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Evans Learning Labs  ·  Articles and Writing

Cornerstone Research Monographs

Foundational Evans Learning Labs research and the most comprehensive treatment of core organizational capability topics.

Publication formats
Executive Briefs
Concise, evidence-based insight for working leaders.
27 articles  ·  View all
Applied Research Briefs
Research-informed analysis bridging scholarship and practice.
27 articles  ·  View all
Cornerstone Research
Long-form foundational Evans Learning Labs research.
12 articles  ·  Current section
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Capability Development  ·  9 minute read
From Individual Leaders to Leadership Systems
Applies capability maturity modeling to leadership development, arguing that sustainable organizational performance requires systemic investment in leadership capacity rather than identification and development of exceptional individuals.
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Strategy  ·  11 minute read
Measuring Strategic Clarity Across Organizational Levels
Examines the gap between leadership-level strategic intent and operational-level strategic understanding, reviewing evidence on how misalignment at the translation layer produces execution failures that are attributed to implementation rather than clarity.
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Diagnostics  ·  13 minute read
Gap Analysis and Maturity Modeling in Practice
A methodological synthesis reviewing how gap analysis and maturity modeling approaches can be integrated to produce diagnostics that identify both current state deficits and developmental trajectory.
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Culture  ·  12 minute read
Culture as Both Constraint and Catalyst for Change
Synthesizes the organizational culture literature to develop a framework for understanding culture as both an enabler and a constraint on change initiatives, with implications for diagnostic assessment of change readiness.
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Diagnostics  ·  11 minute read
The Case for Self-Directed Leadership Diagnostics
Examines the potential of accessible, self-directed diagnostic tools to extend the benefits of structured organizational assessment beyond organizations with resources for consulting-grade diagnostic work.
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Motivation  ·  11 minute read
What Actually Motivates Performance
Reviews self-determination theory and the motivational crowding-out literature, examining the implications for how organizations design performance management, feedback, and development systems.
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Strategy  ·  9 minute read
Why Aligned Organizations Consistently Outperform
Examines organizational alignment as a measurable construct, reviews the evidence on its relationship to execution effectiveness, and identifies the organizational conditions that produce or undermine strategic alignment at scale.
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Decision Making  ·  11 minute read
Cognitive Bias and Decision Quality in Organizations
Reviews the behavioral economics literature on systematic cognitive bias in organizational decision-making, examining overconfidence, anchoring, groupthink, and the planning fallacy, and evaluating structural debiasing interventions.
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Teams  ·  10 minute read
Psychological Safety as a Multi-Level Organizational Construct
Traces psychological safety from Schein and Bennis through Edmondson''s operationalization to contemporary multi-level research, reviewing measurement validity, organizational antecedents, and the leader behaviors most associated with it.
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Trust  ·  9 minute read
Why Organizational Trust Functions Like an Operating System
Most organizations treat trust as something to be built through relationship investment and values statements. A more accurate and more useful frame locates trust as structural infrastructure — the operating system that determines coordination costs, information flow, decision speed, and discretionary effort across every organizational function.
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Decision Making  ·  9 minute read
What Good Organizational Decision-Making Actually Looks Like
Most organizational decision-making processes are designed to produce agreement rather than good outcomes. The conditions that make a decision process feel comfortable are systematically different from the conditions that make it good. This article examines what the research shows about the structural and behavioral conditions that actually improve group judgment.
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Performance  ·  15 minute read
Organizational Resilience as a Dynamic Capability
Synthesizes the management literature to treat organizational resilience not as a trait or a synonym for strength, but as a latent, multi-stage dynamic capability—anticipation, coping, and adaptation—and examines the antecedents that constitute it, the threat-rigidity response that defeats it, and what its latency implies for diagnostic assessment.
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