The One Thing in the Way

Strategy Design for Organizations in Motion

Format Keynote, 45 minutes

The One Thing in the Way is a 45-minute keynote on strategy design for executives whose organizations have a plan, a budget and a set of AI pilots and still cannot say what they will refuse or what stands in their way. It shows how to design a strategy around the one constraint that limits the whole organization.

What this strategy design keynote offers

Many leadership teams already have something they call a strategy, and it is usually a plan, a budget or a portfolio of pilots. Each of those documents is useful, and none of them states what the organization will give up or what stops it. The talk offers a method that asks three questions in a fixed order: what do we choose, what limits the whole system, and which challenge do we take on first. The choice comes first so the team knows which goal the constraint limits: it says where the organization will compete and how it will win, the constraint says what stops it, and the first challenge says where to start. When several leaders each name a different shortage, the method shows which one to relieve first, and why spreading funds thinly across every shortage leaves the binding one unrelieved. The same test applies to artificial intelligence: an AI program adds to the goal when it relieves the limitation that governs it and the organization changes the rules that grew up around that limitation.

What you will leave able to do

• Tell whether the document their organization calls a strategy is a strategy or a plan, a budget or a list of pilots, by asking what it refuses and what stands in its way.
• Ask the three questions in order about their own organization.
• Know where to look for the constraint: where work waits and how much of it is open at once, and in demand or in policy when no queue appears.
• Choose which of several real shortages to relieve first, by asking which one, relieved first, lets the others work.
• Judge an AI program by whether it relieves the limitation that matters to the goal, and put it in the same queue as all other work.

How the keynote runs

The talk opens on the three documents organizations most often mistake for a strategy, and on a short comedy clip of a conveyor that runs faster than the worker at its slowest step. It then sets out the three questions and a brief account of how the slowest step in a system sets the pace for all of it. Most of the talk follows the leadership team of a vehicle valuation and data company through one engagement: the leaders named their constraint at the first workshop, the company's own records confirmed it, and a portfolio board with a limit on every stage put the constraint in charge of the weekly decision about what starts. It closes on three tests a finished strategy has to pass (it names its constraint, puts its money at the constraint, and states what would show it wrong) and on why the rules a company adopts for one constraint have to be retired when the constraint shifts.

Questions about this keynote

Who is The One Thing in the Way for?

Executives whose organizations have a plan, a budget and a set of AI pilots and still cannot say what they will refuse or what stands in their way.

How long does it run?

Keynote, 45 minutes.

What do participants leave with?

The ability to tell a strategy from a plan, ask three questions in order, find the constraint, and judge an AI program by whether it relieves that constraint.

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Dispositioning Advantage

Designing Strategy Around Culture, Context and Capability

Format Keynote, 45 minutes

Dispositioning Advantage is a 45-minute keynote on strategy design for executive teams that are asked to cascade and deploy a strategy and find there is little strategy to deploy. It shows how to design strategy around what the organization is disposed to do, given its culture, its context and its capability, and how to change that disposition over time so the organization has more options for advantage than its competitors.

What this strategy design keynote offers

Many organizations call their plans, goals and aspirations a strategy, or group their funded projects by department and call the list a strategy, without naming the challenge in front of them. When a strategy is chosen, it is often written as if the organization could do anything. Every organization has a disposition, the way it reliably acts when choices get hard, set by its culture, the principles its people decide by, its context, and three practical limits: what its people know how to do, what its systems and processes allow, and how much time and how many people it has free. A strategy that asks for work the organization cannot yet support often stalls, because people return to familiar habits and the work stops where capacity runs out. Good strategy diagnoses the challenge, chooses an approach to meeting it, and commits to a few coordinated actions the organization can take, focused where its disposition gives it an edge. Leaders revise it after each action, because each action changes the situation the strategy was written for.

What you will leave able to do

• Tell a strategy from a plan, a goal or an aspiration, and say which their current document is.
• Ask the questions that reveal their organization's disposition: what it does reliably under pressure, what its people know how to do, what its systems allow, and where it has no capacity to spare.
• Judge how predictable their market is and how far they can influence it, and choose a planning approach and a pace of review that fit.
• Test a strategy they are about to adopt against the organization's disposition, and name the first coordinated actions it would need.
• Name the decisions the strategy depends on, who makes them, and whether the structure lets the right people decide at the right speed.

How the keynote runs

The talk opens on what strategy is and what it is not, and follows the loop of observing, orienting, deciding and acting. Its argument is that strategy succeeds or fails at the orienting step, where an organization's shared assumptions, habits, principles and past experience decide what it notices and how it interprets new information. It asks that observing include people at every level hearing from customers directly, and it shows how to recognize a disposition, how decisions flow through it, and how leaders change it by changing the principles, routines and capacity they control. It closes on matching the approach to the market: careful planning where the market is predictable, and where it is not, shorter cycles that sense the situation better and faster than competitors and unsettle their own cycles.

Questions about this keynote

Who is Dispositioning Advantage for?

Executive teams that are asked to cascade and deploy a strategy and find there is little strategy to deploy.

How long does it run?

Keynote, 45 minutes.

What do participants leave with?

The questions that reveal their organization's disposition, a test for a strategy they are about to adopt, and a way to match planning to how predictable their market is.

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Redesigned to Disrupt

How Successful Organizations Explore New Value While Running What Works

Format Keynote, 45 minutes

Redesigned to Disrupt is a 45-minute keynote on innovation strategy for executive teams whose core business is performing well while their new ventures keep stalling, and it shows them how to design an organization that finds its next source of value while it runs the current one.

What this innovation strategy keynote offers

Success often leads an organization to stop looking for new value. The returns from improving what already works come sooner and are easier to predict, so budgets, measures and habits favor them year after year, and the search for what comes next gets less each year. Many organizations then judge their new ventures with the tools they use to run the core: a detailed business case, a fixed plan, and delivery on time and on budget. Those tools assume the answers are already known, and in new territory nobody knows them yet. The talk separates three kinds of work: running the core business, growing the ventures that have started to earn, and testing options that may matter years from now. It gives leaders practices suited to each, and a way for the leadership team to fund and govern all three at once.

What you will leave able to do

• Recognize where their organization's success is crowding out its search for new value.
• Rewrite the business case for a new venture around its riskiest assumptions and the cheapest way to check each one.
• Frame a problem with four questions before funding a solution: who has it, what it is, why it matters, and where it happens.
• Judge each kind of work by measures suited to it, while rewarding leaders on the results of the whole company, so that early experiments stop looking like waste.
• Name one change to how their leadership team funds and reviews new ventures that they can start the following quarter.

How the keynote runs

The talk opens on the success trap, the reason thriving organizations explore less as they grow. It then shows the tools that fail in new territory and the remedies that often fail with them, such as an innovation team set apart with no tie to the leadership of the core business. Midway through, the audience works in pairs to frame a real problem with the four questions. It closes on running the three kinds of work at the same time: each has its own measures and, where it needs one, its own unit, and a closely connected leadership team makes sure the whole company learns from all three.

Questions about this keynote

Who is Redesigned to Disrupt for?

Executive teams whose core business is performing well while their new ventures keep stalling.

How long does it run?

Keynote, 45 minutes.

What do participants leave with?

A way to fund new ventures in stages around their riskiest assumptions, judge each kind of work by its own measures, and govern all three kinds at once.

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Why Transformations Stall

How Ways of Working Spread, Lose Their Context and Harden into Orthodoxy

Format Keynote, 45 minutes

Why Transformations Stall is a 45-minute keynote on organizational transformation for executives, transformation leads, coaches and practitioners who have watched agile, lean and DevOps spread through their organization without changing how it works. It explains why methods stall as they spread, and it gives leaders a way to decide, activity by activity, which method fits and where it will meet resistance.

What this organizational transformation keynote offers

Methods often spread because they solve real problems, and consultants, authors and the business press then promote them well beyond the work they were made for. Each method enters a culture with its own rules, norms, skills and lines of power, and the people who bring it in, the people who make it official and the stories told about both decide what it becomes. Over time an organization accumulates what the talk calls organizational debt: rules, norms and taboos that grew up around what it already does well and that pull its actual practice away from the structure it states. Communities then codify good methods into ideologies, use them as markers of who belongs, and apply them everywhere, so a variation-reducing method such as Six Sigma ends up on early-stage ideas, where it favors small refinements and crowds out exploration. The talk maps each activity by how new or settled it is and shows which methods fit where: exploratory methods for uncharted work, agile for developing products, and variation-reducing methods for stable operations. It argues for choosing and adapting methods by the context of the work, and for checking that each adaptation still serves the method's purpose.

What you will leave able to do

• Name the accumulated structures, rules and norms a new method will meet in their organization.
• Describe the shared beliefs, power structures and skills in their organization, and predict where a new method will meet resistance.
• Place activities by how new or settled they are, and match the method to each.
• Identify who discovers new practice and who turns it into standard practice, and decide what each stage of work needs from those people.

How the keynote runs

The talk opens on the problems in plain sight and states its conclusions first: start with the context, look at the whole system, adapt methods to the situation inside the culture, treat each method as a tool for a particular kind of work, and check change in small experiments. It then works through organizational debt, culture, and the link between power and practice. It maps the work by how far each activity has evolved, from new and uncertain to settled and standard, and places methods and people on that map. It closes on the roles every movement creates, the heretics who discover new practice, the high priests who make it standard and the saints whose stories outlive them, and on what a change from one kind of work to another requires: pragmatism about methods, and thought leaders treated as sources to test against the work.

Questions about this keynote

Who is Why Transformations Stall for?

Executives, transformation leads, coaches and practitioners who have watched agile, lean and DevOps spread without changing how their organization works.

How long does it run?

Keynote, 45 minutes.

What do participants leave with?

A way to assess the culture, power and skills a method will meet, match methods to how new or settled each activity is, and recognize who makes a method standard.

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A New Physics of Work

Who Is Accountable When a System Decides?

Format Keynote, 45 minutes

A New Physics of Work is a 45-minute keynote on AI and the organization for executive teams and boards whose companies are putting AI agents into their operations on the strength of a demonstration and a count of hours saved. It shows them how to decide what software should own, what people should keep, who answers for each decision, and what each choice is worth before the money is committed.

What this AI and the organization keynote offers

Some companies approve AI agents on terms they would refuse for other uses of capital: a vendor's demonstration, one risk rating for every automated decision, and the workforce question left until the software is live. The talk argues that many of the costly mistakes are made before any technology is chosen, when nobody has decided what the software will own, where a person stays accountable, or what return the work has to produce. It treats each automation decision as a capital decision and works through it one decision at a time, using Outcome-Owned Architecture, a method developed by Jamie Bernard with William Haas Evans. The method marks the line where software stops and a named person decides, prices each decision by what a wrong call would cost, and ranks the work by its return for every dollar of cost and risk. Its answer to who is accountable when a system decides is plain: every decision a system makes belongs to one named person, who owns the rules the system follows, has the authority to change those rules or stop the system, and answers for the result to a named executive who owns the operating model. The method is independent of any software vendor, so it can conclude that a company should wait, buy less, or keep a decision with its people.

What you will leave able to do

• State a proposed automation as a capital decision, with its value, its cost and its risk.
• Sort a flow of work into decisions software owns, decisions a named person signs off, and decisions people keep.
• Ask the two questions that set what a wrong automated call would cost: does the software act or only inform, and does it follow a fixed rule or make a judgment?
• Check a proposed change for three risks before ranking it by return: software given more authority than the task needs, personal data left exposed, and automated decisions about people.
• Name who answers for each decision software makes, including who can change its rules, override it or hand the work back to people, and choose one decision to test within thirty days.

How the keynote runs

The talk opens on companies automating without a model of the return, and on three failures that better software does not prevent on its own: the old silos return in software, human review turns into a rubber stamp, and the workforce finds out last. It then names the physics of work the functional organization chart was designed for, in which information came in batches, coordination was costly, execution needed a person and decisions waited for a schedule, and argues that agents can remove all four. An illustrative worked example follows a company assembled from four acquisitions, where qualifying a sales lead takes days of waiting between desks, and the talk redesigns that work around the few decisions that need a person and states what happens to every coordination job affected, including the jobs that end. It closes on the method in sequence: three classes of decision, the cost of a wrong call, the screens and the ranking by return, who owns and can stop each automated decision, the review work that remains, and the first thirty days.

Questions about this keynote

Who is A New Physics of Work for?

Executive teams and boards whose companies are putting AI agents into their operations.

How long does it run?

Keynote, 45 minutes.

What do participants leave with?

A way to treat each automation as a capital decision, sort decisions into software-owned, signed off and human, and name who can change or stop each automated decision.

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