It also nearly cost this client her promotion, and I want you to see exactly where it went wrong, because people run it on themselves after reading something like my last week’s free issue and then delete the wrong things.
This client managed six designers, she’d shipped the 2 biggest things her org put out in 2025, but her performance review still said that she “wasn’t strategic enough”.
4 months she’d spent overthinking that one sentence.
She was reading more business books, saying “from a strategy perspective…” in meetings more. She’d even volunteered for a vision project… that went nowhere.
Nobody could tell her what “being strategic enough” meant, including the man who wrote it, who said something about wanting to see her operating at a higher altitude.
My guess was that, he’d never seen her choose.
Let me explain what I mean here.
Nobody watched you reason or weigh things up inside your head.
It only becomes visible to another human being at the moment something gets left out
Strategy is only visible from outside in one way - through the thing you decided not to do, on purpose, and could explain if somebody asked.
Nobody watches you reason or weigh things up inside your head.
It only becomes visible to another human being at the moment something gets left out.
Finish everything and you’ve produced no evidence of “strategic thinking”, you’ve produced output, and output is what your current level already assumes.
Try this before you read on-
Name the last thing you decided NOT to do,
that someone could reasonably have expected of you,
that at least one other person noticed you skipping.
She couldn’t name one in 3 years.
The 11-minute exercise, and the 20 things that came out of her week
She was surest about the research intake form, and what happened 2 weeks after she skipped it?
Her peer got called “really invested in the team” (and what was he doing that she wasn’t)
The doc had 2 views in 5 weeks (but guess where its sentences turn up ;)
3 items on her list had no origin at all, so who wrote them?
The rule she’d obeyed for 3 years that no calendar audit can find
The one sentence that makes a skip read as a decision, in 3 versions
She expected half her week to be free, guess how much it was in reality.
Write down everything you did last week that nobody asked you for that week: forms, meetings, updates, check-ins, permissions.
Then run 3 questions over each one, in this order
If I skip this, who has to explain it?
Name a person or it isn’t load-bearing.
Has anyone been visibly corrected for skipping it in the past year?
If not, it’s theater.
Is it phrased as judgment with no consequence attached?
Then it’s a test, and someone is watching.
20 items came out of her week.
Her sort, in her words:
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