The Kit Bag
Everything you need to run with it
Five resources. Download them all before you start.
The Field Manual
The full operating guide for a year of practice — every daily prompt, weekly reflection, and quarterly reset across all four quarters.
The Unspoken Truth
The 'why' behind the whole programme — the case that organisations are not machines and that collective judgment is the only durable capability.
Goldratt — Six Questions
The diagnostic form for treating leadership as a technology. Use it to find the real constraint in your organisation.
Drucker — Five Questions
The planning form for clarifying your mission, your customer, and your results. Complete it after the Goldratt diagnostic.
Managing Oneself (HBR)
Drucker's original article on feedback analysis, performance style, and values. The foundation the other two instruments rest on.
The Practice — Slide Deck
A 13-slide briefing on the four-quarter arc and the three methods. Use it to introduce the programme to a team or organisation before they begin.
The Argument
One approach in three moves
Most organisations already know they need high-performing teams. So they reach for the flavour of the month — the programme, the framework, the consultant. What they miss is that the programme is the language. The conditions are something else. You cannot buy them. You have to build them, deliberately, over time.
These three instruments are a single approach used in sequence. The first helps you see the system clearly. The second helps you clarify your role within it. The third grounds your answer in who you actually are.
The language is not the action. People listen to what you demonstrate.
Goldratt
See the system
When you treat leadership and followership as a technology, you can find the real constraint — not the presenting symptom. Where are decisions being held that should be distributed? What are people doing to work around that?
Drucker — Five Questions
Clarify your role
Given what you now know about this organisation and this constraint — what is your mission here? Who are you serving? What does your contribution actually look like in practice?
Drucker — Managing Oneself
Know yourself
You cannot answer the Five Questions honestly without knowing how you actually work, what you are genuinely strong at, and what you value. This is the foundation the other two instruments rest on.
What we are really working towards is a feedback analysis of demonstrated decisions — based on your context and your actual strengths.
The Instruments
Pick them up and use them
These are not frameworks to study. They are instruments that become more useful the more you use them. The questions, the forms, and the source materials are all here.
Method 01 · Eli Goldratt
The Goldratt Diagnostic
When you look at leadership and followership as a technology, you can examine your organisation the way an engineer examines a system — to find where the real constraint is and what it would take to remove it.
Method 02 · Peter Drucker
Drucker's Five Questions
Given what you now know about this organisation and this constraint \u2014 what is your mission here, who are you serving, and what does your contribution actually look like in practice?
Method 03 · Peter Drucker
Managing Oneself
You cannot answer the Five Questions honestly without knowing how you actually work, what you are genuinely strong at, and what you value. The feedback analysis is the practice that reveals this — not what you think your strengths are, but what they actually are. The goal is a feedback analysis of demonstrated decisions, calibrated against your context and your actual strengths. This is the foundation the other two instruments rest on.
The Practice Arc
A year of deliberate practice
The instruments are applied across four quarters. Each quarter has a single focus. The practice runs on a daily rhythm — two minutes to capture what you noticed, fifteen minutes each week to reflect on the pattern.
The 4+1 Rhythm
Daily
Capture
2 min
One observation. What did I notice? What did I do? What happened?
Weekly
Reflect
15 min
What was the most common pattern this week?
Monthly
Review
30 min
What recurring theme should I act on?
Quarterly
Reset
60 min
What did I learn? What changes for next quarter?
Annual
Retrospective
Half-day
How has my judgment changed from the start of the year?
Q1
Notice
See the system clearly
Run the Goldratt diagnostic. Apply the Five Questions. Use Managing Oneself to understand your own starting point. You are building an honest picture — not the official version.
Weekly reflection
“What was the most common pattern I noticed this week?”
Q2
Act
Run small experiments
Take one constraint from Q1. Before you act, write down what you expect to happen. Design the smallest possible test. Act. Each week, compare what happened to what you wrote. That gap is your feedback analysis — available immediately, not after nine months.
Weekly reflection
“What was the gap between the action I intended and the result I got?”
Q3
Connect
Build lateral trust
Distributed judgment only works when people know each other's strengths, working styles, and values. This quarter is about making that knowledge explicit and shared.
Weekly reflection
“What was the most surprising difference between my perspective and someone else's?”
Q4
Teach
Transfer the capacity
See one. Do one. Teach one. The technology scales through people, not programmes. This quarter you pass on what you have learned to someone who was not in the room.
Weekly reflection
“What condition did I create this week that enabled someone else to act with more autonomy?”
The flywheel
The four quarters feed back into each other. Each cycle sharpens the feedback analysis of your demonstrated decisions. The tool below is where you run it.
Start the PracticeThe Field Manual
A Year of Practice
The full operating guide for the year-long practice. It contains every daily prompt, every weekly reflection question, and every quarterly reset for all four quarters. Start with Q1 below.
Q1 — Notice
Daily Prompts to Get Started
Each day, capture one observation answering three questions: What did I notice? What did I do? What was the result? Two minutes. No more.
Month 1 — The Physics of the Room
Notice when the energy in a meeting changed. What was the trigger?
Notice when someone with formal authority spoke, and how the conversation shifted.
Notice when someone without formal authority spoke, and whether they were heard.
Notice a moment of silence. What was the silence about?
Month 2 — The Unwritten Rules
Notice a workaround someone used to get their job done.
Notice a decision that was made in a hallway or a side-channel, not in a formal meeting.
Notice a rule that was followed to the letter, even when it made no sense.
Notice a rule that was broken to do the right thing.
Month 3 — The Flow of Information
Notice a piece of information that was shared freely and openly.
Notice a piece of information that was withheld or filtered.
Notice when you yourself chose to filter information before passing it on.
Notice a question that someone asked that nobody was willing to answer.
End of Q1 Reset: What is the single most surprising thing you learned about your organisation this quarter?
The Reading
The Unspoken Truth
A field manual for leading in a world that does not make sense. It is the “why” behind everything on this site — the case that organisations are not machines, that the same principles discovered on the battlefield and in the laboratory apply to your team, and that the work of building collective judgment is the only durable capability in a complex world.
The Machine Mindset — the ghost of the industrial age that defaults to control, process, and the illusion that you can spreadsheet your way to victory.
The U.S. Army and a handful of rogue scientists discovered the same truth from opposite ends of the universe. The Army calls it Mission Command. The scientists call it Complexity Leadership Theory. They are two words for the same thing.
Judgment is not learned in a classroom. It is forged in deliberate, consistent, daily practice. Function over language. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Are you cutting stones, or are you building a cathedral? The Machine Mindset will pay you to cut stones. Mission Command asks you to bring your whole self — your judgment, your courage, your soul.
The Invitation
This is an approach worth exploring.Help us develop it.
Take these instruments into your context. Apply them with your team, your organisation, or just yourself. The approach gets sharper with practice — it is a flywheel, not a course. It might not be for everyone. Come back and tell us what you found — what worked, what did not, and what your context revealed that we have not seen yet.