Jennifer Pattarini

When things fall through the cracks at work, the instinct is to look at the people involved. Who dropped the ball? Who did not follow through? Who forgot? That instinct is almost always wrong. Most of the time, when a task goes unfinished, a deadline gets missed, or a blocker sits unresolved for three days, the problem is not that someone did not care. It is that the system around them made it easy for things to go missing. Here is the research that makes this impossible to ignore. The Stat...

Most teams today are not suffering from too little communication. They are drowning in it. Messages in Slack. Emails. Status update meetings. Follow-up messages about the status update meeting. Notifications from four different tools, all telling you something that someone else on the team already knew. And yet somehow, at the end of the week, important things still got missed. Blockers went unresolved. Someone did not know a decision had been made. Two people worked on the same thing without...

Every team has two versions of the same Monday morning standup. The boss's version starts with a familiar question: did anyone actually do the thing we talked about last week? The employee's version starts with a slightly different one: do I really have to say, out loud, in front of six people, that I am still working on the thing I said I was working on yesterday? Same meeting. Two completely different headaches. And somehow, everyone still shows up. The Boss's Side: "Did Anyone Actually Do...