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Research Notes

What the research actually says.

Longer-form synthesis of the evidence on why executive teams stall — sourced, quoted accurately, and translated into the specific disciplines you can act on. No inflation, every claim cited.

Latest · July 2026

Sprawl persists because it works at first

Every over-committed team is told to focus — a destination with no mechanism. Sprawl persists because load speeds a team up first and slows it down a quarter later, so the cost gets misattributed. The fix is a limit, not a list.

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July 2026 More candor will make it worse The standard fix for a team that tolerates mediocrity is more candor. For most executive teams it makes things worse. Two meta-analyses disagree about task conflict — but agree on the one variable that decides which way it goes. July 2026 Your post-mortem would not have qualified The best-evidenced practice in management takes under twenty minutes and works about as well for teams as individuals — yet almost no executive team runs a session that would qualify. Why the constraint is safety, not process. July 2026 What decision paralysis actually costs Every dollar figure for the cost of indecision traces back to marketing, not research. What the primary studies actually establish about decision speed — and the three places paralysis really costs a team, none of which appear on a P&L. July 2026 Your leadership team is aligned. So why isn’t anything happening? Executives say they’re aligned, then the priorities don’t move. BCG, David Livermore, and twenty years of consulting all circle the same finding: alignment is the symptom, not the cause — and one of four disciplines has quietly broken underneath it.

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