The last strategy session ended the same way the last three had: a whiteboard full of arrows, half the team excited, half already exhausted. We had no shortage of ideas. What we didn’t have: any real sense of whether the new thing was working.

That’s what standards are for. Not rules for their own sake, but the scaffolding that makes progress legible. Without them, everything takes longer. Data can’t be trusted. Fixes don’t stick. Onboarding a teammate feels like teaching a dialect that only exists inside your own head. Even the simplest experiments collapse under ambiguity.

And yet, standards aren’t fun. Standards are quiet and unglamorous work, so standards are often deferred. Pushed aside until the system is brittle and exploration feels like pushing gravel uphill.

Exploration usually gets the spotlight. It’s newer, louder, easier to pitch. It promises step-change impact and immediate reinvention. But in a team without standards, exploration is wasted time. Every new idea grinds against the same old friction: inconsistent data, unclear ownership, incoherent naming. A decision point arrives, and suddenly you’re arguing over whether the inputs can be trusted at all.

This is the real tension: not innovation versus maintenance, but novelty versus legibility. You don’t need perfect systems to try something new. But you need enough clarity that experiments don’t collapse on contact with reality.

If you want to build something new, invest in what you already have. Standardize enough that the next step forward isn’t guesswork. Legibility first, then novelty. That’s how exploration gains leverage instead of drag.

Otherwise, you’re not building anything at all. You’re just rearranging entropy.

Like this? Subscribe via email here.