Gonglomerate
An organization where silos keep each other hostage.
Read the ideaThe ideas
Seven ideas to free an enterprise
From diagnosis to cure, in the order of the book. Each idea in a sentence — and a short page when you want more.
The diagnosis
The Fallacy of One
One platform. One suite. One partner. One “solution.” The relief in the room is the tell.
The quiet, collective conviction that a single system, vendor or methodology will save you from the messy reality of your own complexity. It won’t.
Read the ideaThe shift
Abundance & Scarcity
AI makes candidates cheap. Commitment stays expensive.
Read the ideaThe cure
The Organizational Brain
A maintained, human-owned record of what the company wants — and why.
Read the ideaThe Infinite Optionality Engine
Put the enterprise in the conditional.
With the Brain in place, AI makes strategic alternatives cheap to create, compare, challenge and keep alive. Not an oracle — an ensemble of futures, with the assumptions showing.
Read the ideaGreenfield Thinking
Don’t shrink the company. Strip it.
Read the ideaOrchestration Governance
Govern the seams, not just the silos.
Read the ideaA–Z
Glossary
The book coins a few words. Here they are in one place.
- 1:200
- The share of large projects that land on budget, on schedule and with their promised benefits (Bent Flyvbjerg’s database of 16,000+ projects). The book’s guiding number.
- Bolt-on AI
- Attaching AI to existing processes, data and authority structures without changing them. Useful locally; it does not release the hostages. Abundance & Scarcity →
- Cognitive tax
- The daily cost in human attention of running a liberated, judgment-heavy enterprise. It must be funded, not merely consumed.
- Computable Enterprise
- An organization whose intent, rules and dependencies are explicit enough for people and machines to query, test and act on.
- Enterprise Upside Down
- The shadow replica beneath the official company: home-brewed databases, monster macros, private spreadsheets and undocumented code.
- Executive Security Blanket
- The slide deck: it does not make the world less uncertain, it makes uncertainty easier to hold.
- Fallacy of One
- The belief that one platform, one suite, one partner or one “solution” will save you from the messy reality of your own complexity. The Fallacy of One →
- Flood of Governances
- Ten well-meaning committees, each formed for a good reason, together creating an ocean nobody can swim in. Orchestration Governance →
- Gonglomerate
- An organization where silos keep each other hostage. Large enough to fragment, successful enough to be tired, comfortable enough to stop fighting. Gonglomerate →
- Greenfield Thinking
- Keeping the intent and the real constraints while removing history’s right to answer first. Strip, don’t shrink. Greenfield Thinking →
- Infinite Optionality Engine
- Using AI and the Organizational Brain to put the enterprise in the conditional: alternatives that are cheap to create, compare and keep alive. The Infinite Optionality Engine →
- Intent
- What the organization wants, and why. Its first practical expression is strategy. Scarce, human and — in most companies — never properly written down. The Organizational Brain → The cartoon →
- Iron Law of Megaprojects
- Bent Flyvbjerg’s finding: over budget, over time, under benefits — over and over again.
- Meta Grid
- Ole Olesen-Bagneux’s concept of governed, uniform access to the distributed descriptions a company already has — without moving them into one database.
- Orchestration Governance
- Governance of the seams between domains: making dependencies visible and resolving trade-offs no single committee owns. Not an eleventh committee. Orchestration Governance →
- Orchestration Governance Center (OGC)
- A small body, reporting to the CEO or board, that acts like a constitutional court for the enterprise’s shared formats and guardrails. Orchestration Governance →
- Organizational Brain
- The maintained, human-owned record of the organization’s intent, meanings, commitments and learning — readable by people, usable by machines, open to correction by evidence. The Organizational Brain →
- Progressive formalization
- Begin in rich human language; add formality only where the cost of ambiguity demands it — sufficient formality, at the latest responsible moment.
- Shadow IT, Data, Architecture, Intent
- The four layers of the Enterprise Upside Down. The deepest — shadow intent — is the unwritten treaties and incentives that decide how decisions are really made.
- Solution-speak
- Using “solution” as a verbal anesthetic in place of precise words. When everything is a solution, nothing is.
- Spec-Driven Organization (SDO)
- An organization in which living, owned specifications — not slide decks — are the primary medium of coordination between people and AI.
- Standing Evaluation
- A serious option that was not chosen, kept asleep with explicit conditions for reopening it. Options sleep; they do not freeze. The Infinite Optionality Engine →
- Wall of PoCs
- The pile of AI proofs-of-concept that impress in the demo and are never seen again.