Breakfast of insulation

I’m at a buffet breakfast in Southeast Asia. Japanese, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese — flavor-soaked and nuanced dishes.

The hotel gets a stream of foreign guests. The gentleman to my right is having a white bread slice, one egg, a banana — boring, motel-like food. He’s not taking risks on food choices.

McDonald’s and Starbucks built empires on this. Not quality — predictability. Most people default to minimizing downside over capturing upside. That’s the baseline behavior before any system intervenes.

Leaders forget this. Your team’s behavior isn’t a personality trait — it’s a response to the environment you built. What you reward and who you hire are the biggest lever you have.

Some unlearned to be curious. They got punished for experiments. A risk-averse employee still manually formats slides for two hours. Trying the AI tool and getting it wrong carries a cost they’ve been trained to avoid. Unless you’ve explicitly made experimentation safe, they won’t touch it.

You work with people, but more importantly you cultivate the habitat they operate in. Did you tune it for stability or also asymmetric returns?