Module three of the Anchor Method Intensive — the one on reconstructing a week from calendars — exposed that our “innovation office” had no standing in the Monday production meeting. We had been celebrating labs that the plant never intended to staff. I still think the homework load is heavy for people who already have night shifts of email, and I told faculty so.
Unedited enough
People who sat in the room.
★★★★☆
Discovery Framing Lab, day two. We finally wrote a question our legal team could live with. Four stars because the room was cold and the coffee was an afterthought. The brief, though, is still on our wall.
Kaohsiung. After the Governance Clinic we stopped opening new trials in Q4. That sentence would have been heresy a year earlier.
The Field Studio pairing was more confrontational than our last vendor. They refused to “socialize” a roadmap that had no owner for stopping work. Our CHRO found that bracing; our CFO found it overdue.
Longer notes
Two cases, without the glow
A chemicals group with seventeen pilots
A mid-sized producer on the west coast asked for “an innovation operating system.” What they had was seventeen overlapping trials, three of which shared a sponsor who had left. The Pulse Diagnostic mapped decision rights onto the actual production calendar, not the org chart in HR.
They killed nine pilots in week five. Two directors felt publicly exposed; we did not try to soothe that. Twelve months later the remaining eight had named operators and a shared stop rule. Revenue attribution stayed messy — we said so in the close letter.
A bank that wanted a lab and needed a queue
Retail leadership wanted a glass-walled lab. The Intensive cohort inside their digital unit argued for a queue: a visible list of experiments with expiry dates. The lab still got built — politics won a room — but the queue is what the risk committee now reads.
Limitation we own: we did not change incentive letters in year one. Without that, some product owners still start shadow trials. The case is unfinished on purpose.