Move 37
In 2016, Google's AlphaGo played Lee Sedol, the best Go player alive.
In Game 2, AlphaGo placed a stone where no human would. Commentators thought it was a mistake. Lee Sedol left the room.
It wasn't a mistake.
AlphaGo had a better model of the game. One that saw structure and signal humans couldn't perceive. That was Move 37. It won the match.
Everyone has experienced the moment when they realized there were signals they couldn't see. And when someone pointed them out, everything changed.
The Idea
Every organization has patterns invisible from the inside: path dependence, information bottlenecks, misaligned incentives, unexplored adjacent possibles.
We read the structure. That's the move nobody else makes.
We find signals in the structure that are invisible to the people inside it. Moves that look impossible from the inside become obvious when you can see the patterns.
The Learning Loop
Every engagement runs the same loop. Most organizations want to jump straight to action: implement the tool, ship the fix. The real skill is knowing when to explore versus when to act. We find that balance.
Design Thinking, Active Inference, OODA, AI agent design: they've all converged on the same learning loop, because it's what any organized system must do to grow. We make that loop explicit, and it drives our process.
The Team
AI tools are available to everyone. Judgment and taste aren't.
We bring 50+ years between two partners reading markets and organizations. Design thinking meets complexity theory. Product strategy meets causal modeling.
We converged on the same insight from different directions: the best predictions don't come from looking harder at the obvious. They come from finding the signal everyone else is missing.
Joshua Shane on LinkedIn →J. Scott King on LinkedIn →
You know something's wrong.
We find what it is.
Let's Talk