Welcome to The Liberty Framework

"You were the chosen one." That's how I feel about what happened to agile. We took beautiful principles for unleashing human potential and turned them into exactly what we were trying to escape: rigid ceremonies, certification mills, and story point torture sessions.

What Went Wrong:
🏝️ Cargo cult behavior: Copying agile forms without understanding the spirit
📜 Certification industrial complex: Weekend certifications and 150+ page frameworks
⚖️ Principles vs practices: We codified flexibility and removed adaptability
🔄 The scaling trap: When "this helped our team" becomes "mandatory for all teams"

What Actually Works:
✅ Experimenting and Learning is REAL agility
✅ Principles (trust, transparency) beat frameworks every time
✅ Voluntary adoption vs mandated compliance
✅ Local ownership vs corporate scaling

Real Examples:

• Valve: No hierarchy, billions in revenue through principles over process
• W.L. Gore: Lattice organization enabling constant innovation
• Spotify: Evolved organically, never became rigid doctrine

The Pattern:

• Boeing (rigid processes) failed.
• Alcoa (flexible principles) succeeded.

Your approach avoids the agile trap by growing change organically with informal leaders instead of imposing structure from above. 

You've seen the evidence (trust beats control) and found the hidden leaders in your organization. Now what? Here's your practical playbook that actually works - no rigid frameworks, just smart experiments with the people who can make change happen.

Your 5-Step Roadmap:

🎯 Step 1: Find your spark - What problem keeps you up at night?
📊 Step 2: Reality check - Coffee conversations with informal leaders
🧪 Step 3: Design experiments together - Start tiny, time-boxed, voluntary
📈 Step 4: Make success visible - Progress tracking that motivates
🚀 Step 5: Let success pull - Organic spread beats mandates

The Magic Formula: Small experiment + informal leader support + visible results = organic spread

Your 8-Week Timeline:

Weeks 1-2: Get clear and listen
Weeks 3-4: Co-create your first experiment
Weeks 5-6: Run it (celebrate small wins publicly)
Weeks 7-8: Let success spread naturally

You're looking at the wrong org chart. The real power in your company isn't in the corner office - it's with the person everyone turns to for the real story. The one who can kill your best initiative with a shrug or make it fly with their enthusiasm.

What You'll Discover:

🔍 Google's Project Aristotle: Why psychological safety (created by informal leaders) beats everything else
📊 The 30% problem: Why most transformations fail (hint: it's not what you think)
🎯 Three magic questions to find your real influence network
⚡ Nokia vs Virginia Mason: What happens when you ignore vs embrace hidden leaders

346 people died because Boeing forgot they build airplanes, not spreadsheets. Meanwhile, an aluminum company increased value 9x by focusing on worker safety over profits. What's the difference? The leadership approach.

What You'll Learn:

• 🔴 The Boeing disaster: How "run like a business" thinking killed engineering excellence
• 🟢 The Alcoa transformation: Why focusing on safety created trust (and massive profits)
• 📊 The $8.8 trillion problem: Global cost of employee disengagement
• ⚡ The real pattern: Trust consistently beats control in measurable outcomes

Key Examples:

• Boeing's culture shift from engineering-first to finance-first
• Paul O'Neill's radical safety focus at Alcoa (9x market value increase)
• Why military "mission command" works better than traditional hierarchy
• IBM, Ford, Sears, Kodak - what separated winners from losers

Ever wonder why your best moments at work happened when someone trusted you to figure it out? Most of us know intuitively that freedom and trust lead to better results - so why do most organizations still operate like it's 1950?

In this episode, I introduce The Liberty Framework - four simple principles that create conditions where human creativity naturally aligns with business success:

• 🎯 Autonomy within clear boundaries - Maximum freedom within minimal necessary structure
• 📊 Evidence over authority - Let data win, regardless of hierarchy
• 📋 Information follows decision rights - Give people the context they need to succeed
• 🎯 Purpose connects individual to collective impact - Clear line of sight from daily work to meaningful outcomes