Eric Kebschull

Every organization has patterns that look productive on the surface but quietly undermine its ability to learn and adapt. Chris Argyris called these defensive routines: habitual behaviors people enact to protect themselves from embarrassment or threat*. They feel normal. They often feel necessary. And they are almost always invisible to the people enacting them. What makes defensive routines so damaging is not their mere existence, but their self-preserving nature. The very behaviors that...

Your star performer just gave notice. Your first instinct is probably predictable: call the recruiter, update the job posting, start lining up interviews. On paper, this looks like a straightforward replacement problem. It isn’t. Because that person wasn’t just doing their job. They were the one people went to when things got stuck. They knew which clients needed reassurance and which needed space. They understood why certain approaches worked in your organization, and why others failed. That...

Change is often framed as a strategic exercise. New plans. New structures. New initiatives designed to fix problems that keep resurfacing. Whether or not fixing the same problems over and over again is a mark of success in said strategic exercises is a debate for another article.... so let's focus on the merits of change as strategy. But how many change management teams and organizations actually understand the dynamics of change from the ground floor? What makes real change actually...