Orbital Shift Lab
Move your system to a higher orbit.
See what's inside Opens the community on Skool
Move your system to a higher orbit.
See what's inside Opens the community on SkoolYou've run the retreat. You've brought in the consultants. You've restructured, rebranded, relaunched. And the same conversations keep happening, the same fixes bounce off the same walls, and the system goes on producing what it has always produced.
Effort was never the missing ingredient. You've been pushing in the places where the system doesn't move.
The Orbital Shift Lab is a private community for people who carry real responsibility for a system that should be working better than it is. Executives, consultants, organizational development practitioners, coalition-builders. People who are done diagnosing dysfunction from 30,000 feet.
The engine is the weekly Systems Clinic. A member brings something that is actually stuck: a transformation that won't hold, a coalition that keeps fracturing, a leadership team that cannot say the true thing out loud. Together we work out what structure is producing it, where the feedback loops run, and what can be moved. The replay library compounds. So does the skill.
This is systems thinking used as a working method rather than a vocabulary. You bring a live organization; you leave with a read on it and something to try on Monday.
Reading the structure underneath the behavior, so you stop treating events as the whole story. Stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays, and where the leverage actually sits.
Staying candid and curious together, especially once the stakes rise and the room tightens.
Moving people through the kind of change that asks them to give something up, and telling that apart from a technical problem with a known fix.
Acting well after the plan runs out, which in a live system is most of the time.
Collaboration isn't a fifth item on that list. It runs through all four. None of them work if you're working alone.
You don't need to be steeped in systems theory. You need a real stuck system and the willingness to look honestly at what's producing the results you're getting.
This is a practitioner space. If you're after motivational content, networking for its own sake, or generic leadership development, it will disappoint you.
Both, weighted toward community. There's a curriculum across the four capacities, but the center of gravity is the weekly clinic where members work on each other's live situations. A course teaches you the concepts. This is where you find out whether you can use them.
One member describes a stuck situation in their organization or coalition. The room asks questions until the structure comes into view: what's reinforcing what, where the delays are, which fixes have already backfired and why. We map it, argue about it, and land on a small number of places worth pushing. Sessions are recorded, so the library becomes a case archive of real organizations rather than textbook examples.
No. Plenty of members arrive having read a few books and never applied any of it. Modeling and mapping are taught from the ground up, and you can participate usefully in a clinic on day one by asking good questions about someone else's system.
Coaching works on you. This works on the system you're inside, with your own development as a side effect rather than the subject. The unit of analysis is the organization, the coalition, the department that keeps producing the same result no matter who leads it.
In practice people use them interchangeably, and both get used loosely enough to mean almost nothing. Here they mean something specific: changing the structure that generates the behavior, rather than changing the behavior directly and watching it revert. If your intervention doesn't alter a stock, a flow, a feedback loop, an incentive, or a rule, you're rearranging outputs.
Chris Soderquist of Pontifex Consulting, who has spent more than two decades building system dynamics models and facilitating strategy work with state health agencies, nonprofits, coalitions, and corporations. Guest faculty lead periodic sessions in their own areas of practice.
Yes. There's a free tier with a diagnostic, an introduction to systems mapping, and a monthly public clinic, so you can see how the room works before deciding.
The clinic is weekly and about an hour. Everything else is asynchronous and optional. Members who get the most out of it bring a real situation within the first month rather than lurking through the archive.
The full description, the curriculum, and what's included at each level are all on Skool.
Open Orbital Shift Lab on Skool