Inexperienced leaders to fix problems before they’ve diagnosed the system that creates them.
They tweak incentives, shuffle roles, or launch new initiatives—without seeing the structure underneath.
Then they wonder why the same friction keeps reappearing.
Every organization is a living system.
And like any system, it follows predictable laws of energy, structure, and evolution.
When you know how to see and sense the system, you stop fighting symptoms and start working with reality.
Over the years, I’ve found seven questions that reveal where a system is leaking energy and how to realign it:
1️⃣ What’s the system’s real purpose?
2️⃣ Where are the boundaries and interdependencies?
3️⃣ What’s draining energy or reinforcing old assumptions?
4️⃣ Which lifecycle stage are we in—Pilot, Nail, Scale, Milk, or Kill?
5️⃣ Which PSIU forces are out of balance?
6️⃣ Do we have enough mass (people, data, and attention) pointed in one direction?
7️⃣ Are we learning fast enough to self-correct?
Once you can answer those seven, you can see the whole—and lead with far less friction.
That’s what the carousel below breaks down:
👉 “How to Diagnose Any System.”
A visual guide to making sense of complexity before you try to fix it.
If your team feels stuck, the Entropy Survey will reveal what’s really going on:
👉 https://organizationalphysics.com/entropy-survey
– Lex, your CEO coach
📌 P.S. When I feel lost in the weeds, I pause and ask: “What’s the system trying to become?”
That question always brings me back to clarity.
