Simon Brown (00:02.164)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown and today I'm here with my co-author Paul Ashcroft. Unfortunately, Garrett can't be with us today. We're delighted though to be joined by Radhika Dutt. Hi Radhika.

Paul (00:11.744)
Hi there.

Radhika Dutt (00:20.052)
Hi, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Simon Brown (00:23.562)
It's a pleasure. So welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. So Radhika is an advisor on product thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, a speaker, consultant for organizations around the world. And in her work, she's seen how the pressure to hit numbers drains motivation, fuels performance theater, burnout, and short-term thinking.

And she's the author of Radical Product Thinking and she's currently working on her next book, which is called Escaping at the Performance Trap, Why Goals and Targets Backfire and What to Do Instead. So I'm looking forward to hearing much more about that in our conversation today. So maybe to kick us off, Radhika, so you work at the intersection of product thinking, leadership and organisational change. So in all of that, I guess, how does curiosity shape the way that you approach that work? And maybe how has it influenced your idea?

in either your previous book or looking forward to your upcoming book.

Radhika Dutt (01:21.576)
Yeah, curiosity is just such a central part to everything that we do. know, one thing that I've realized and which is why I'm writing this next book is when we have goals and targets, I've actually found that it stifles curiosity because what happens is when you set goals and targets or objectives and key results, OKRs, right? Whatever the name of this goal setting methodology is,

What happens is you're telling people this is the problem and this is the solution and therefore if you do this, this marks success. And what we really need is space for figuring things out along the way because in the course of the year we're gonna learn a lot and it turns out, well, it's not quite how we imagined it when we started out. That's the first thing. But the second thing is,

Even let's say you somehow had a crystal ball and you knew exactly what the problem and solution needed to be, et cetera. When you set goals and targets, the incentive you create for someone is to say, look, you set the target, I hit the target. Here are the fantastic results. And even if I'm not malicious in my intent, just subconsciously, it makes me pick and choose metrics that validate that

hey, this is all working so well and look at these fantastic numbers. And what actually happens is I've swept those bad numbers under the rug. And this is where it atrophies that curiosity muscle because we're not looking at those bad numbers with openness and curiosity and saying, huh, I wonder what happened there, right? And one example is in sales. You've seen salespeople where you lose a deal.

How quickly are we ready to say, okay, moving on then to the next one, right? We don't stop and think, what happened there? Why did we lose that deal? Truly reflect and see what's happening. Does that resonate for you all?

Simon Brown (03:27.338)
It does and it's I guess it's one that it's the way that things have always been done. It's the way that organizations sort of organize ourselves. But when you position it like that, it does raise the question of, yeah, is it the right way? Is there a better way? And yeah, does it create the space for us to reflect back on what we're doing and whether it's the right thing and whether how we're getting there is the right way to get there as well.

Is there a better way that you've come up with through your research?

Radhika Dutt (04:03.092)
I have, yes. And by the way, to your point, right? Like one of the issues was when I used to tell leaders, here are the side effects of goals, targets and OKRs. That was exactly the reaction I would get, which is, OK, I see what you're saying. It makes sense. But it's the devil I know. Like, what do I do instead? And for a long time, I didn't have a good answer for that. In the last couple of years, I've been trying out this approach, which I call OHLs.

Paul (04:07.283)
Thank

Radhika Dutt (04:32.924)
So instead of OKRs, it's Objectives, Hypotheses, and Learnings, OHLs. And it's a methodology for puzzle setting and puzzle solving. Because just think about the following two questions, And just sense your internal reaction to these two questions. So the first question I'm going to ask you, what are your goals for this year?

The second question instead is, what puzzles would you like to solve for the business this year? Did you notice your own reaction and sort of how you felt differently about the two?

Paul (05:10.862)
Sure. Yeah, you're promoting a more creative, curious approach to that as a problem, right?

Radhika Dutt (05:19.944)
Right, exactly. So you're exactly right. The puzzle setting and puzzle solving approach basically means we look at either problems in the business or observations, and then we frame it as a puzzle for the team so that we can start to solve this, look at good and bad numbers, and we can experiment, learn, and adapt. The puzzle setting and puzzle solving doesn't mean that I'm creating a playground for my team and saying, OK, off you go.

Go play and come back when you're done. Instead, you know, it's actually much more rigorous than with OKRs because I expect really deep answers to the puzzle solving questions. So let's talk about what I mean by OHLs in this puzzle setting and puzzle solving. And I'm going to stick with the sales example because I think sales is actually the hardest to transform because our mindset is so entrenched in goals and targets. So let's look at the sales puzzle of

Instead of giving you a target alone, I would say the market expects us to hit X million by the end of this year. What I've observed is sales had grown over the last three years, but they've stalled in this last year. It's plateauing. What is going on? And there might be guiding questions to help us delve into this puzzle. And these are questions I genuinely don't know answers to. So it might be, you know, maybe there are things that are fundamentally shifted in the market. Maybe

our competitors are doing something that we haven't figured out how to respond to. Or maybe it's that we were really good at selling to the early adopters, but we just don't know how to sell into the mass market. There may be a set of questions and we're setting out to figure out how do we solve this puzzle? And the summary is the objective. How do we hit X million in revenues while figuring out this puzzle of getting past this plateau and getting back to that growth trajectory?

So that's puzzle setting. And so now we can talk about puzzle solving, but I can pause there for a moment if you have thoughts or questions or things you'd like to add to that.

Paul (07:26.269)
Well, I love it. I really wonder if you've experimented with a company on this. Have you got a particular story of where a company was very much goal-based, objective-based, and have tried and experimented with OHLs and what results have they seen? But maybe that's tied into what you're about to tell us.

Radhika Dutt (07:46.909)
Yeah, and actually maybe I'll tie in this example with the puzzle solving part. So the example I'm going to share is a company called SignalOcean. So I've been working with them for a couple of years. And so when I was brought into the company, sales had stalled two years ago. And if we looked at even our numbers, you know, we'd been tracking OKRs. The CEO had introduced OKRs into the company as a way of, you know, being really rigorous about metrics and measurements.

And I told the CEO kind of the side effect of what I was seeing, this lack of curiosity as a result. And, you know, there was this worry, like, I can't just give up on OKRs. That's how everyone else says they're making progress, right? And so what I did was I just introduced the OHL's approach to the product team. And I said, OK, you know, regardless of OKRs, I want you to start solving puzzles and we'll figure out how to meet these OKRs. But let's solve the puzzle.

And there are three questions to puzzle solving. The first question is, how well did it work? This is where you state a hypothesis. If we try this experiment, then this is what I expect as an outcome because here's the connection. And I test leading and lagging indicators to see how well is it working. So that's the first question, and it's the left brain side. The second question, this is where teams

used to tell me a bunch of numbers. So the second question is, what have you learned? So teams used to tell me, okay, this is our X number of weekly active users, time spent on this feature, the bounce rate, blah, blah, blah. And I would say, okay, let's stop there. You figure out what are these numbers actually telling you? What are people actually doing? And tell me the story. Weave for me the narrative in terms of what's happening.

So that starts the creative problem solving. And then the third question comes in, which is, based on how well it worked and what have you learned, what are you going to do next? Like, what would you try next? And that's this third piece of adaptation. So you've experimented, you're learning, and you're adapting. And so how did we apply this? So at Signal, so this is a data platform company in the maritime industry.

Radhika Dutt (10:07.795)
And by the way, I've worked in so many industries, but this is by far the most complex industry I've ever worked in. And yeah, and there are so many different players. There are the brokers, the operators who operate vessels in the shipping business. There are the charters who have cargos. It's a bunch of different people with different mindsets. And what we saw in the puzzle was our early users were the tech savvy brokers.

Simon Brown (10:13.898)
now.

Radhika Dutt (10:37.779)
And beyond that, our growth was stalling. So the question was, how do we address the needs of the tech-averse people and people in other roles? So that was the puzzle. And then in terms of puzzle solving, we had to look at how well things were working. So we would look at a particular feature. And then we would start to answer these three questions of how well is it actually working? What's going on? And instead of...

only looking at just the numbers and the usage of it or weekly active users. That doesn't quite tell me what is actually happening. So you delve into this and you figure out where did they come from? Why did they not use this? What is their mental model? How do they think about it? You start to delve into all of these things and you figure out what you've learned. And then you say, OK, what are we going to do next? So one thing that we learned was our data accuracy.

was so brilliant that it looked like magic. And people who are tech-averse, they don't like magic. They don't like tech telling you, here's a magic number. They want control, right? They don't trust the tech. They want to know, how did you get this number? They want control over it. And so we had to figure out the puzzle of how do you make this not overwhelming, and yet it's really understandable. It's not magic.

Simon Brown (11:37.503)
You

Radhika Dutt (12:02.037)
And so that's the kind of puzzle that we had to solve. And so what were the results? We started doubling sales every year from when I joined and turn dropped. So turn in terms of the number of users, it dropped from 26 % in 2023 to 4 % in 2025. Right. So the results were huge and we completely turned around both the CEO and the head of sales, both of whom were saying, okay.

I see this path to experimentation, learning and adaptation, that now it feels like OHLs. They're like having ears on the track where you can anticipate what's coming and you make measurement actionable. Whereas OKRs were like the view in the rear view mirror. You know, either you hit your targets or you didn't, but you couldn't quite figure out how to make it actionable.

Simon Brown (12:55.828)
So I love that sort of, so how well did it work? What have you learned and then what do you try next? And that sort of, I presume becomes a sort of a circular process that you keep going round and round. And I think that the thinking there is very similar to we have a seven seas model that we talk about in the Curious Advantage book. And in there, the heart of it is what we call the curiosity engine, which around creativity and construction. it's sort of coming up with ideas, questions, putting those into action and experiments through construction and then applying

criticality to see what happened and it feels like it's that same loop of sort of figure out what's happened, come up with ideas or experiments to address it, look at the results and you end up in this sort of virtuous cycle in order to see improvement and it sounds like based on the results that you had here that you got some phenomenal increases. I guess looking at OHLs, can you tell us more about OHLs then? objectives, hypotheses and learnings.

So yeah, tell us more on what those are and how we would use them.

Radhika Dutt (14:00.853)
Yeah. And by the way, I love what you described also in the curious advantage and sort of this virtuous cycle that you create. One of the things that, you when you start to talk about puzzle solving in this way, as you start to see a shift in even how people talk about progress. So where OKRs often drive this monthly business reviews where everyone is scrambling to show numbers in that monthly meeting.

and spinning those numbers, you know, a lot of people in those OKR meetings, I would observe, like we're talking at each other and showing results as opposed to actually listening. And it's not a participation around, you know, what would we try next? Right. And this created a very different conversation and discussion that was a lot more productive and meaningful. That was the first thing. So just going back to OHLs and your question of how do you

introduce it, use it. So the objectives is the puzzle setting part. That is where you say, where you summarize the puzzle. The hypotheses and learnings, that's what you use in this puzzle solving part of how well did it work, where you use your hypothesis, and then you structure your learnings into what did we learn and then what are we going to do to adapt. So how can you introduce this approach in an organization, right? The first thing I would say is

change is hard. You don't have to sort of transform overnight and just throw out all OKRs overnight because that's really scary as a prospect for both leaders but even for employees like you you want to bring in structure slowly. And so the idea is if you're a leader you can think about an initiative you've worked on and you can present that to the team in this format of how well did it work.

What have we learned and what are we going to do next? And you can look at both the good and the bad things in that initiative. And you can talk about it in this way so that you role model for the team, being able to talk about both the good and the bad, the learnings and adaptation, right? So that's one thing. The second thing is even for individuals, this is something you can use to make your own work a lot more interesting.

Radhika Dutt (16:24.438)
Instead of feeling like you're having to chase numbers, if you frame it as a puzzle for yourself, you just start to notice that work feels more creative. And you can introduce this within your team, within your sphere of control. And I'll give you the example of a company where I was working, we were tackling the advertising business in TV advertising. We had a management team where I felt like

We didn't have clarity of vision at the management level, but that didn't stop me from having a clear vision for my team and then being able to use puzzle setting and puzzle solving with the product team that I had. And I didn't have direct reports at the time, but you can still use it within your sphere of influence. And in fact, it increases just how much influence you have.

Paul (17:17.709)
I imagine if you were introducing this into an organisation, like with any relative new idea, you're going to get some pushback. And if I'm a sales director, I'm a sales director listening to this podcast and I'm thinking, okay, I'm interested, but my head of sales is basically demanding quarterly results as are our shareholders. And I've got to bring my team along with me and now get them into puzzle solving rather than doing this.

What are some of the things that leaders need to do to create the right conditions, both within their teams to do this, the culture and the way they work, but also in managing upwards to those they're expecting results and numbers from at the moment? What's been your experience there?

Radhika Dutt (18:04.874)
Yeah, I love this question, right? Because one of the concerns that I always see in the resistance is this fear that when I say we're doing puzzle setting and puzzle solving, it creates this feeling that we're not focusing on the numbers. Whereas the reality is you're doing a lot more in terms of numbers. So let me give you an example. I was working at a company called Avid. And Avid dominated

the video editing industry. So we made video editors and every Oscar movie was edited using Avid. And we continued to hit our sales targets. Our sales numbers were looking fantastic. Well, until you sort of peeled back and looked at what is really happening. So our low end was being eroded by Apple and Adobe. The mid tier two.

And so we were making the numbers by going further and further into the high end. And so this approach doesn't mean that I'm not looking at numbers or that I don't care about business outcomes. So when I look at OHLs, I very much do want to see business outcomes. And I want to see them in the context of here is what the market is expecting us to hit. Here is how

sales numbers looked last year, what is happening within all of our different tiers? You know, and one thing that we should have done as a company was honestly to look at our video editing business and put a do not resuscitate order on it rather than, you know, keep trying to salvage that, right? Like we kept investing in the video editing business, whereas our broadcast business was growing. That was the space that we needed to invest more in.

Simon Brown (19:45.45)
Thank

Radhika Dutt (19:57.867)
So my point is we should have looked at the numbers and said, okay, this isn't working. Our business is getting commoditized by all means. You know what? Let's cannibalize our own business. We can, what do we do instead in the movie business? Right? That's kind of how we have to look at it. So with OHLs, we do look at numbers. We look at a lot of different numbers, not just the few OKRs that we set.

What we do is we look at the depth of those numbers, depth meaning, like we look at what those numbers are actually teaching us about the market, about the customer, about what's actually happening, the good and the bad numbers. We weave a story and tell the story, share that amongst ourselves so that collaboratively we can problem solve and say, what are we going to do instead? So that's really the mental shift. It's not about...

sort of downplaying business results at all.

Simon Brown (20:59.924)
feels like it's taking a much sort of view or curious view of sort of looking at the environment versus focusing in on just one aspect of it and maybe missing key things in the of context around it. Yeah, which.

Paul (21:14.859)
very, very interestingly, it is a curious advantage process, right? You're talking about exploring the context, then building community around it, and then starting to get creative with the problem solving is a, it's a lovely application or, you know, of those things.

Radhika Dutt (21:33.291)
And to your point about the community part, and you said, what can leaders do to create such a community? One big piece of it is have deep discussions. Don't shoot the messenger. You want people to tell you what's not working. Very often you hear leaders say, don't just come to me with problems, come to me with solutions. One example of what happened at NASA was a disaster because

they expected people to come to them with solutions. What if you don't have a solution? Does that mean you don't raise the problem? You know, what you want instead is to have people come to you saying, you know, how well did it work? Well, this part, it worked well. This other part, we're learning it didn't work. What did we learn? Here's what we learned. I am not 100 % sure what we do next. Here's one thing maybe we could do, but I don't fully know if this is the right approach. As a leader, you could use this opportunity to say,

You know, what you're planning on doing is a next step here that carries a huge risk of failure. I'm all about, you know, failing and learning, but maybe this is too big of a failure that you're risking. Here's maybe how you can take a smaller risk and try this instead, right? You can negotiate what is the right level of failure that you'd be willing to tolerate. as in terms of building, building this community and what leaders can do.

You know, it's offering genuine and honest feedback, but it's not, it's doing so without shooting the messenger. You're not creating this mentality of I'm constantly judging you and telling you how well or how badly you're doing. You're, you, Simon are rated, you know, a four and you, are rated five. It's not that it's really about, you know, here are, here's what we are doing well. How do we develop, cetera.

And that's how we build such a community and this collaborative way of working.

Simon Brown (23:31.446)
essentially creating the psychological safety and the team that people can bring those problems and yeah, the leader will help in resolving them and not send them away to mull over it. So I think you have a template if I'm right that our listeners would be able to access. So I think we'll put a link in the show notes for that, but that will give them what they need then to be able to start on that OHL journey with it.

Radhika Dutt (23:58.377)
Yes, exactly. And so that's a template that's in Google Slides format or in a PowerPoint format. And what you can do with it is it shows you an example of how you set such a puzzle with objectives and then how you use this puzzle solving template of how well did it work? What have we learned? What are we going to do next? And you can try this out for yourself. This is one area where in terms of introducing it to others, before you start

using it widely across the organization, you can try it out for yourself and just see how is it shaping your thinking. And then as you build a little bit of comfort with it, you can start to use it with others and encourage others to use it.

Paul (24:43.677)
Radhika, your previous book, if we dip back into a bit of history, Radical Product Thinking, also brilliant. And I suspect some of the ideas around the OHLs and the puzzle solving are building on some of the ideas in this book. But could you tell us a bit about radical product thinking and how is this different from how often we get into very much just an iteration led approach to product design?

So what is radical product thinking? Let's just start there.

Radhika Dutt (25:16.662)
So the problem that I was seeing was just a bunch of product diseases that I was seeing just over and over. So regardless of what industry I was working on or size of company, I kept seeing the same set of product diseases. And here are some examples, right? Pivotitis, there's obsessive sales disorder.

that was HERO syndrome. And I can tell you more about these product diseases. But even as I say names of these, know, people probably are listening to this going like, yes, I see the light.

Paul (25:52.763)
I love these names. Featureitis is another one, isn't it? I love the names of the diseases.

Radhika Dutt (25:59.064)
So, you know, I kept seeing these product diseases and I had this burning question, is it that we are all doomed to learning hard lessons in terms of how you build great products? Or is there a systematic process we can give people to build these world-changing products and translate that intuition for avoiding product diseases into a process?

So that was the burning question. so radical product thinking, the reason it's radical is because it challenges a lot of conventional wisdom. So I want to give you an example of one tidbit. One thing that I talk about is instead of being iteration-led, we need to be vision-driven. It doesn't mean that we don't iterate. In fact, you do need to iterate. Like you might discover that you were wrong about some of your thinking and what the problem was. And so you do iterate.

But to avoid the disease, pivotitis, we iterate with gravitas. We iterate with a deliberate reason where we know this is what was wrong. This is what we're going to try instead. And all of that comes from a really clear vision. Whereas what we've learned about a good vision is that it has to be broad, never changing. It is something where a vision is

something like being number one in aerospace, as an example, right? The global industrial champion is what Boeing says. But a vision like that doesn't actually carry any weight because it doesn't tell you what it means. It doesn't act like a filter. I can't hold up a feature against this vision and say, should I or shouldn't I do this? The answer sometimes should be no, don't do it, right?

And so what we need is a real vision that gives you the details. So here's an example. And this is the radical part because it's a fill in the blank statement that gives you the details of what problem are you trying to solve? So here's how it would go for a startup that I had. Today when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they're likely to like or learn about wine along the way, they have to find attractive looking wine labels or find wines that are on sale.

Radhika Dutt (28:20.787)
This is unacceptable because it leads to so many disappointments and it's hard to learn about wine in this way. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix. We are bringing about this world through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your taste and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your door.

And so what is radical about this vision is that I didn't tell you anything about my startup. And yet, hopefully after you heard this vision, you knew exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it.

Simon Brown (28:56.79)
You also sussed out how I choose my wines as well. On the label and the one that's on the I think I need your app. But so it provides the level of specificity, it also leaves it open enough that you can put certain things in there and use that as a filter as to which, in order to achieve that, I need these features? Yeah, do I need to take this path? Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (29:05.235)
User research.

But that was...

Radhika Dutt (29:26.967)
Exactly. so radical product thinking was about translating this vision into everyday action and into an actionable strategy. But that's not this fluffy two page document that says being more customer centric and focusing on our core. It actually makes it more actionable. And then how do we translate this into priorities, thinking about the long term versus short term, et cetera. But the reason it led to this second book I'm working on was because a lot of people would reach out to me and say, you know,

I know I need to be vision driven. I want to think long term. But the reality is we keep focusing on the short term because of all of the goals and targets that we have. How do I focus actually on the long term? How do I bring back this long term thinking? And that's when I realized that this was a persistent problem, that it wasn't just something I was seeing. was a need for this, that people were seeing that goals and targets were getting in the way as opposed to helping.

Paul (30:24.262)
I was going to say, and I think you've been part of, think, shifting the narrative away from sort of Silicon Valley, move fast and break things culture into thoughtful, stable, more sensible, responsible design, right? I mean, do you feel that that, are you seeing that shift? Are you seeing that starting to happen, not just in Silicon Valley, but outside in the tech sector and beyond?

Radhika Dutt (30:40.296)
Hahaha

Radhika Dutt (30:53.623)
You know, what I will say is there are people who are high on the Kool-Aid of Silicon Valley and radical product thinking was never targeted at them, right? I think there are some people who are really firmly entrenched in this idea that you just move fast, break things. And, you know, even if you listen to Sam Altman on a podcast on New York Times, he said, he was asked, so what are your reflections? And he was like, you know, there really hasn't been much time for reflection.

Paul (31:03.739)
Right.

Paul (31:22.982)
Yeah, release, release, release.

Radhika Dutt (31:23.511)
And that's downright scary, right? But I will say that the people that I was writing this book for see the problem with the world that we are creating without reflection. They see that we're eroding the fabric of society, that there is space for being vision-driven. This is not a call for altruism. I'm not saying that you don't care about business results. In fact, the book talks about examples with

business results were phenomenal. But it's a different way of thinking about it so that we can have clarity of what is the end state we want. Rather than Facebook's vision of we want to be open and connected, you ask, what does that actually mean? What does an open and connected world look like? Where is privacy in an open and connected world? There are questions you can ask and really think about what's the world you envision.

And then you can work towards that very systematically. And this is where my engineering background comes in, that you can engineer that world very systematically, engineer that change. And from that perspective, for those people who have reached out to me, what is truly satisfying for me is to see that they've been able to apply this way of thinking, even in their personal lives or activism, not just at work, of course at work too.

And I think that is the power of this way of thinking, that it becomes a mindset.

Simon Brown (32:51.188)
So if we look at pivotitis and the solution to pivotitis or the cure for pivotitis is this vision be vision driven and then iterate with gravitas. I guess firstly, maybe your first question of what does iterating with gravitas look like? So you gave the example of that vision statement, but yeah, how would I then iterate that with gravitas? Yeah.

Radhika Dutt (33:14.855)
I love this question. So let's talk about my example of pivotitis. First of all, you know, we were, was working at a startup, I was head of marketing. We wanted to be the next visa of the world, but you know, that turned out to be really complicated because we had to acquire consumers and businesses. And so we said, you know what, we're going to become a loyalty solutions provider for, for businesses.

And then we pivoted from there because we said, that's a really crowded market. So we became a credit solutions provider for businesses. And in all of this pivoting from one thing to the next, as head of marketing, I didn't even know what I was asking people to sign up for anymore. And so that is pivotitis when there's such a whiplash that you don't even know what exactly you're doing right now anymore. And so how do you avoid this? Because I'm not saying that you don't pivot. When you pivot, when you have such a

detailed vision statement, your vision statement doesn't have to be stuck on that forever. If you're an early stage startup, you might discover that the answer to this first question of whose world you're changing might've been wrong. Maybe it's that you discover, the problem is actually different from what you thought as you did user research. It turns out they buy wines in a different way. And so as you actually learn more, you would go back to your team and you say, you know what?

we were wrong about this particular element of our vision. Here is what we've learned and what we're going to do instead. And therefore, this is our pivot and what we're going to try. That is pivoting with gravitas. And the reason you need to pivot with gravitas is because no matter how much funding you have, you have two to three pivots before you're out of money or momentum. Even in a large business, you run out of momentum. And so taking this approach,

It reminds you of very similar questions to the puzzle solving. Even in the vision, you look at it and you say, how well is this working? What have we learned? What are we going to do next instead?

Simon Brown (35:19.098)
So it's fine to pivot, but we do it in a very conscious way, recognizing there's only two or three pivots there. And we do it based on what we've learned, what maybe we got wrong along the way. And then very deliberately pivot. If we look at some of the other ones, so you had then obsessive sales disorder, HERO syndrome, and featureitis. So what were the cures for some of those?

Radhika Dutt (35:35.115)
You

Radhika Dutt (35:41.753)
Hero syndrome, that was the first product disease I had caught when I started out. We had started a company, we had raised funding. Hero syndrome is where our vision was revolutionizing wireless. And looking back 25 years ago, I still don't know what this revolutionizing wireless meant. We were all about growing big and scaling without knowing what problem are we solving, right? So you have to go back to...

What is a detailed vision for what problem are you solving? And what is the end state you want to bring about? Obsessive sales disorder. this is my favorite disease probably because I have contributed to this myself. And it happens when your salesperson has a glimmer in their eye and they go like, you know, if you just add this one custom feature, we can win this mega deal. And it sounds mostly harmless. So you say, yes, let's do it.

And that's how very soon you end up accumulating a ton of what I call vision debt. Right. And this is where you keep detouring from your vision to instead get short-term gains. And so the solution to that is thinking about long-term versus short-term. So think about vision versus survival on this two by two of X and Y axis. So things that are good for vision and survival, they're easy decisions.

but you can't always just stay in easy decisions. Sometimes you have to invest in the vision. That's stuff that is good for the vision, but it's not good for your short-term sales, let's say. And so you're investing in the vision if you're doing things like user research or fixing technical debt. And the opposite of that is when you're doing vision debt things. This is where it's good for short-term.

like taking on this custom feature so you can win this mega deal, but it's bad for your long-term vision. And obsessive sales disorder happens if you're not keeping track of vision debt and you just start to pile on lots and lots of vision debt.

Paul (37:48.035)
Radhika, I love this and what makes me think of is if I can connect it to say overeating or not exercising, that I kind of know that there are certain diseases that might happen to me and I really should avoid pivotitis and I really should avoid featureitis and I'm sure no company starts out or even intends to continue to do this. They just end up falling into that.

You know, I don't intend to stop exercising and making myself fat, right? It just happens. What practically should leaders or companies or teams do to say, spot this starting to happen or make sure they're paying attention to it on an ongoing basis?

Radhika Dutt (38:32.936)
I love this question. And it's really about being more deliberate and intentional, right? So let's look at obsessive sales disorder. When you have a visual representation of how are you balancing easy decisions versus how often are you investing in the vision versus taking on vision debt? Just having such a visual representation is so incredibly

helpful to see how you're balancing the long-term versus short-term. The other thing it does is it brings your vision back into focus in everyday decisions. You're exactly right that we don't mean to veer off course. It just sort of happens because we write vision statements and then we file them away for posterity. And instead, this vision versus survival two by two

You know, it starts to bring your vision into focus when you're making everyday decisions, whether it's planning a sprint, whether it's looking at sales opportunities or strategic initiatives at an executive level. look at vision versus survival and I start to balance long-term versus short-term, right? It brings vision back into focus. And so by taking such a, both a visual approach,

But having those discussions, inviting those discussions of how are we balancing vision, how are we using our vision and how is our vision manifesting in everyday decisions that we're making, that's how we become more deliberate about staying on course. And you know what the reality is? Sometimes we do take on vision debt. You say, I need to take on vision debt because I need to make this quarter. But we acknowledge it's vision debt. You're not telling the team.

I don't care about my vision. You're in fact saying this is vision debt. And you make a plan for how do you invest in the vision.

Simon Brown (40:27.754)
Based on that we're allowed two, maybe three pivots. me use one of our pivots and take us into your thoughts on curiosity. it sounds like it features prominently in the methods, but keen to hear how do you define curiosity? What do you see as curiosity?

Radhika Dutt (40:45.204)
to me, curiosity is asking with openness. It's asking genuine questions with openness because you're interested and want to know. And I guess the one the one reason I use the word openness is because very often people want to ask questions, but they have a hypothesis in mind already. And it's almost like, you know, you're you're already going to bias what you're

Simon Brown (40:47.87)
me.

Radhika Dutt (41:14.114)
going to figure out from those questions because you have this innate desire to validate your hypothesis. So curiosity is being aware of that and asking with genuine openness and build your hypothesis afterwards.

Paul (41:30.931)
I really like that. I'm also curious about what are you personally, maybe even outside of work, what are you personally curious about at the moment in this slightly crazy world that we're living in, could do with some radical product thinking at the moment. What are you curious about?

Radhika Dutt (41:48.989)
I'll share my own reflections that I've been thinking a lot about is, you know, my own upbringing and how it shapes me. I think there's so much that I'm working on unpacking, you know, in my 40s now. I've lived in different countries. I lived in India till I was 12, moved to South Africa, just as the apartheid laws were being abolished, lived there through the democratic elections in 1994, then moved to

the US for undergrad. You know, even my upbringing before there, before then, I've never lived in the same country or sorry, lived in the same place where my mother tongue was the same as the regional language. So I've never lived in a place where I've actually belonged, let's say. Which is which is fascinating in terms of how it shapes your identity and so on. So a lot of my curiosity at the moment in my 40s is about how has my upbringing and experiences, how have they shaped?

who I am today and how is it coming forth in whatever I'm doing.

Paul (42:52.447)
Hmm. Very nice.

Simon Brown (42:55.914)
And then maybe why do you think we need to remain curious? So why do you think it's so important?

Radhika Dutt (43:05.237)
my gosh, it's the essence of life, isn't it? To me, to me, it really is like that is what makes life enriching. If we aren't curious, we don't learn. Learning can never be forced on us. It only happens because we're curious. And so, yeah, to me, the essence of life is learning and figuring things out. And it's

Simon Brown (43:08.776)
Thank

Radhika Dutt (43:32.565)
the foundation of all of that is curiosity.

Simon Brown (43:36.383)
it.

So in a moment I'll come back to you for sort of one thing to leave our listeners with, but maybe to summarise the conversation so far. So we dived into how goals and targets stifle curiosity, that we need to create the space for people to figure things out and go broader that it's not a malicious thing to stifle curiosity, but actually it can lead to people sweeping numbers under the carpet or not being transparent.

what things are doing and then offered up an alternative objectives, hypotheses and learning OHLs and framed it in this sort of puzzle setting and puzzle solving which I think makes it a whole lot more fun if nothing else as well. It feels much more positive that I'm going into puzzle setting and puzzle solving versus delivering on goals.

And then, some examples of what that can do. And it was great to see the sales examples. Then you went into some of the questions. So, how well did it work? What have I learnt? And then what do I try next? And that's a virtuous circle that we can get from asking those three questions over and over.

And then looked into why change can be hard, how leaders can introduce this and make that a little bit easier in terms of some of the things that a leader can do, maybe by introducing this in a more gradual way rather than just a straight shift into a new way of doing things and sort of using that puzzle language around how to do it. You have a template and we'll put the template into the show notes so that people can download that and use that if they want to get started as well.

Simon Brown (45:20.074)
And then dived into your book, Radical Product Thinking, and we heard about the product diseases of Epivititis, Obsessive Cells Disorder, Hero Syndrome and Featuritis, and some of the things that we can do to manage through those or cure those around vision driven and iterating with Gravitas, which I love. And yeah, great to see some of the examples from the startups that you've been involved in as well around that.

and the ability to still pivot as a startup, but maybe there's two or three pivots and need to maybe sometimes admit we were wrong there, look at what we've learned and then what do we do instead.

a little bit into the hero syndrome, about growing big and scaling and yeah without, how can organisations do that without actually knowing what the problem is they're trying to solve or obsessive sales disorder where there's this ton of vision debt where you go for short-term gains in what your salespeople tell you and you compromise that long-term vision and all that sort of vision and survival sort of four-box model of yeah are we playing in the right spot on that model and the need to be more deliberate more intentional and bring

that vision and survival thinking. And then dive into defining curiosity, that importance of genuine openness, how you're curious about your own upbringing and how that's shaped you. And then I love that conclusion of, why be curious because it's the essence of life. It's how we learn, it's how we figure stuff out. So huge amount we covered there, Edika. What would be one thing from all of that that you'd leave our listeners with?

Radhika Dutt (46:58.745)
Wow, that really was a lot that we covered. I won't cover any more material. Maybe I'll just summarize with you can download the OHLs toolkit. Try it out. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I always love to hear from people and how they're creating change. If you share a case study with me on how you're using OHLs in your own experiences, it might just make it into the next book that I'm working on, which will come out sometime.

Simon Brown (47:01.95)
Hahaha.

Simon Brown (47:05.77)
Thank

Radhika Dutt (47:25.561)
towards the end of 2026 or early 2027. I'm still working on it.

Simon Brown (47:31.179)
So if you want a feature in the book then do share your case studies directly with Radhika through LinkedIn. Thanks so much for joining us Radhika.

Radhika Dutt (47:39.395)
Thanks so much for having me. This was such a fun conversation.

Paul (47:42.609)
We enjoyed it. Thank you.

Simon Brown (47:45.301)
So this series is about how individuals and organisations use the power of curiosity to drive success in their lives and businesses, especially in the context of our new digital reality. So it brings to life the latest understanding from neuroscience, anthropology, history, business and behaviourism about curiosity, and it makes this useful for everyone. You've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're curious to hear from you. If you think there's something valuable or useful from this conversation, please do leave a review for the podcast on your preferred channel. Give us five stars and say this

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