Your week should be full of interesting hats

Your week should be full of interesting hats.

(not literal hats)

The rate of change in 2026 is sufficient that “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good” is a line I’ve been using for most of this year when encouraging individuals to progress their own learning journey.

I now think that’s backwards. I’m seeing 2026 paying outsized rewards to individuals and teams that demonstrate adaptability, and this is built atop an aggressive approach to continuous learning/improvement.

This means for the last couple of weeks I’ve instead been framing it as “Perfection in 2026 is (at least) one small learning increment every day”. This is a Hat.

…if you use James Clear’s pattern for assessing the reversibility of an experiment:

• Hats: Low risk, can be reversed in a few minutes • Haircuts: Modest blast radius, can be reversed in a few weeks • Tattoos: Genuine long-term decision

I’ve framed this here for individuals, but the broader concept is just as applicable to teams:

Are team members empowered to experiment with Hat-style change during their day to day? Are they encouraged to do so?

Does your team’s weekly or fortnightly meeting have a formal continuous improvement standing agenda item for people to bring up Haircuts they think might be valuable? Are they encouraged to do so? How often are we acting on them?

This wouldn’t be a post from me if I didn’t mention AI, so I’ll just say “Are we capturing the output of all this continuous improvement in a place where both humans and agents can read it?”

For any team that hires knowledge workers, this context layer we’re gradually building is what allows Person B in a team to get better quality and velocity from the work their agents do, because Person A in their team found a great Hat last Tuesday.

Continuous Learning / Continuous Improvement has always been a core tenet of the highest performing teams; it’s is just becoming more apparent in this era.