Narrator: A team huddles in a conference room, now a “war room,” surrounded by whiteboards covered in frantic notes, rolls of paper, and the low hum of jazz music. They have a directive from senior leadership: create a brand-new, high-stakes sales onboarding program from scratch in just three months. The pressure is immense. The old way of doing things—dumping hundreds of documents on new hires and hoping for the best—has led to burnout, high attrition, and missed quotas. Now, a key executive, Maya, is coming for a progress update, and the team has nothing polished to show. They have progress, but it’s messy, complex, and unfinished. The team lead, Olivia, makes a radical decision: instead of hiding the chaos, she will invite Maya directly into the war room to see the process, warts and all. This high-stakes gamble on transparency over perfection lies at the heart of the modern business dilemma.

In her book, Radical Outcomes: How to Create Extraordinary Teams That Get Tangible Results, author Juliana Stancampiano argues that this is the only way forward. She provides a new framework for collaboration and execution, designed to cut through the corporate "insanity" of wasted effort and deliver what actually matters: tangible, measurable results.

Narrator: Many organizations are trapped in a state of what Stancampiano calls "insanity"—investing enormous time, money, and energy into initiatives that yield no clear results. Executives feel their investments disappear into a "black hole," enablement teams are perpetually understaffed and overwhelmed, and employees are bombarded with irrelevant information. This dysfunction is perfectly captured in the story of Omen, Inc., a company struggling to adapt.

After nine months of analysis, Omen’s leadership decides to create new sales roles but gives the enablement team an impossibly tight deadline to get them ramped up. The team leader, Jack, is told that feedback on his team's existing training programs is overwhelmingly negative. The programs are seen as disconnected from the business's real needs. This scenario illustrates a core problem: organizations often respond to change by doing more of what already isn't working. They create "random acts of content," overwhelming employees with information that lacks relevance and connection to measurable goals. The book points to research showing that the average employee has only 24 minutes a week for formal learning, making the common "drinking from a fire hose" approach completely ineffective. To escape this cycle, a fundamental shift is required—away from simply creating "stuff" and toward a process focused on achieving specific outcomes.

Narrator: The solution begins with rethinking the nature of teamwork. Stancampiano argues for building "ensembles," not just teams. The difference is profound. A team can be competitive and siloed, but an ensemble, like a jazz duo, operates on collaboration, improvisation, and a deep, shared understanding of a structured process. The book uses the metaphor of two jazz musicians performing "Autumn Leaves." They start with a familiar structure but quickly begin to improvise, weaving in musical jokes and complex rhythms. They can do this because they have both mastered the fundamentals and established a process for working together. They have role clarity, a common goal, and a code of conduct built on trust.

This is what extraordinary business teams do. They are built on what Google’s Project Aristotle identified as the number one factor in team success: psychological safety. This is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Members feel they can admit ignorance, ask for help, and propose ideas without fear of judgment. This environment is cultivated by a leader who, like Olivia in the book's narrative, focuses on managing the ensemble's energy, ensuring everyone feels supported and has their back. This foundation of trust and structure is what allows for the agility needed to achieve radical outcomes.

Narrator: A core failure of the "insane" corporate cycle is the confusion between outputs and outcomes. An output is the thing you create: a training course, a presentation, a report. An outcome is the measurable result you achieve: a 20% reduction in new-hire ramp time, a 15% increase in quota attainment. Stancampiano stresses that high-performing organizations measure the impact of their work and connect it directly to a business outcome.

The book tells a cautionary tale of a lead designer who, observing that employees were stressed during a merger, decided to create a course on "stress management." While well-intentioned, this was a classic output-focused action. It wasn't tied to any specific business metric or role-based success. The value was impossible to explain to executives because it didn't solve a defined business problem. In contrast, when Olivia’s team is tasked with fixing the sales onboarding, they don't just start creating content. They first work with the stakeholder, Maya, to define the desired outcome: reducing the time it takes for new hires to achieve their sales quota. Every subsequent action is then measured against this single, clear goal. The book’s central mantra is a challenging question: if you can't connect your work to a measurable outcome, should you be doing it at all?

Narrator: Once an outcome is defined, the work must be structured to avoid overwhelming the audience. This requires two key elements: architecture and design. Architecture is the framework that organizes and sequences information, preventing the "random acts of content" problem. It translates the business outcome into a logical journey for the learner. The book's protagonist, Olivia, has a breakthrough moment at an art exhibition for the Japanese artist Hokusai. She sees his unfinished prints and the layered stencils used to create them, realizing that a complex, beautiful final product requires a clear, repeatable process and a set of guiding principles. Her team needs the same thing: an architecture for their onboarding program that ensures every piece of content has a purpose and a place.

This architecture is then brought to life through human-centered design. The experience must be valuable, easy to navigate, and make the user feel good. Stancampiano points to the seamless experience of ordering coffee from a mobile app. It works because the company obsessed over the user's environment, role, and time constraints. In contrast, corporate learning often fails because it ignores these realities, creating virtual courses for employees who lack the right technology or delivering information overload to people who have no time. By focusing on architecture and design, teams can create experiences that are not only effective but also respectful of the human on the receiving end.

Narrator: The final piece of the puzzle is a mindset shift away from perfectionism and toward iterative progress. The book champions the principle of "Good Enough for Right Now" (GEFRN). This doesn't mean producing sloppy work; it means embracing that the process will be messy and that showing unfinished work early and often is the fastest way to get feedback and improve. The fear of being wrong often paralyzes teams, causing them to hide their work until a "big reveal," by which time it may be too late to course-correct.

This comes to a head in the story of Olivia's team. When the executive Maya demands a progress update, the team panics because they don't have a polished demo. Instead of creating a sanitized PowerPoint, Olivia brings Maya into the messy "war room." She walks her through the whiteboards, the unresolved questions, and the complex process maps. She chooses transparency over polish. This act of vulnerability, of showing work that is GEFRN, is transformative. Maya sees the depth of the thinking, understands the challenges, and becomes the team's biggest advocate. This is how radical outcomes are activated: not through a single, perfect launch, but through a continuous, patient, and collaborative process of making iterative progress, step by messy step.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Radical Outcomes is that the path to extraordinary results is not about working harder within a broken system, but about fundamentally changing the system itself. It requires replacing the chaos of random outputs with a structured, human-centered process focused relentlessly on achieving clear, measurable business outcomes. It’s a shift from individual heroics to the collaborative power of a true ensemble.

The book leaves us with a challenging but empowering thought: true transformation begins when we have the courage to let go of what we think we know, embrace the messiness of the creative process, and trust that showing our work—early, often, and imperfectly—is the only way to build something truly remarkable. The ultimate question is not whether your organization is perfect, but whether it is making progress.