Value-First Leadership w/ Tony Dowling: Freedom to Learn over Control

Episode Description

The Meeting Every Organization Has: Someone tries something new. It doesn’t work perfectly. The response? “We need a process to make sure this never happens again.”

What you just did:

Punished experimentation Rewarded playing it safe Taught your team that trying = risk Chose control over adaptation

The result: Your organization gets really good at preventing mistakes. And completely unable to adapt to change.

The pattern we’re stuck in: Error occurs → Create control process → Reduce experimentation → Miss opportunities → Fall behind competitors who ARE experimenting → Panic → Demand innovation → But maintain all the controls that prevent it

Sound familiar? Today, Tony Dowling and I explore the principle that breaks this:

“We will enable learning over controlling execution”

What we’re tackling:

• Why error prevention creates organizational rigidity and eventual failure • The difference between “safe-to-fail experiments” and reckless risk-taking • How annual reviews destroy adaptation (while rapid feedback enables it) • Why hiding failures makes you weaker (while sharing them makes you antifragile) • What happens when you measure learning velocity instead of error rates

The reality nobody wants to admit: Your competitors aren’t beating you because they make fewer mistakes. They’re beating you because they learn faster from the mistakes they make.

Join us live or catch the recording by saving this post.

The series so far: ✅ Episode 1: Create conditions for value, don’t control outcomes ✅ Episode 2: Distribute authority to knowledge, not hoard at the top ✅ Episode 3: Enable others’ success, don’t control their actions ✅ Episode 4: Ask powerful questions rather than provide answers ✅ Episode 5: Remove barriers rather than add pressure

This week: 🎯 Episode 6: Enable learning over controlling execution

Question for you: When was the last time someone on your team tried something new without asking permission first?

If you can’t remember, you’ve already lost the adaptation game.

#ValueFirst #Leadership

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