Welcome to Project Meridian

Finding True North

"Best practice" is consensus thinking dressed up as wisdom. It's what everyone else is doing, validated by the comfort of the crowd. It rarely leads anywhere worth going.

Project Meridian takes a different approach. We explore how leaders navigate organizational constraints, competitive dynamics, and structural forces that shape strategic choice. Not through platitudes about innovation or transformation, but through rigorous frameworks borrowed from systems theory, international relations, sociology, and cybernetics.

What We Write About

Our articles examine the structural realities that constrain and enable leadership:

Organizational Dynamics. How bureaucracy emerges from rational decisions. Why change initiatives fail despite genuine commitment. How mental models filter reality more effectively than any formal rule. We draw on Max Weber's iron cage, institutional entrepreneurship, and cybernetic principles to understand why organizations resist the very changes they claim to want.

Competitive Structure. Why cooperative leaders build defensive moats. How power accumulation begins as insurance and evolves into strategy. Why partnerships fragment under pressure. Through frameworks like Mearsheimer's offensive realism, we examine how structural conditions transform cautious actors into aggressive competitors regardless of their values.

Knowledge and Memory. What organizations systematically forget. How expertise becomes invisible. Why critical knowledge vanishes while trivial policies persist. The antimemetic forces that ensure certain insights cannot be retained, even when people recognize their importance.

Systems Thinking. Feedback loops that drive dysfunction. Leverage points that enable systemic change. The gap between defensive intentions and offensive appearances. We explore how seeing whole systems rather than isolated problems reveals possibilities that linear thinking obscures.

Our Approach

We question conventional wisdom not because it's wrong but because it's rarely examined. The meridian line doesn't follow the crowd—it provides orientation for those willing to navigate by principles rather than consensus.

This means:

• Context over convention. What works depends on specific conditions, not universal formulas
• Structure over intention. Systems shape behavior more than values or vision
• Awareness over answers. Understanding constraints enables conscious choice within them
• Depth over breadth. We explore frameworks thoroughly rather than surveying superficially

Who This Is For

Project Meridian serves leaders who recognize that:

• Their cooperative instincts and competitive requirements both reflect rationality under different frames
• Transformation requires understanding why current structures exist, not just imagining alternatives
• Power dynamics are structural, not personal failures
• The most sophisticated leadership acknowledges constraints while working deliberately within them

If you're exhausted by the cognitive dissonance of preaching collaboration while practicing competition, frustrated that change initiatives founder despite genuine commitment, or suspicious that "best practice" substitutes conformity for thinking, this work might resonate.

What to Expect

Long-form articles (15-25 minutes) that take ideas seriously. We cite Weber, Mearsheimer, Meadows, Nadella, Polman, and Iger not to name-drop but because their frameworks illuminate structural realities that shape leadership.

No quick fixes. No five-step transformations. No promises that the right mindset overcomes systemic constraints.

Just rigorous analysis of how structure, strategy, and agency interact in organizational life. And perhaps, through that analysis, possibilities for more conscious navigation of the traps we cannot escape.

The Question That Drives Us

If competition is structural, if power dynamics are inescapable, if even cooperation occurs within competitive frameworks—what does ethical leadership mean?

We don't claim to answer this definitively. But we believe the question deserves more than platitudes about purpose and values. It demands engagement with the actual constraints leaders face and the structural forces that shape strategic choice.

Project Meridian is that engagement. Not comfortable. Not always satisfying. But clear-eyed about the terrain we're navigating.

Welcome. Let's find true north together.

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Questions about navigating organizational constraints or competitive dynamics? Reach out at info@eudexio.com.