Tools to find where your strategy is bending.
The Refraction Self-Assessment
A 5-minute structural read on your organization — for senior leaders.
Most diagnostics measure symptoms: engagement, alignment scores, sentiment. This one looks at the medium. In five minutes, it maps where strategic intent is most likely bending in your organization — by hierarchy layer, cultural boundary, and incentive system — and tells you which boundary to look at first.
- A structural read across the three modes of refraction — hierarchical, cultural, and process
- Your most probable refraction point — the boundary where intent is bending hardest
- A short interpretation guide written for executives, not for an OD consultant to translate
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Start with Chapter 1.
Read the opening chapter — The Strategy-Reality Gap: A New Explanation — and see the reframe for yourself: why roughly a third of your strategy's value disappears before it arrives, and why that's a transmission problem, not an execution one.
The following is the opening of Chapter 1 of Organizational Refraction.
Organizations realize, on average, only about two-thirds of the value their strategies promise. Mankins and Steele put the number at 63% in their 2005 HBR study — and in the two decades since, the management field has generated an enormous literature on how to close the gap. Better communication. Tighter alignment. Stronger accountability structures. More rigorous performance measurement.
None of it has worked — not because the advice is wrong, but because it addresses the wrong problem. The gap isn't a communication failure. It isn't an alignment failure. It isn't a commitment failure. It's a transmission failure. Strategic intent degrades between the room where decisions are made and the point where they're supposed to land — not because anyone dropped the ball, but because the medium it travels through has structural properties that bend it.
This book names that mechanism: organizational refraction.
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Organizational refraction, in plain language.
Short, self-contained explainers for leaders who want the model before the book.
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1
What is organizational refraction?
The core idea in three minutes: why intent bends instead of simply fading.
Article coming soon
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2
The three modes: hierarchical, cultural, process.
The three ways intent bends, with one familiar example each.
Article coming soon
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3
Refraction vs. resistance: why "people won't execute" is the wrong diagnosis.
How to tell a structural problem from a motivation problem.
Article coming soon
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4
Total internal reflection: the strategy everyone endorses and no one implements.
When intent never penetrates the boundary at all.
Article coming soon
Want the structural read on your own org?
Take the Refraction Self-Assessment →