A 52-week practitioner series translating a decade of research on AI transformation into board-ready frameworks, diagnostic questions, and operational artifacts — published three times a week on Substack.
DRT Into Action — The 52-Week Practitioner Series
Each week follows a three-part structure: a Concept Primer that reframes a managerial object — what a decision is, what an event is, what a seam is — so it can be governed rather than managed; a Boardroom Reframe that converts the concept into the hard questions and decision gates executive teams can actually use; and a Playbook Build that produces a concrete artifact — a register, a diagnostic test, a drill, a dashboard — ready to apply immediately.
The series is grounded in the Dynamic Relationality Theory trilogy, the co-creation research program, and the REAL governance framework. By the end of 52 weeks, readers have a complete operating system for governing AI-enabled organizational transformation: an MLXE map, a REAL toolkit, governance and repair cadences, and a board-ready coherence dashboard.
Started on January 1, 2026. Three posts per week. All back issues available in the archive.
Featured posts — four curated picks:
This is the heart of the page. Each card should show: a format label, the post title as a link, one pull-quote sentence from the post, and the week number. Here are the four I’d recommend, and exactly why.
Card 1 — Concept Primer · Week 8
Events vs. Initiatives: The Unit of Change Is the Event
“Most transformation programs fail in a familiar way: the organization does many things, on schedule, with competent project management — and yet the underlying system stays brittle. DRT treats this as a modeling error: we have been trained to treat initiatives as the primary unit of change. But the system itself does not reorganize around initiatives.”
Why this post: It opens with a finding that every executive has experienced and nobody has named precisely, and the counter-claim is immediately useful. It’s the most accessible Concept Primer in the archive — no technical vocabulary in the first three paragraphs — and it represents the signature move of the series: taking a familiar problem and showing that the diagnosis has been wrong all along.
Card 2 — Boardroom Reframe · Week 11
From Boxes to Seams: The Governance Object You’re Probably Not Governing
“Boards can ‘do governance’ while drift accelerates. They govern boxes, while the system runs on seams. The board’s real object of oversight is not the initiative list — it is the system of decision travel: where does authority actually move, where does accountability thin out, where do evidence rules change as decisions cross interfaces?”
Why this post: The title is the sharpest in the archive for an executive audience — “the governance object you’re probably not governing” is a challenge that demands a response. The Boardroom Reframe format is at its best here: it takes a structural problem (the board’s frame mis-specifies what it’s governing) and gives a concrete alternative with three named flaws to correct. It’s also the post most directly connected to the advisory offer.
Card 3 — Boardroom Reframe · Week 6
From “Move Fast” to “Learn Safely”: Speed Without Invariants Is Drift Financed on the Balance Sheet
“In Timeline A, the board hears ‘we must move faster.’ Speed amplifies hidden coupling, governance becomes retrospective narration, and trust becomes a demand rather than a property. In Timeline B, the board reframes speed: the rate at which we can learn without violating invariants. That sentence does two things the ‘move fast’ story cannot: it forces explicit invariants, and it turns change into an observable, classifiable event that can be authorized, monitored, and reversed.”
Why this post: The “two timelines” format is maximally accessible — readers can self-diagnose which timeline their organization is in within the first minute of reading. The subtitle is the entire argument, which is exactly what a good Boardroom Reframe does. This post also directly addresses the board-level framing of AI governance, which is the entry point for the advisory practice.
Card 4 — Playbook Build · Week 8
The Event Ledger and the Reopen → Redesign → Re-stabilize Loop
“Most organizations measure event-like material through initiative-shaped proxies: tickets closed, time to resolve, milestones hit, adoption recovered. These metrics are not useless — they are aimed at the wrong object. They track operational closure, not systemic re-stabilization. The Event Ledger treats events as rupture-driven state transitions that propagate across the organization and persist until assumptions have been reopened, couplings redesigned, and stability re-achieved.”
Why this post: Shows the Playbook Build format — that the series doesn’t just diagnose, it produces usable artifacts. The Event Ledger is a concrete deliverable readers can start using immediately, and the loop structure (Reopen → Redesign → Re-stabilize) is one of the series’ most transferable operational ideas. Showing a Playbook Build on the Writing page signals to prospects that engagements produce deliverables, not just frameworks.
Recent posts block:
Below the four featured cards, add a “Recent Posts” section showing the last six posts automatically via RSS (titles and dates only, each linking to Substack). This section updates itself without any manual work on your end — important given the teaching load.
Substack subscribe embed:
At the bottom of the page, a subscription call-to-action with Substack’s native embed widget. One line of description above it: Join practitioners and researchers receiving three essays per week on AI transformation governance. Then the embed form.