Virtues-Based and Values-Based Cultures
Why virtues-based cultures (defined by behaviors) create less friction than values-based ones (defined by ideals).
Luca Dellanna's Blog
People management and risk management.
Latest posts
How Can a Culture Outlast Its Founder?
Five factors that determine whether an organization's culture survives after its founder is gone.
Who Is School Designed For?
Schools teach academic skills but assume social skills will teach themselves, leaving many children behind.
How to Handle Poor Performers
Why 90-day PIPs are too slow, four feedback mistakes to avoid, and how to know in two days whether a plan will work.
AI Adoption Is a Supervisor Problem
A licenses-plus-announcement AI rollout works only for self-starters. Here is what the rest of the team actually needs.
Manager Overload Is a Training Problem
If you feel you don't have time to train your team, it's precisely because their undertraining takes your time.
Perks Don't Retain People, Managers Do
The main reason good people leave is their supervisor. Perks don't fix that. Training supervisors does.
Soccer Academies and Job Distortions
Delaying practice filters out the wrong people and makes the distorted version of each field look normal.
Hire for Outcomes and Habits, Not Skills
Most hiring screens for the most teachable part of the job. Here is what to screen for instead.
Remote Teams Need Clarity, Not Trust
Remote work deletes the stream of small clarifications that office proximity provides. Here is how to rebuild it.
Insurance as a Warning Signal
When insurance becomes unaffordable or disappears, it is a signal governments should listen to, not silence.
Developing Your Team's Skills via Coaching
Group training transfers information, not skills. This is how to build real capability through supervisor coaching.
Ergodicity and the Tales of Two Skiers
Why bets with positive expected value can still ruin you, and why the best short-term strategy isn't the best long-term one.
Wealth, Preferences, and Culture
Low fertility isn't caused by poverty but by culturally inflated standards for parenthood, a pattern that extends to how we use money, time, and productivity.
Agency Is a Trainable Skill
Proven techniques to make your team more proactive.
Incentives Buy Behavior, Not Habits
Incentives amplify behavior, but habits decide it.
The Goldfish Student: AI and Context
More context isn't always better. Practical techniques for working with AI's limited working memory to get sharper answers.
How AI Skills and Contracts Work Together
Contracts extend AI skills by verifying output quality and logging every run automatically.
7 Ways to Get Better Results from LLMs
Seven practical tips for non-developers using LLMs for office work, from scoring outputs to managing context.
The Anthropomorphization of the Human Brain
On the mistake of treating the brain like a human: it is a collection of systems, not a single conscious agent.
Put Your Ego Into Your Future Self
Where you invest your ego determines who benefits from your choices. Invest it in your future self for long-term growth.
Moral Dilemmas: Choice vs. Advice
A thought experiment reveals the gap between the most moral individual choice and the most moral advice to give.
What makes humans special?
What makes humans special is not intelligence or creativity, but scarcity and skin in the game.
The Importance of Early Check-Ins
After delegating a task, a brief check-in 1-2 days later prevents wasted effort by surfacing questions employees didn't yet know they had.
Standards Don't Enforce Themselves
In 2017, Gregg Popovich benched his entire starting five after 52 seconds of careless play, to protect the standards that made the Spurs excellent.
Risk management as a competitive advantage
Risk management is not a defensive tool but an offensive one: it lowers costs, drives innovation, and boosts engagement.
Policy Lab: AI Agents for Policy
AI agents that design better policy proposals, representing real voting blocs, surfacing genuine disagreements, and negotiating trade-offs.
Automation vs Upskilling (in AI)
A common worry is that delegating to AI will make us forget how to think. I believe the opposite, and here's why.
5 Techniques for Better AI Outcomes
How to get consistently better results from ChatGPT, Claude, and similar models.
A Simple Setup for a Self-Improving Claude
A quick guide to set up Claude Desktop so that it learns from its mistakes and gets better the more you use it. Great for non-technical users.
Talking with Your Manager, Effectively
A framework for providing suggestions to your manager
Mentorship Meetings, Structured Well
Most mentorship meetings are a waste of time because they are not structured. Here's how to make the most of them.
The gap between 'rolled out' and 'adopted'
Adoption of change initiatives requires reducing local friction, not just making a strategic case.
Ergodicity as a Non-Binary Property
Is ergodicity binary or a spectrum? Why degrees of non-ergodicity matter more for real-world decisions than theory.
Fragilization: Antifragile Systems Weaken
How antifragile systems weaken over time: fragilization shrinks the beneficial stress range, gradually making even adaptive organisms more vulnerable.
How I built a Twitter network from scratch
How I went from 0 to 24,000+ Twitter followers without prior contacts, in an isolated city, and without cold outreach.
Fractal Action: Minimizing Lockdowns
To prevent pandemic spread within countries, governments must limit travel fractally—between states, cities, neighborhoods, and blocks
Principled Decision-Making in Competition
How can business managers and sports coaches remain consistent with their principles while adapting to competitive pressures
Elastic and Plastic Change
Why change initiatives fail and how concentrated pressure produces lasting change instead of temporary shifts
Circuit Breakers extended
How automatic regulatory triggers can help countries respond quickly to emergencies when the cost of delay is catastrophic
Solving the sources of your problems
You can work to solve your problems and see them coming back tomorrow, or you can work to resolve the sources of your problems and never see them again
The Fence Paradox in Medicine
How reducing symptoms can lead to increased risk-taking and ultimately worse outcomes through risk homeostasis
Resistance is Signal
Chronic resistance to activities isn't something to power through, but information to dissect and address.
Culture is the track record
Organizational culture is not a set of concepts but a track record of actions and reactions.
3 Catalysts For Change
How to drive long-lasting change within your organization
Police Shootings: A Post-Mortem Lesson
When tragedies occur, focusing on blame misses the point. The Five Whys technique reveals root causes that, if addressed, could prevent future incidents.
A one-minute exercise to de-risk your life
A quick thought experiment to spot your biggest vulnerabilities and identify simple steps you can take today to reduce them.
The Planner and the Gatekeeper
The difference between decision-making and action-taking
Reproducible Success Strategies
The 3 properties of strategies that lead to long-term success: sustainable, constructive, and inevitable.
The Dellanna Method for Training Skills Fast
How to develop competence fast through concrete, problem-focused training that produces real behavior change.