A Discussion Guide

Hacking the Scoreboard runs in five parts, and the guide below follows them. A reading group can take one part per session and finish in five or six meetings, or pick a handful of questions and cover the book in one. The questions assume people have read the material, but most of them work from lived experience too, because the book's subject is the workplace everyone in the room already knows.

Opening questions

1. The book opens with a claim: every organization keeps two scoreboards, and nobody posts the second one. When did you first discover that the published rules of a workplace were not the operating rules? What did the discovery cost you?
2. The author says the book is for anyone who has suspected that everyone else got a handbook they never received. Does that describe you? What would have been in your missing handbook?

Part I · See the System

1. Chapter 1 opens with the first platypus specimen to reach London, and the naturalist who cut it with scissors, hunting for the stitches: faced with a real animal its categories couldn't hold, the institution questioned the animal. Organizations flatten people the same way, into single labels like "executive presence" or "leadership maturity." What label have you been graded with, and what specific behavior was hiding underneath it?
2. Nearly everyone runs a private workaround: the routine, the script, the quiet hour, the rule quietly bent, that makes the job doable in a system that wasn't designed for how they work. What's yours? And what would it mean if the system were designed so nobody needed one?
3. "What gets rewarded is what gets done. What gets tolerated is what gets repeated." What does your organization tolerate that its values statement says it shouldn't? Who absorbs the cost of the tolerance?
4. Chapter 4 argues that nobody will write the real rules down, because a written rule can no longer be bent. Test it: write down one unwritten rule of your workplace. Would you be comfortable saying it in a meeting? What does your answer tell you?

Part II · Make Your Work Visible

1. "Your work does not speak for itself. It needs a carrier." What carries the account of your work today: you, your boss, your witnesses, or nobody? Where does the account go when you're not in the room?
2. Mentors explain the game. Sponsors get you chosen. Who has actually put your name forward somewhere you couldn't see it happen? If nobody comes to mind, what would have to change for someone to take that bet on you?
3. The people who decide your future can't see your full career. They see a talent profile: a rating, a few examples, a reputation, and the testimony of whoever has worked with you. What's in your talent profile right now, and who assembled it?
4. Have you ever held a role that was bigger than your title, or a title that was bigger than your role? Which direction is the gap running now, and what is it costing you?

Part III · Truth Under Pressure

1. Chapter 10 defines story drift as the persistent gap between current evidence and the assumptions still directing an organization's resources, processes, and decisions. Where is your organization still spending money, time, or people on an assumption the evidence stopped supporting? How long has the gap been open?
2. Think of a warning that you, or someone near you, raised and that didn't land. The book says acting in time takes evidence, authority, a decision path, and protection. Which one was missing?
3. "What you say is scored. So is what you leave unsaid." Where has candor billed you? Where has silence billed you? Which invoice was larger?
4. Chapter 12 describes becoming the storage system for a truth the organization refuses to take custody of. Have you carried knowledge like that? What would it have taken to hand it somewhere: an owner, a decision, a date?

Part IV · Where Decisions Actually Get Made

1. Recall the last decision that mattered to you. Had it already been made before the meeting convened? Were you part of the pre-work, or only the announcement?
2. The book distinguishes tailwind conditions from headwind conditions, and warns that the move that earns capital in one spends it in the other. Which mode is your organization in right now? What independent signals say so?
3. "Not all seats can hold all truths." What's a truth you hold that your current seat can't carry? Whose seat could carry it, and what would it take to get it there?

Part V · What the Game Costs You

1. The book separates capability, what you can produce once, from capacity, what you can produce repeatedly without spending more than you can restore. What kind of work bills you the most? Is its recovery tail anywhere on your calendar?
2. Can you get through a workday without performing a version of yourself built for the audience? If not, which parts of the performance are a fair price, and which are running up a bill you never agreed to?
3. Every strength has an overdone version: Fair becomes Cold, Decisive becomes Steamroller. What's the shadow version of your best trait? Who pays for it, and have they ever told you?
4. The book names an adaptation spectrum: self-regulation, translation, conformity, self-erasure. Where on it were you five years ago? Where are you now? Which direction are you moving?

Closing questions

1. The book ends on authorship: knowing what you're preserving, what you're changing, who is paying, and whether the price is still yours to choose. Say your four clauses out loud, or write them down.
2. The author says every rule in the book is a penalty he got flagged for. Which rule had already flagged you before you knew its name?
3. What will you do differently in the next thirty days? Name something small enough to actually happen.