A PE bankruptcy specialist and BCG partner walk into a bar...

Just kidding, they walked into HBR... and they're trying to sell you a framework!

Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Leader Om Patel dissect the April HBR piece arguing that "consensus decision-making doesn't work in the AI era." By the end, you'll spot the sales funnel dressed as thought leadership, understand who profits from "autonomous scrum," and (hopefully) never read a management article the same way again.

Listen or Watch as we discuss and debate:
• Why the OVIS framework is RACI in a trench coat
• How the authors' try to undermine building consensus
• What "autonomous scrum" is (it's just scrum)
• The fiduciary duty argument
• A Peacetime/Wartime CEO concept lifted without attribution
• Questions to ask whenever an HBR article recommends a specific consulting firm's methodology

HBR: Decision-Making by Consensus Doesn't Work in the AI Era (Rosenthal/Zuckerman, 2026-04-07)
https://hbr.org/2026/04/decision-making-by-consensus-doesnt-work-in-the-ai-era

#DecisionMaking #ManagementConsulting #CorporateGovernance

Harvard Business Review, Saybrook Capital, Boston Consulting Group, United Airlines bankruptcy 2002-2006, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, RACI matrix, Jeff Bezos, Marty Cagan

LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

The damage from your Q1 goal doesn't show up until Q3, on someone else's dashboard, after the person who flagged it got fired.

Part 2 of the Outcome Trap series. Brian and Om argue why you can't see the trap from inside it: second-order effects land too late to trace, the people who spot trouble get removed, and the truth fractures across team dashboards until nobody owns the whole picture. By the end you'll have questions to ask before any number you set quietly destroys the business.

Listen or watch as we discuss and debate:

• Why Goodhart's Law turns every new leading indicator into another surface to game
• How Sears split into 40 competing units and imploded while every department hit its OKRs
• The Wells Fargo whistleblower fired for 'tardiness' eight days after calling the ethics hotline
• Why Deming's 1986 warning to eliminate numerical goals got ignored for forty years
• Two questions to ask before setting any target

If you've ever been in a company where every conceivable metric was green while the business slowly bleed out, this podcast is for you!.

#OKRs #Deming #GoodhartsLaw

W. Edwards Deming (Out of the Crisis, The New Economics), Goodhart's Law, Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline, The People's Republic of Walmart, Sears (Eddie Lampert), Wells Fargo (Bill Bado), Frances Haugen Facebook testimony, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

LINKS
YouTube: https://youtu.be/BuWgxH8VpRI
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)