I’m just going to say it: I don’t love the term psychological safety. Not because I disagree with what it’s trying to describe. I think every person in every organization deserves to work in a culture built on respect, clarity, gratitude, and accountability. But the term has gotten so loaded that half the room tunes out the second they hear it, and the other half thinks it means something it was never meant to describe. So I’m not going to use it. What I am going to talk about is what has to be true in a culture before your teams can do hard things… Name the real issue. Sit in an uncomfortable conversation. Tell you what’s broken instead of what’s safe to say. Without that foundation, your issue-solving process is working with incomplete information. The Part That Gets Skipped There’s a tool in EOS called the Issue Solving Track

If you want to truly strengthen the Vision component of your business, there’s one tool you can’t skip: the State of the Company meeting. Inside EOS, we talk about getting your vision “Shared by All.” That’s the goal. But if you’re not consistently sharing that vision with your entire organization, it stays stuck at the leadership level. And when that happens, your Vision component will only ever be about 50% strong. The SOC is how you close that gap. It’s the mechanism that takes your vision from the leadership table and puts it into the hands of your entire team. It’s how you create clarity, alignment, and belief across the organization. Without it, you’re asking people to execute on something they don’t fully understand. And that’s where things start to break down. From Awareness to Enrollment A strong State of the Company meeting doesn’t just inform your team. It enrolls

The Army does not build high-performing units by accident. It does it through clarity of purpose, defined roles, documented processes, consistent execution, and relentless accountability. Those are not military concepts. They are business concepts. And they are the foundation of EOS. Two Systems Built on the Same Truth The Entrepreneurial Operating System was designed to help small and mid-sized businesses get what they want. The Army was designed to accomplish the mission, protect the soldier, and bring everyone home. The objectives are different. The operating principles are nearly identical. Both systems recognize that people do not perform well in chaos. They perform well when they know the mission, understand their role, trust their teammates, and have a clear process to follow. Remove any one of those four things, and performance collapses. EOS gives businesses a framework to build all four, deliberately and consistently, across every level of the organization. Where

I was sitting across from a business owner recently. He was a sharp guy with a successful business and a lot of confidence in the future. When I asked him where he wanted the company to be in ten years, he leaned back and said something I’ve heard more times than I can count: “I don’t really think that far ahead. The market will dictate where we get to.” He wasn’t being dismissive. He honestly believed it. His business was doing great, he had a solid one-year plan, a decent budget, and a team that was executing. Why mess with a good thing? But the thing I’ve noticed after working with dozens of leadership teams is this: when you don’t have a long-term vision, you aren’t really leading. You’re just reacting. And there is a world of difference between the two. Finding Your North Star In the EOS world, we

I’m hoping enough time has passed that I can tell this story without incriminating myself. A few years ago, I inherited a beautifully built chicken coop and three very friendly hens from a friend in my network. This coop was small, just four feet by eight feet, but it was fully enclosed. The hens were raised by people who loved them, and they were used to free-ranging in their backyard in Portland. To get the chicken coop home, we had to disassemble it and load it onto a trailer. When we got home, we had the three hens join our existing flock until we could reassemble the coop. Once the coop was prepped and ready for the hens, we moved them into their home. Compared to the space we had just moved them from, it seemed like such a small place for these hens to spend all of their waking