnout before it happens. When I built my first team of technical communicators, I set myself a goal that wasn't in any management handbook I'd read: I wanted to know if my team was okay. Not performing — okay. The problem was that most team health metrics I found were really productivity metrics in disguise. Some quantit