Ten weeks to change how your company actually works.

Before you change behavior, you have to see it. Every team, every board, every customer base is running on an incentive structure that no one wrote down — a quiet web of rewards, penalties, defaults, and social cues that shapes what people actually do when nobody is watching.

The first move of a senior practitioner isn't to push for a new strategy. It's to map the room: who benefits from the current behavior, who pays the cost, what favors are owed, and where the felt reciprocity already runs. Most failed change programs are not bad ideas. They are good ideas pushed against an unread incentive map.

You will learn to read a room the way a tracker reads a forest — quickly, quietly, and without flattering anyone in it.

Behavior change at scale rarely starts with a mandate. It starts with a small, public commitment that the rest of the system then has to live up to. The pilot, the signed memo, the team that volunteers first — these aren't symbolic. They're the lever.

Once a person or team has taken a visible step, every subsequent ask becomes cheaper, because saying no would force them to be inconsistent with the version of themselves they just performed. This is why founders use beta lists, why armies use uniforms on day one, and why the best change leaders ask for a 90-day trial before they ask for a year.

We'll build a library of commitment devices you can deploy without anyone noticing them as such.

The first number on the table sets the gravity for every number that follows. This is the anchor, and it operates whether or not the people in the room believe in it. A budget that opens at $4M cannot easily land at $1M; a salary band that opens at $300K does not get re-set by data.

Senior operators don't fight anchors. They place them. They decide, before the meeting, which number, frame, or comparison should walk in first — and they make sure it does. The default on the slide is the policy of the company, for as long as nobody challenges it.

Most executive rooms are flooded with two false signals: confident authority from people who have title but not data, and visible social proof from people who copied each other into agreement. Both feel like information. Neither is.

The discipline of incentive intelligence is filtering: stripping the deck of framing, the speaker of title, and the room of salience, until what's left is a base rate, a track record, and an honest forecast. We'll practice this on real decks until the move becomes automatic.

Culture decks don't change behavior. Reinforcement schedules do. What gets praised in public, paid in private, and tolerated in the corner is the actual culture — everything else is decoration.

You'll learn to redesign a comp plan, a recognition program, or a roadmap review so that the behaviors you want are rewarded on a schedule the brain actually responds to — variable, well-timed, and tied to surprise rather than predictability. Predictable bonuses lose their motivational pull within one cycle. Surprise rewards keep working for years.

The most expensive failure mode in modern organizations is a well-meaning KPI that becomes a target, and then becomes a game. Goodhart's Law guarantees it: once a measure becomes the thing being optimized, it stops measuring the thing you cared about.

The remedy is not better metrics. It is paired metrics, rotated metrics, and built-in guardrails — plus the discipline of asking, before any new KPI ships, "What would I do to game this?" Then assuming someone will.