🗻5.2.2025 - Total addressable impact, System prompts, AI security

Every person in every team, has a deep need to climb mountains of success, not just run on treadmills.

S3T PodCast May 2, 2025

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In this Issue

• 🎯 Reframe Productivity with TAI
  Like TAM in investing, Total Addressable Impact (TAI) helps leaders visualize the gap between what their organization is doing now vs. what it could achieve—highlighting both unrealized potential and hidden negative impact.
• 🧠 Everyone Feels the Delta
  Team members instinctively sense when their work isn’t adding up to real impact. They want to do more that matters—but are trapped in systems full of administrivia and friction that make real progress feel out of reach.
• 🧪 Challenge Your Assumptions
  A bold thought experiment—what if 20% of current work was removed or restructured? Would your organization crumble, or would you finally unlock capacity for high-leverage, mission-critical initiatives?

Premium Content for Paying Members (Sign up for free 1 month trial):

• 💼 Investor Lens: TAI = Operational Traction
  For investors and board members, TAI offers early insight into whether a company has real traction—or is bogged down by operational drag. It’s a better indicator of long-term growth than busy dashboards and bloated OKRs.
• 🧗‍♂️ From Treadmill to Ascent
  The ultimate leadership question: Are we stuck on a treadmill of low-impact activity—or climbing toward peak performance and meaningful change? The difference is what we choose to let go of—and what we empower people to pursue.
• 🔐 AI vs. Cybersecurity: A High-Stakes Tug-of-War
  Organizations managing sensitive data face a no-win dilemma: unlocking AI's value often requires risky data access, while AI simultaneously heightens cyber threats—driving urgent interest in AI-native security solutions and startups.
• 🧠 AI Agents = New Governance Frontier
  ChatGPT’s recent behavioral issues spotlight the risks of opaque system prompts and inadequate testing. As AI agents grow more autonomous, current "ship now, patch later" approaches won't cut it—rigorous interpretability and safety must become non-negotiable.
• 🛠 AI Testing Just Got Serious
  Enterprise teams and investors should demand clarity on system prompts, edge-case handling, and behavior under pressure. Smart questions about governance and alignment will become your frontline defense in the AI-powered workplace.

[perspective]

Total Addressable Impact is your best Motivator for boosting Organizational Performance

Part 1 of a 2 part series on Work that Doesn't Work.

Expanding Impact: The motivation for moving beyond work that doesn’t work

The Total Addressable Impact infographic compares your current impact vs your potential impact both in positive and negative terms.

1. Total Potential Impact – the full scope of what your company could achieve.
2. Total Actual Impact – a much smaller circle, representing what’s actually being accomplished.
3. Total Negative Impact – the drag created by inefficiencies, unnecessary tasks, and misaligned efforts.

This visual is adapted from the common investor framework we call TAM (Total Addressable Market). It gives investors and founders a more concrete way to consider the potential of a company or product. Likewise our TAI (Total Addressable Impact) visual helps us think about the impact we're having vs the impact we could have.

What every team member intuitively knows...

Company staff at all levels usually have an intuitive sense of the positive impact they are having as well as the negative impact they are having. They naturally wish to increase the positive impact and decrease the negative. This is where the productivity paradox can become a hindrance.

Yes, we wish we could, but we just can't. Well, we think we can't.

Too often, organizations believe they’re at full capacity simply because project portfolios and backlogs look full. Everyone is busy. But busy doesn’t mean effective. If we want to maximize positive impact, we don’t just need to do less—we need to remove the administrivia and friction that eat up time and energy without driving real value.

Here’s a thought experiment:

• What if you took half of your accounting staff and had them work at a soup kitchen or a community initiative for a month? Most would say: We can’t afford that!
• But if you really looked at the return on investment of the work they’re doing today, would it be so clear-cut? How much of their time is spent on processes that don’t truly move the needle? How much of their effort is dedicated to tasks that could be streamlined or eliminated altogether? (Not to mention, these efforts probably don't even have any reputational or social good!)

This is where organizations get stuck - the tacit all too often unexamined assumption that every piece of work is necessary simply because it exists. But if we took a harder look at what’s actually generating value versus what’s just burning time, we might find that we’re holding on to low-impact work at the cost of something far more meaningful.

And here's where the motivation part comes in...

Changing the way people work is one of the toughest kinds of changes to drive in an organization. Letting go of the comfortable work processes and structures and moving into something tighter, faster, more skill-based is really scary. That's why it is crucial to connect people to the fundamental motivation that will inspire the needed level of commitment. This fundamental motivation is present in all of us - our desire to have an impact.

The first step is to have a conversation - guided by a graphic like the one above - that enables people and teams to consider the difference between the impact they're currently having vs the impact they'd like to have. This delta is universal: the sense that we could be having a greater impact, and we'd really like to. Notice it's the sense that we could be impacting more....not simply doing more.

The Shift: From Busywork to Real Impact

To bridge the gap between potential and actual impact, organizations must:

• Cut the administrivia – Identify the work that exists only because of outdated processes, unnecessary approvals, or excessive internal coordination.
• Redefine what ‘essential’ really means – Just because something has always been done doesn’t mean it needs to continue.
• Reallocate effort toward higher-value work – Not just for the company’s bottom line, but for broader societal impact.

When you remove the inefficiencies and align people’s work with what truly matters, you unlock a level of impact that seemed impossible before. We will dig into this more next week with the special feature on "The New Productivity Paradox - doing more and getting less done."

Implications for Investors and Stakeholders

If you’re an investor, board member, or advisor, this Total Addressable Impact lens is just as critical as the Total Addressable Market lens. Look beyond surface activity and ask: