teamcharge
The science

Grounded in research. Forged in practice.

The thinking behind TeamCharge, and the evidence it stands on.

Underpinned by Nobel Prize-winning research
Hayek · Prigogine · Simon · Hurwicz, Maskin & Myerson · Ostrom
01
The origin

The answer was not in any single field.

Not organisational psychology, not behavioural economics, not even systems science. It was in the space where all of them intersect, where almost no one was looking.

Every piece of this thinking already existed. Nobody had connected the dots. TeamCharge is the product that emerged.

This page documents where the thinking came from. Not to claim authority, but because the problem deserves to be taken seriously, and the evidence that informed the solution should be visible to anyone who wishes to examine it.

02
The foundations

An obsessive focus on root cause analysis.

Six disciplines, each answering one part of why organisations fail to change, and what it takes to make them adapt.

Together they describe the friction surface: the three layers, structural, relational and personal, where work either flows or stalls.

Complex systems
Intelligence lives at the edges, not the centre
Hierarchies cannot process environments that change faster than they can respond. The intelligence needed for good decisions is dispersed across individuals who each hold only a fragment of the whole picture. No central authority can collect and use it without losing its value.
Hayek, 1945 · Santa Fe Institute, 1980s onwards · Prigogine, Nobel Prize Chemistry 1977 · Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, 1956
Mechanism design
Honest behaviour requires honest architecture
You cannot reliably predict behaviour from what people say. You must design the system so that honest behaviour is the rational choice. When a measure has consequences for the person being measured, it stops measuring what it was designed to measure. This is why surveys fail.
Goodhart, 1975 · Campbell, 1979 · Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson, Nobel Prize Economics 2007
Adaptive performance research
Adaptive performance is a skill. It can be built.
Adaptive performance is a distinct and measurable dimension of work performance, separate from task performance and personality. A meta-analysis of 71 independent studies covering 7,535 participants confirmed it is trainable.
Pulakos et al., Journal of Applied Psychology 2000 · Stasielowicz meta-analysis, N=7,535, 2020
Organisational learning
The structure rewards. The culture follows.
Every organisation operates with two sets of rules: the ones stated and the ones rewarded. When they conflict, the ones that get rewarded win. Changing culture requires changing what the structure rewards, not describing a different one, not training for one, not role modelling one.
Argyris & Schon, 1978 · Schein, 1985 · Ostrom, Nobel Prize Economics 2009 · Sull et al., MIT Sloan 2022
Behavioural economics
People optimise for what is measured
Rational actors do what the system rewards. Understanding how people decide, under uncertainty, with incomplete information, in contexts that have consequences, is the only way to design tools that change behaviour rather than measure it.
Thaler, Nobel Prize Economics 2017 · Hirschman, 1970
Psychological safety
Without honest conditions, nothing surfaces
Psychological safety, the belief that one can speak up without penalty, is the structural condition that allows honest information to travel. Without it, the signal organisations most need never reaches anyone with the authority to act.
Edmondson, Harvard Business School 1999 · Google Project Aristotle 2016 · Edmondson, The Fearless Organisation 2018
On the shoulders of giants

Five Nobel Prizes are cited in the research that underpins TeamCharge. Not for status, but because the problems this product is built to solve are among the most important in the study of how organisations work.

Hayek Economics 1974
Prigogine Chemistry 1977
Simon Economics 1978
Hurwicz, Maskin, Myerson Economics 2007
Ostrom Economics 2009
03
The evidence

Additional layers of evidence.

Beyond the Nobel Prize-winning work, these are the findings that most directly inform the TeamCharge thesis:

Adaptive performance is a trainable skill, not a fixed personality trait, confirmed across 71 studies and 7,535 participants.
Stasielowicz, 2020 · Journal of Research in Personality
65% of senior executives say their strategy was sound but failed at execution.
Mankins & Steele, 2005 · Harvard Business Review
Global employee engagement has moved 8 percentage points in 15 years of measurement. The investment grew. The results barely moved.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2009 to 2026
The top quartile of AI users generates returns that are multiples of the average. The difference is not the tool.
McKinsey Global Institute, 2023
Only 26% of major transformations succeed. The reason is consistent: structural change is implemented without building the individual capacity to sustain it.
McKinsey Global Survey, 2020 · Kotter, Harvard Business Review, 1995
Toxic culture is ten times more predictive of attrition than compensation. 82% of executives rate their culture as good or excellent. 47% of individual contributors agree.
Sull, Sull & Zweig, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022
TeamCharge is what emerged from taking the evidence seriously.
The science

See it in practice.

The science explains why the gap exists. TeamCharge is built to close it. A SaaS product, live within days.

Whatever comes next: be ready.
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