Six investigations, anonymized. What they came with, what was found, what changed.
Read the Stories ↓LeakMap · Attrition Pattern
What they came with
Attrition at 34% and rising. Two engagement surveys, a salary benchmark, and a ping-pong table had changed nothing. HR was tired of exit interviews that produced anecdotes.
What was found
Exit data mapped by team and tenure showed departures clustered under three supervisors with an average tenure of 11 months — not salary-driven, but recognition-driven: a pattern where new joiners were onboarded into silence and left the moment the market offered acknowledgment.
What changed
One action: a fifteen-minute weekly recognition ritual installed at the team level with Poka-Yoke (a visible tracker that made skipping obvious). Attrition fell to 21% in two quarters.
LeakMap · Quality Pattern
What they came with
A repeated defect escape to a key customer, three corrective actions closed, and the same defect back within weeks. The customer had started dual-sourcing.
What was found
The CAPA process was blame-terminated: every investigation ended at ‘operator error.’ The behavioral root — a night-shift handover where asking questions was punished with delay — was never on the form.
What changed
The handover was redesigned around a two-minute structured question round, and ‘human error’ was banned as a root cause category. Zero escapes in the following six months.
Career Connect
What she came with
Six years out of the workforce, an MBA gathering dust, and twenty applications that produced two interviews and no offers. She wanted résumé help.
What was found
The résumé wasn’t the problem. A pattern was: she was applying only to roles strictly below her last level, to be ‘safe.’ The gap had become a hiding strategy dressed as humility.
What changed
She applied to three roles at her actual level with a rewritten narrative of the gap. Two offers in five weeks — both at the level she had been avoiding.
The Untaught Life
What she came with
A full-time job, two children, an aging parent, and a marriage that had become logistics. She arrived asking for time-management techniques.
What was found
Her calendar was a people-pleasing map: every block belonged to someone else’s need, and the only negotiable time was her own sleep. The pattern predated the children by two decades.
What changed
One counter-pattern: a single non-negotiable hour, treated with the same protection as a client meeting. Small, visible, and — six months later — still running.
Career Connect
What they came with
A father and a seventeen-year-old, deadlocked over engineering versus design. Every conversation ended in a slammed door. They came for mediation.
What was found
The father was running an inherited script — his own abandoned arts career converted into a rule: ‘creativity doesn’t pay.’ The son wasn’t rejecting engineering; he was rejecting the script.
What changed
In the joint session, the script was named and its origin surfaced. The son enrolled in a design program — with a business minor that was entirely his own idea.
POSH & POCSO
What they came with
A funder’s due-diligence letter asking for POSH compliance documentation — and a leadership team that had none of it. Forty staff, three locations, zero policy.
What was found
Beyond the missing documents, a behavioral gap: the IC had never been constituted and no one below program-manager level knew any reporting mechanism existed. Documents were the smaller fix.
What changed
Policy, IC constitution, and SHe-Box registration in three weeks — plus scenario-based training for all staff. The funder renewed; the second audit found the practice alive, not just the paperwork.
“Something here keeps repeating.” If you can say that sentence, you can begin.
Begin an Investigation