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Write down what good looks like in the seat, measure against it, and keep the reasoning. The three steps below are the whole offer.

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Capability that outlives the vendor

Leadership Worth Following · September 14, 2026 · 1 min read

  • The DRiV needed practitioners who could deploy it well in rooms its author would never be in.
  • Licensing more users would not have achieved that, so the curriculum taught why the instrument behaves the way it does rather than how to read its output.
  • Every participant used the instrument on themselves before going anywhere near a client.
  • More than eighty are certified and none has called back for help with a debrief.

The DRiV assessment needed practitioners who could deploy it well in rooms Chris would never be in. Licensing more users would not achieve that. The firm needed people who could handle whatever a real client brought them, including the situations no script covers.

Designed the curriculum end to end, including the facilitation guides and the practice architecture. Built it to explain why the instrument behaves the way it does, rather than how to read its output, because a practitioner who understands the mechanism stops needing the script.

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Your success formula has a shelf life

The profile that produced your current leaders was written for the work as it used to be.

Most organizations promote against a picture of good leadership that nobody has revisited in years. It was accurate once. It was drawn from the people who succeeded under conditions that have since changed, and it keeps selecting for those conditions after they are gone.

AI is the sharpest version of that problem anyone has faced. When the analysis, the drafting and a good deal of the coordination stop being scarce, the capabilities that made somebody indispensable in 2019 are not the ones that will make them indispensable in 2029. Judgment under ambiguity, the ability to set a direction other people will follow, and knowing which problems are worth solving do not automate, and most success profiles barely mention them.

So the work starts before the assessing. We get to the bottom of what success is going to require in your organization, then build the talent infrastructure that moves you toward it.

Three steps, and what each one produces

Each one needs what the step before it produced, which is why most assessment programs that start at step three end up with a great deal of data about a target nobody wrote down.

Define what good looks like

What does successful leadership actually require here, given where the business is going rather than where it has been. Built from interviews with the people who know what the job takes, and written down before anybody is measured against it.

A sample success profile, built for an invented company

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Build the strategy to measure it

Which instruments belong where in the process, what each one is allowed to decide, and what to stop paying for. The test is whether you can run it at the volume you actually hire and promote at.

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Assess, coach, and close the gap

Leaders measured against the profile, with the reasoning attached so the call can be defended later. Coaching runs off the same data rather than off chemistry alone: we deliver it at the top, and Spherikal carries it to the layers a coaching budget has never reached.

A sample assessment report, with every person in it invented

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The slowest decision to undo

A senior hire you regret is the most expensive decision available to you, and the slowest one to undo. Almost nobody assesses like it.

Hiring for a seat that matters?

The earlier the profile gets written, the better the assessment works. Bring the role before you bring the shortlist.

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