1. Reconstruct the week
Calendars, not slogans. You rebuild how decisions actually moved in the last quarter, including the meetings that exist only to reassure a sponsor.
Flagship cohort
Anchor Method Intensive
Twelve weeks for people who already sit close to a portfolio and are tired of facilitating rooms that produce posters. You will run a six-week diagnostic on a live problem from your organization, with faculty critique that is specific enough to sting.
Ask for the next cohort dates
Modules
2. Decision rights on paper
Write who can start work, who can stop it, and who is merely informed. We treat informal vetoes as first-class data.
3. The kill criterion
A one-page rule for ending a trial. If you cannot read it aloud in a plant meeting, it is not finished.
4. Staffing without theatre
Match experiments to people who already have a day job. We practice saying no to “a small tiger team” that does not exist.
5. Live diagnostic
You run the six-week unit inside your organization with two faculty reviews. The artifact is a letter, not a deck.
6. Public critique
Alumni and peers annotate your letter. Praise without a page number is not allowed.
What you should be able to do afterward
Hold a sponsor meeting that produces a stop/continue, not a new workstream. Draft a decision-rights map that survives contact with HR. Brief a CFO using language that names cost of delay without borrowing startup vocabulary your board distrusts. You will not become a keynote speaker. You will become harder to ignore in the Tuesday operations huddle.
Instructor
Yen-ling Chou
Yen-ling spent a decade inside a Taiwanese electronics group before teaching. She still takes Field Studio pairings in chemicals and care. Her notes are famously short; her comments in the margin of a diagnostic letter are not.
Questions we would rather you ask early
Is this suitable if I have never facilitated?
No. The Intensive assumes you already run rooms or own a slice of a portfolio. If you need first-time facilitation, the Executive Briefing Series is a more honest starting point.
Can my company send a substitute if I travel?
Once. After that the seat is personal because critique is cumulative. We will not “catch someone up” with a recording of other people’s political maps.
What is the real limitation?
We cannot change your incentive letters in twelve weeks. If bonuses still reward opening new trials, graduates return to a system that punishes the kill criterion they just learned to write. We say this in week one so nobody pretends the course is a substitute for compensation design.
Do you offer a certificate?
A letter from faculty that names the diagnostic you ran. We do not sell framed badges.
From people who finished a cohort
The live diagnostic module collided with our year-end freeze. Faculty would not let me swap in a hypothetical. I resented that at the time; the letter we produced is the only artifact our plant manager still quotes.
Yen-ling’s comments on my decision-rights map were three sentences. I wanted more warmth. I needed the three sentences.