Research in Strategic Cognition

Strategic judgment is not what you think. It is what you notice.

Before analysis begins, an affective-motivational architecture is already shaping what registers as evidence. We study that architecture, and we diagnose the recurring patterns through which organisations actually make decisions.

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"the most dangerous moment in a strategic decision is when choosing feels like finding"

Three interlocking workstreams, one framework

Theory

The OAI Framework

A bounded-interpretation account of strategic judgment. Affective-motivational orientations structure attention before analysis begins and converge through coherence rather than through computation. Thirteen propositions, peer-reviewed, grounded in cognitive science.

Diagnostics

From individual to organisation

A family of diagnostic tools spanning individual strategists, executive teams, investment committees, boards, and whole organisations. Each tool shares a common measurement backbone and a common theoretical foundation.

Practice

Decision culture redesign

Diagnosis is the starting point, not the destination. Each engagement produces specific, framework-grounded interventions that organisations can act on — not generic culture recommendations but targeted structural changes to how decisions are actually made.

Diagnostics for every level of organisational judgment

Each product addresses a distinct unit of analysis — individual, team, investment committee, board, or whole organisation — while sharing a common theoretical backbone that lets findings at one level inform interventions at another.

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Decision Culture & Friction Diagnostic

How your organisation actually makes decisions

Reads the cognitive and process residues your decision artefacts already contain. Diagnoses whether the burden of your decisions matches their stakes, identifies the dominant archetype, and surfaces the specific interventions that would change it.

Unit of analysis: Whole organisation
Governance

Board Perceptual Coverage Audit

What your board is structurally equipped to see

Maps the collective orientation architecture of a corporate board. Identifies the perceptual bandwidth the board provides, the collective exclusion zone, and whether composition matches the strategic context.

Unit of analysis: Board of directors
Executive

CXO Team Diagnostic

The orientation architecture of your leadership team

A team-level diagnostic that reveals how an executive group's collective orientation profile shapes what it can see, how it deliberates, and where its blind spots fall. The basis for targeted team redesign.

Unit of analysis: Executive leadership team
Investment

Investment Committee Diagnostic

How your deal team converts uncertainty into commitment

Applies the orientation architecture to investment decision-making. Deployable at diligence, in the hundred-day plan, or as a recurring portfolio benchmark. Designed for PE, VC, corp dev, and portfolio oversight.

Unit of analysis: IC and deal teams
Individual

Strategic Judgment Masterclass

Know your own guidance system

A structured development programme that produces a personalised strategic judgment profile for each participant, revealing their characteristic orientation, attentional pattern, and closure tendency. The entry point to the full framework.

Unit of analysis: Individual strategist
Forthcoming

The Coherence Trap

The book — HBR Press, 2026

The trade-length treatment of the framework for senior leaders, directors, and advisors. Seventeen chapters on how strategic commitment actually forms, why confident decisions so often fail, and what to do about it.

Format: Book
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Peer-reviewed foundations, not consulting heuristics

The product family is built on a substantive research programme. Four papers have been submitted or are under review at top behavioral strategy journals; the programme as a whole covers six interconnected papers on the Orientation-Attention-Interpretation system and its consequences for strategic judgment.

The OAI Framework

A recursive affect-cognition architecture linking orientations, valence, attentional selection, and the formation of valenced mental models. Thirteen propositions specify how strategic interpretation is bounded not only by computation but by interpretation itself.

The framework reframes bounded rationality's "satisficing" as "cohering": interpretations stabilise when they achieve affective coherence sufficient to act, not when they achieve informational sufficiency.

"Strategic interpretation does not begin with data. It begins with feeling."

Read the Full Research Programme