This companion explains why TIP brings these methods together and how we adapt them through real work. They help people choose worthwhile problems, test assumptions and act on evidence. AI changes the speed, cost and range of experiments, alongside customer expectations and competitive responses.
A customer is anyone who is not you: someone whose outcome depends on your work. This includes colleagues as well as external customers. The test is whether their outcome improves, alongside the effort and cost required to deliver it.
What endures and what needs to change
Decision lens | Enduring discipline | Adaptation for AI |
|---|---|---|
Desirability | Establish a real problem and evidence that people will use or buy the answer. | Retest expectations, alternatives and trust. Generated personas and positive reactions are hypotheses, not observed demand. |
Feasibility | Prove that the whole service can work dependably in its intended setting. | Use faster prototypes and technical trials early. Separately verify data, integrations, exceptions, security and operation. |
Viability | Show that value exceeds the full cost of delivery and adoption. | Recalculate build and run costs, pricing, acquisition, assurance and support. Cheaper development can help both us and competitors. |
Human adoption | Enable people to understand, use and challenge the new way of working. | Address changing expertise, incentives and roles. Protect learning time and agree who owns decisions and failures. |
The evidence supports inquiry and disciplined choice
Camuffo and colleagues’ 2024 study of 759 firms across four randomised trials found that teaching a scientific approach increased idea termination and influenced the pattern of strategic pivots. That supports explicit hypotheses and decisions to stop; it does not validate every Lean Startup practice or TIP’s combined programme. [1]
Published research, practitioner books and our experience inform different parts of the approach. The mapping is TIP’s synthesis; the Transformation example is illustrative. Its combined effectiveness and any capacity or financial return must be established in the organisation’s own work.
[1] Camuffo and colleagues • A scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision making • Strategic Management Journal, 2024.
Turn customer uncertainty into evidence
Method includes technology and the techniques for using it well. The books give us complementary disciplines. We practise them on the same piece of work so the problem, experiment, delivery and outcome remain connected.
Challenge and reading | Practice in real work | Evidence for the next decision |
|---|---|---|
We start with a solution Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg | Reframe the request from different perspectives before choosing a tool. Ask whose problem it is and what a better outcome means. | An agreed problem and alternative explanations. AI can widen the options; people check which fit the evidence. |
We hear what we want to hear Rob Fitzpatrick | Ask internal or external customers about a recent real situation, its consequences and their workaround. Explore behaviour before pitching. | Customer accounts, observed use and meaningful commitments. An AI persona or a sponsor’s enthusiasm cannot validate demand. |
We build before testing the risk Eric Ries | Name the riskiest assumption, its smallest credible test and the evidence that would change the decision. Iterate or stop. | Learning about demand, delivery and economics. A conversation or manual service may be a better test than a polished AI-built MVP. |
The pilot never becomes normal work Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland | Deliver usable changes in short iterations. Review with users, inspect outcomes and adapt. Agree quality and operating ownership with IT. | A working service, adoption evidence, support and release criteria. Iterative practice can support human change; using selected practices is not full Scrum. |
We measure activity rather than value John Doerr | Connect an objective to measurable customer and business outcomes. Assign owners and review what changed. | Key results for the chosen change, with dates and baselines. Retain KPIs for business health, service quality and risk. |
AI can help draft interview guides, compare options, prototype and analyse feedback. Keep original sources, check a sample of the reasoning and seek evidence that contradicts the preferred answer. Generating more material is not the same as learning more.
Emphasis in the journey: reframing begins in PERSONAL and TEAM; ADVANCED deepens checking; ACCELERATE develops personas, discovery and experiments; ADVANCED PLUS embeds delivery; FUNCTION connects the roadmap to OKRs. These practices recur as the work develops.
Make change discussable and actionable
The method depends on people being willing and able to use it. Expertise, identity and incentives affect which questions get asked and which findings receive attention. These readings help us work with that human reality.
Challenge and reading | Practice in real work | Evidence for the next decision |
|---|---|---|
Change threatens familiar roles The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow & Marty Linsky | Separate a technical fix from changes in habits, loyalties and responsibilities. Involve people in shaping the transition. | Explicit concerns, learning needs and role decisions, with an owner for support. A new tool alone cannot resolve these. |
People cannot safely raise doubts Amy C. Edmondson | Invite uncertainty and dissent. Examine mistakes without humiliation, while keeping clear performance standards. | Concerns raised early and acted on; evidence that people can challenge leaders and AI outputs. [2] |
Teams avoid difficult conversations The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni | Build trust, discuss disagreement and make commitments and accountability explicit. Connect work to shared outcomes. | Named decisions and owners; competing incentives surfaced. The CEO and executive team retain difficult choices. |
Communication misses its audience Erin Meyer | Explore how people give feedback, build trust and make decisions. Ask about individual preferences and context. | Agreed ways to communicate and challenge. Cultural tendencies are prompts for inquiry, not labels for individuals or functions. |
Conviction outruns the facts Jim Collins | Combine Level 5 humility and professional will with disciplined focus. Confront unwelcome facts and ask what would change an investment decision. | An explicit stop or adapt decision when warranted. Persistence is not a reason to defend sunk costs. |
Today’s model hides tomorrow’s opportunity Clayton M. Christensen | Investigate underserved customers, nonconsumption and incentives that favour the current business. Test alternative offers and economics. | An option leadership can fund or reject. Not every AI advance meets Christensen’s specific definition of disruptive innovation. |
The books offer different practitioner lenses. Edmondson’s field study found an association between psychological safety and learning behaviour; it does not establish a causal return from a training session. [2]
[2] Edmondson • Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams • 1999.
Build the method through real work
We introduce practices where they become useful, then reuse them. The outputs connect the sessions; insights can inform decisions as they emerge. Effectiveness is measured from PERSONAL onwards. The linked session names open the practical detail on the website.
Session | What people practise together | What carries forward |
|---|---|---|
Curiosity and self-awareness; define the problem, challenge an answer and check understanding. | One useful work product with an explicit quality test and effort baseline. | |
Psychological safety, listening and shared problem framing on real team work. | An agreed customer problem, outcome, owner and current effort. | |
Critical thinking, source checks, reusable context and bounded AI support. | A checked pattern tested on known cases that a colleague can reuse. | |
Deep customer discovery and personas; reframe the workflow and test its riskiest assumptions. | Evidence of real use, customer outcomes and net effort. Personas can begin earlier. | |
Product thinking, communication and iterative delivery with IT; connect and automate proven work. | An owned service with release checks, review, escalation and maintenance. | |
Outside-in inquiry, future customer needs, a 2028 or 2030 future article, operating choices and OKRs. | A living roadmap with assumptions, experiments, owners, outcomes and capacity allocation. | |
STRATEGIC and ENTERPRISE | Compare inside-out learning with external change; resolve priorities and align cross-functional choices. | Investment and operating decisions, trade-offs and measures that guide the next experiments. |
Mindset and method remain connected
Mindset + Method = Money & Momentum is our organising approach. Mindset enables questioning and learning. Method includes the tools and techniques that turn inquiry into tested changes. Money means evidenced economic value; momentum means people can repeat the learning and delivery with clear ownership.
Capacity is one result to measure. Effectiveness asks whether we chose better work and improved the customer’s outcome. Released time becomes economic value only when it is used productively or supports a realised cost change. Count review, exceptions, rework and ongoing operation before claiming a net gain.
Improve the decision behind the report
Consider a Transformation team preparing a monthly steering report. The initial request is to automate the pack. The customer is the executive who must decide where to intervene or reallocate resources. This is an illustrative application of the method, not a reported client result.
Discover what makes the decision difficult
In TEAM, ask which decisions the report serves. In ADVANCED, trace important claims to their sources and test the AI on known cases. In ACCELERATE, ask executives about the last decision they delayed or later reversed. Their accounts might reveal that uncertainty and options are buried beneath status updates. That becomes a testable explanation, not an assumed truth.
Test a better decision service
Use Lean Startup to test a short decision brief on one workstream: the problem, options, evidence, uncertainties and the decision required. Compare it with the existing approach over several cycles. Agree success and stop criteria beforehand; record differences in case complexity. AI can prepare and challenge the draft, while a reviewer verifies sources and the decision owner explains the reasoning.
Measure | What the pilot should establish |
|---|---|
Effectiveness | Do fewer decisions require later clarification or correction? Are risks identified early enough to act? Review the reasoning and subsequent outcomes. |
Capacity | How does total staff effort change after checking, chasing, exceptions and rework? Keep staff effort separate from elapsed turnaround time. |
Adoption and judgement | Do executives use the brief and understand its uncertainty? Can people challenge it and identify a plausible but wrong recommendation? |
Viability and operation | Do benefits justify integration, licences, model use, assurance and support? Who owns the service when it fails? |
Embed the service and reconsider the function
If the evidence justifies it, ADVANCED PLUS connects the workflow with IT and establishes ownership. FUNCTION asks what the Transformation team should become: for example, more capacity for early risk discovery and investment choices. A future vision becomes an owned roadmap. An objective might be “Improve the quality of portfolio decisions”, with key results for avoidable corrections and timely action on material risks, based on an agreed baseline.
STRATEGIC then decides where verified capacity creates the most value. A faster pack is useful; a better intervention is a separate result to demonstrate. Leaders retain judgement over conflicting incentives, priorities and people.
Across the connected papers, customer inquiry, human support, experiments and delivery produce evidence for the same choices: invest, adapt, partner, buy or stop.
Turn the reading into practice
Choose one idea relevant to the work. Read a chapter, listen to an audiobook or use an author’s short talk. Explain it in your own words, test it and bring back the result. The aim is understanding that changes a decision, not a count of completed books.
Curiosity and preparation for different futures
Inevitable Surprises — Peter Schwartz gives FUNCTION and STRATEGIC a stimulus for looking beyond today. Our application is to identify external forces, explore plausible futures and record signals that would change a choice. Use the discipline with current evidence; a 2003 book is not a forecast for today.
Curious — Ian Leslie is a useful addition from PERSONAL onwards. Practise sustained inquiry: ask what is missing, explore an unfamiliar perspective and follow a question beyond the first plausible AI answer. An official audiobook edition is available.
Two memorable cases with different lessons
Zume Pizza featured in Measure What Matters and later closed. Our interpretation is that an OKR needs customer evidence, technical feasibility tests and full economics alongside delivery measures. This case does not establish which methods Zume used or why it failed. [3, 4]
Darwin Smith and his team at Kimberly-Clark chose consumer products over the company’s traditional paper mills. Collins describes disciplined inquiry followed by years of execution. We use the case to explore what to stop, where value lies and how leaders mobilise people; it does not predict the outcome of another divestment. [5]
Reading the evidence in context
Research findings retain their setting and limits. The books offer frameworks to examine and apply. Our experience and interpretations show how we connect them. The listening guide on the next page offers short introductions and routes to the original work.
Design the medium around the person
We used NotebookLM to create short audio companions from the papers and selected sources. This is a practical example of adapting how we communicate to the person receiving it. A board paper may be circulated without everyone having time to absorb it. An audio introduction, a visual explanation and the written evidence offer different routes into the same issue. Ask what helps the recipient prepare, understand and challenge; check what they understood. Audio supports that work, while the decision maker still needs access to the evidence and its limits.
[3] Kleiner Perkins • Measure What Matters and its featured companies • 2018.
[4] Bloomberg News • Fallen Pizza Startup Zume Shuts Down After Raising Millions • 2023.
[5] Jim Collins • Good to Great • 2001 author account.