Happy Friday friends, this week from the shores of Lake Ontario. Still in recovery mode from 11 crazy nights at Nashville North (Calgary Stampede).
I spent the better part of this week on that shore with Marcus Buckingham’s new book, Design Love In. I listened to it on Audible first. Then bought a physical copy for my partner. Then stole it back and read the whole thing again. Somewhere in there, I caught his conversation with Mitch Joel (Thinking - With Mitch Joel). And one line landed and refused to leave.
“The opposite of design, is drift.”
I wrote it down. Sat with it. Then went to a meeting that proved it.
I was reviewing curriculum for the fall semester (that I was going to teach, and put my name on). The program (Robotic Process Automation - RPA) was designed three years ago. In most industries, three years is nothing. In today’s exponential world, it might as well be a geological era. I walked through the material. I came back with notes. When I raised the issues, the chair didn’t push back. Didn’t defend it. Didn’t have a counter-proposal.
They didn’t know what to say. Or what to do.
That’s not a curriculum problem. That’s a “drift” problem. And I see it everywhere I work.
Let’s break it down.
Signal:
THE PARALYZED LEADER ISN’T WAITING. THEY’RE DECIDING.
Harvard Business Impact surveyed 1,139 leaders to surface the top challenges of 2026. Theme number ten (which I’d argue is really theme number one wearing a disguise) is balancing short-term performance with long-term reinvention.
Most leaders know they need to do both. They’re just not doing either one deliberately.
Drift doesn’t look like chaos. It looks like last year’s strategy copy-pasted into this year’s planning deck. It looks like AI pilots running in parallel that nobody is comparing. It looks like a curriculum that was designed once, and then just...kept going.
Here’s where it gets concrete. Zapier looked at what happened when organizations actually designed their AI approach. Not just bought tools, but built a system around a specific workflow problem. One company recovered 615 hours a month. Another automatically closed 27.5% of IT support tickets. Measurable. Documented. Predictable.
That’s design.
The flip side: untrained workers, the ones who had AI handed to them without a system around it, are six times more likely to say AI reduces their productivity. Six times. That’s not a tool problem. That’s a drift problem wearing a tool’s face.
The tool is interchangeable. The design is not.
And here’s what makes it worse. The department chair I sat with knew the curriculum was outdated before I walked in. They’d probably known for a year. Knowing isn’t the barrier. Choosing is.
Scale:
THE THREE-BOX SOLUTION
When Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and someone who has been teaching this problem longer than most consultants have been alive, built this framework, he didn’t call it a time management system or a portfolio model.
He called it the Three-Box Solution. And he grounded it in Hindu spirituality.
I’ll be honest: when I first hit the Hindu framing, I paused. It sounded like the kind of thing you put on a conference slide and never actually use. Then I read it properly. And I understood why he chose it. The three deities don’t just describe categories. They name the feeling each box requires of you. That’s the part most frameworks miss.
Box 1 - Lord Vishnu (The Sustainer): Manage the Present.
Vishnu keeps things running. This is your core business. Revenue. Operations. Payroll. The engine that funds everything else. Every leader I’ve worked with lives primarily in Box 1. Because Box 1 is where the urgent lives. Always. So for most organizations, Box 1 quietly becomes the whole strategy.
Box 2 - Lord Shiva (The Destroyer): Let Go of the Past Selectively.
Shiva’s job is to clear what blocks the future. Not cut costs. Consciously release what no longer belongs. The three-year-old curriculum. The process nobody questions because it’s “always been done this way.” The tool your team quietly routes around. The pilot launched eighteen months ago that nobody mentions anymore.
This is the hardest box. It requires you to kill something that probably cost a lot to build, and probably still has defenders in the room.
Box 3 - Lord Brahma (The Creator): Create the Future.
Brahma creates what doesn’t exist yet. New programs. New workflows. New business models for problems your customers don’t even have language for yet. This is where the department chair I met needed to spend protected, deliberate time. This is where most organizations I work with need to be, and aren’t.
Here’s what Govindarajan is clear about: the three boxes aren’t sequential. They run simultaneously. You fund the present while you destroy what no longer serves you and build what doesn’t exist yet. And because Vishnu is always the loudest voice in the room, most organizations default to sustaining. They drift.
Deep Dive:
THIS WEEK, NAME YOUR BOXES.
Don’t start with strategy. Start with honesty.
Grab a page, or a whiteboard if you’re feeling theatrical, and sort your current initiatives into the three boxes. What are you running to sustain the business? What are you carrying that has quietly expired? What are you actually building for the future?
If everything you wrote lands in Box 1, you’re not running a strategy. You’re drifting with a budget.
Fair warning: sorting the boxes is the easy part. Box 2 is where this gets political. Something has to die, and it probably has friends.
Here’s the thing about Buckingham’s line that hasn’t left me since I read it on that shore: drift isn’t passive. You don’t drift by accident. You drift by default: by choosing not to choose, by deferring the uncomfortable Box 2 conversation, by never carving out protected time for Box 3.
Design is a choice. A deliberate one. It requires you to name what you’re sustaining, name what you’re releasing, and name what you’re creating. Out loud, on paper, with accountability attached.
The school didn’t design their program into irrelevance. They just never redesigned it.
I’m back at that college in September. I’ll let you know what I find.
You know someone doing the same thing right now.
Maybe you are.
What’s living in your Box 2 that you’ve been avoiding? Hit reply and tell me. Especially if you’ve already named it and still haven’t moved on it.
The newsletter isn’t the conversation. The conversation is the conversation.
Thanks for reading! See you next Friday.
Best,
JT