The whole corpus
Library
Articles, books and reports on the distance between what a leader means and what their organisation actually does.
Articles 17
Long-form, published weekly, on what happens to a leader's meaning after it leaves the room.
Books 2
The CRAFT in Action series. Each book applies the method to one real leadership moment.
Reports 1
Long-form on one question at a time. Download and read.
Tools
Free tools and downloads.
The research behind it 11
Almost none of this research was written for the people it describes. These 11 are the ones carrying a finding you can act on without the apparatus.
- Barnlund 1970
- Meaning does not exist before the communication and then get sent. It is produced by the people involved, which means the receiver is making it too.
- Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991
- Following how strategic change actually begins in a large organisation, they found the chief executive's main work is neither formulating the strategy nor implementing it. It is constructing what it means and getting that construction to travel.
- Maitlis 2005
- Four distinct forms the interpretation process takes inside an organisation, depending on how much the leaders shape it and how much the people receiving it do. A diagnostic grid, and the first thing in the literature usable as an instrument.
- Rouleau 2005
- Four micro-practices middle managers use to carry a strategy down a hierarchy, observed rather than theorised. This is the cascade layer, and the literature's own complaint is that almost everything else studies only the people at the top.
- Clark, Gioia, Ketchen and Thomas 2010
- An interim identity carried two merging organisations through change precisely because it was optimally ambiguous, and bridged their differences better than a clear, well specified vision would have. Clarity and effect form an inverted U. Past a point, more precision does less work.
- Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen and Clark 2011
- Organisations do not simply use communication. They emerge in it, and are sustained and transformed by it.
- Maitlis and Christianson 2014
- The people receiving a leader's message hold their own reading of it and can actively resist the leader's attempt to shape it. Influence downward is not a one-way street, which is the whole problem.
- Logemann, Piekkari and Cornelissen 2019
- In a European multinational, what travelled down the organisation was the form of the leadership language, not its meaning. People borrowed the wording and left the function behind.
- Liu, Chambers and Moore 2023
- Fifty years and 260 studies using leaders' actual words as data, and the field still mostly treats what a leader says as a proxy for something else about them rather than as the thing worth studying.
- Eckstein, Shrestha and Russo 2025
- 2,838 articles between 1988 and 2023, 327 in 2023 alone, and in the authors' own words a dearth of concise guidance for practitioners.
- Comes 2026
- An optimisation paradox. The more each individual interaction with an AI system is optimised, the less equipped a group becomes for the problems that only appear between people.