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After every strategic failure, the same diagnosis arrives: the data was insufficient, the time was compressed, the mandate was unclear. The diagnosis is wrong. Strategic breakdown is behavioural, not informational, and that distinction changes what fixing it actually requires.
Angus Ess
July 2026
6 min read
In the World
Organisations can now generate more strategic intelligence about AI than they can act on. The problem is not informational. It is a crystallisation failure, and every conventional response to it makes it worse.
June 2026
7 min read
First Principles
Every organisation calls its plan a strategy. The two words describe different cognitive operations applied to different conditions, and conflating them is why strategies so regularly fail to survive contact with the reality they were designed for.
May 2026
5 min read
When players explained their reasoning aloud, their moves improved. That was the first observation. Communication doesn't follow strategy. For anything genuinely complex, it's part of how strategy takes shape.
April 2026
8 min read
The goal of most development programmes is better decisions. That is the wrong unit. What transfers across every problem a leader will face is not a better process for this one. It is judgment, and developing it requires different conditions entirely.
March 2026
From the Room
The opening sequence of a Go game is the clearest window into how someone reasons under uncertainty. Three patterns appear in the first five moves. What they reveal has nothing to do with Go.
February 2026
We had scheduled one game. We played three. What shifted between the first and the third had almost nothing to do with Go.
January 2026
One team talked. The other whispered. What the whispers cost them had nothing to do with information.
December 2025
Facilitators don't just watch the board. They listen to the conversation around it. After enough sessions, you can hear a decision disappearing before the team knows it's gone.
November 2025
The global leadership training market is worth $34 billion. At most 30 percent of it transfers to workplace behaviour. The industry has known this for decades. The problem was never the content.
October 2025
Go is often described as the most complex board game ever devised. But complexity is not what makes it useful as a practice environment. What matters is that every move changes the board, and consequences appear long after the decision.
September 2025
The RCDC-Engine is not a checklist. It is a cognitive mechanism, a structured cycle that transforms uncertainty into action through reasoning, crystallising, deciding, and communicating. Understanding how it stalls is as important as understanding how it flows.
August 2025
A first-order thinker applies the framework. A second-order thinker can observe themselves applying the framework, in motion, under pressure, and adapt their posture in real time. The difference is not knowledge alone. It is metacognitive awareness.
July 2025
9 min read
Go is not a metaphor for strategy. It is a practice environment. That distinction is what makes it work, and why the metaphor always breaks down.
June 2025
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