The AFS practices rest on assumptions most organizational approaches never examine — what an organization actually is, how anyone can claim to know its condition, what causes what inside it, what a practitioner owes the people they work with, and what practicing well requires beyond competence. This series argues for those assumptions rather than asserting them.
- Fitness, Judgment, Inquiry — a pragmatist epistemology, drawing on Dewey and Peirce: organizational fitness is a relational judgment made under conditions, not a state a model can specify in advance.
- When Cause Gets Confused for Control — the clean cause-and-effect story organizations tell about their own change is mostly confabulation.
- The Organization That Wasn’t There — the error underneath most change failures is ontological, not strategic: an assumption about what kind of thing an organization is, made before anything else, almost always wrong.
- The Honest Instrument — the practitioner corruption that isn’t quite lying: a diagnostic view filtered through what will land well before the client ever sees it.
- The Practitioner in the Room — the moment no methodology can specify in advance, when what’s actually happening in the room exceeds what the formal analysis captured.