01
A shared language
Most teams argue about behavior without a vocabulary for the forces that produce it. Stage 01 gives you words — visible, hidden, perverse, missing, AI, and future — so you can finally name what you're looking at.
Stage 01 · Understand
Before you fix it, you have to see it.
Stage 01 is the foundation. Learn the language, the framework, and the evidence base behind Incentive Intelligence so that everything you do downstream — diagnose, design, deploy — rests on something solid.
What Stage 01 gives you
Three things you'll leave with.
02
A diagnostic spine
The III Framework™ is six dimensions, six questions, one operating system. It turns intuition about 'culture' or 'misalignment' into a structured read you can act on.
03
An evidence base
Drawn from behavioral economics, organizational design, neuroscience, and frontier AI research — published in the Research Center and pressure-tested in real engagements.
The Stage 01 reading list
In the order most leaders find useful.
Start here
The Six Incentives
The forces that shape every human decision — and the order in which they fire.
Read →
The framework
The III Framework™
Six dimensions of Incentive Intelligence and the diagnostic question that defines each.
Read →
Why now
Velocity
Why the speed of AI, capital, and culture makes incentive design the work of the decade.
Read →
Evidence
The Research Center
Studies, essays, and source material behind every claim we make.
Read →
Worked examples
What an incentive diagnosis actually sounds like.
Three short reads from real engagements. Names changed; structures untouched.
Dimension
Visible vs. Hidden
Situation
A revenue team is hitting quota but losing its best account executives every other quarter.
Diagnosis
The visible incentive (commission on new logos) is intact. The hidden incentive — status earned by closing 'whales' — quietly punishes anyone working mid-market accounts where the renewal economics actually live. People leave when the hidden scoreboard contradicts the official one.
Dimension
Perverse
Situation
An engineering org rewards 'shipping velocity' and watches incident counts climb.
Diagnosis
Velocity is a proxy. The system performs exactly as designed — it ships. Quality is the missing dimension. Until on-call burden and post-launch stability sit on the same scoreboard as ship rate, the perverse loop continues.
Dimension
Missing
Situation
Leadership repeats 'we value mentorship' for three years; senior ICs stop mentoring.
Diagnosis
Mentorship is named, never measured, never rewarded. Stated values without an incentive surface become noise. The fix is structural, not motivational.
FAQ
Common questions at Stage 01.
I've read behavioral economics. How is this different?+
Behavioral economics describes how individuals deviate from rational choice. Incentive Intelligence is operational — it gives leaders a way to see, score, and redesign the incentive architecture of a system at the team, org, and market level.
Is this just 'culture' work in a new wrapper?+
No. Culture is the output. Incentives are the input. We work upstream of culture — on the formal and informal reward structures that produce the behavior every leader is trying to change.
How long does it take to learn enough to use it?+
About an hour with the six incentives gives you a working vocabulary. A weekend with the framework gives you a diagnostic. The deep fluency is what the Practitioner, Executive, and Masters tracks are for.
Do I need to take the Diagnosis to move to Stage 02?+
No, but it's the fastest way. Five minutes of structured questions returns a read on which dimensions are loudest in your situation — and where to look first.
Next · Stage 02
Ready to point it at something real?
The AI Diagnostician takes five minutes and returns a read on which of the six dimensions are loudest in your situation.