Refining Reality is a coaching practice and a research program, run by one practitioner. This page is who that is and how to work with me.
Todd Lovett is an organizational strategist and team coach who designs organizations for performance. He spent nearly three decades in software, first engineering computer systems and then the people systems that produce them. Refining Reality is what came out of that shift: a model of how organizations actually process information, and a method for leading them.
His work usually begins where organizations are stuck. A program has spent its budget with nothing to show. A strategy sounds right but can’t be executed. Teams are busy but can’t agree on what matters. He makes the real situation visible, gives strategy a shape teams can act on, designs the structure that connects intent to action, and gets working results flowing again. He has done this at scale, including at one of the world’s largest retailers. When something hard needs to be said, he is often the one who says it, in a way that brings people together and leads to action.
He is the founder of The Shift Complex, the independent press that publishes this work, and the author of Refining Reality: The Physics of Leadership in Computational Organizations. He lives on a homestead on Clinch Mountain, in northeast Tennessee.
The method on this site is free. Applying it inside a particular organization, with its particular history and its particular people, is the work of coaching, and that is the work I do. I work with engineering and technology organizations: software, product, and platform groups, and the leaders responsible for them, from a single team to a few hundred people. That is where I spent my career, where the model was built, and where its effects show fastest. The mechanisms are general, but the practice is specific.
Engagements usually take one of four shapes.
Organizational assessment: a short, structured reading of your organization, with your leadership team taking the instruments and a working session to interpret the spread, where you agree and where you don’t, and what it means. This is the diagnostic the free assessments on this site are drawn from, and it is often where the other work begins.
Leadership coaching: one leader, over months, applying the model to the organization they run.
Team work: a leadership team learning to read its own organization and repair the loops that have broken.
Advisory: a standing relationship with an executive who wants a second mind on structure, strategy, and the places where the two aren’t meeting.
If one of those sounds like your situation, write (todd@refiningreality.com) and describe it to me. Say what is stuck and what you have already tried. The first conversation costs nothing and is useful either way.
The book set out a model: that organizations are computational systems, that they lose information in predictable ways, and that a leader’s work is to see where. The research program is the next step: to make that loss measurable.
Three threads are open.
Instruments. The assessments on this site each read one dimension. The work now is to build and validate the organizational diagnostics that read many, and to learn what the spread of answers across a leadership team reveals that no single score can.
The method. Distilling the model into practices a leader can run without the book open: heuristics, routines, and the structures that keep a map tested against its territory.
Cases. Patterns from the field: what the model predicted, what happened, and where the two disagreed. Published as Insights when they’re ready.
This work depends on practitioners running the assessments in real organizations and reporting what they find. If you have a situation the model should be able to explain and doesn’t, or a result you can’t account for, that is a research question, and it is worth sending.
