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Borrowed Playbooks: Why Copying What Works Elsewhere Fails in Complex Organizations
The instinct to copy a proven playbook is strongest exactly when the problem is least copyable. Why best practices break in complex organizations — and what to do instead.
Adaptive Leadership for Higher Education: Leading Institutions Built to Resist Change
The enrollment cliff is fixed for two decades — and it’s an adaptive challenge, not a technical one. Why universities resist change by design, and how adaptive leadership helps them move anyway.
The Assumption Ledger: A Framework for Making Strategy Testable
Most plans are judged on how close results come to projections — a useless test in complexity. The Assumption Ledger makes strategy testable: six columns that turn hidden beliefs into dated tripwires.
The Permacrisis Operating Model: Leading When Disruption Is the Baseline, Not the Exception
Economic uncertainty just hit its highest level this century. When disruption is the baseline, a contingency plan isn’t enough — you need an operating model built to adapt.
The Tension Map: A Framework for Leading Through Competing Demands You Can’t Resolve
Some leadership arguments keep coming back because they were never problems to solve — they're polarities to manage. The Tension Map: a four-move framework for competing demands you can't resolve.
The Pilot Trap: Why Your Organization Keeps Experimenting and Never Scales
MIT found 95% of enterprise AI pilots delivered zero return. The failure isn't the technology — it's the adaptive work of scaling. Why experiments stall, and what adaptive leaders do differently.
Change Enablement: Why Adoption Is a Design Problem, Not a Communication Problem
The 70%-of-change-fails stat is unsupported — but the real problem is documented: 74% of leaders say they involved employees, yet only 42% felt included. Adoption is a design problem.
The Reorganization Reflex: Why Restructuring Rarely Fixes What's Actually Broken
When performance stalls, leaders reach for the org chart — yet only 23% of reorganizations meet their objectives. Why restructuring is a complicated answer to a complex problem.
The Decision Rights Map: A Framework for Ending the Quiet Stalemates That Stall Complex Work
Managers waste 58% of their decision-making time — not on wrong calls, but on decisions that circle and stall because no one can say who actually decides. A four-part map that ends the drift.
The Compliance Paradox: Why Adding Controls Makes Regulated Organizations Slower to Adapt
An average hospital assigns 59 employees to compliance — a quarter of them clinicians pulled from patient care. Every control was justified; the aggregate is an organization that can no longer move.
Strategic Planning Facilitation: Why Most Strategic Plans Become Documents, Not Decisions
Most strategic plans become documents instead of decisions. The version of strategic planning facilitation we run is built to close that gap — and it starts eight weeks before the offsite.
The Adaptive Pre-Mortem: A Framework for Stress-Testing Initiatives Before You Launch
Gary Klein’s pre-mortem is a 2007 classic — but its standard form catches the wrong category of failure on adaptive initiatives. Here is the four-prompt version we run.