Advanced Applications Group
High-Stakes Missions, Powered by the Latest Research
Inspired by Tier 1 special operations units, the Advanced Applications Group (AAG) brings PII research into partner organizations in the pursuit of extremely challenging outcomes.
AAG applies, adapts, and tests PII frameworks, strategies, and tools as part of its missions. It also transfers knowledge and capabilities. Experience from AAG feeds back into our research.
Leaders are facing a post-industrial shockwave.
AI agents and decentralization are rapidly transforming how organizations operate, innovate, and compete.
Customer relationships, brands, competitive advantages, and business models are under siege. New competitors can emerge and advance with frightening speed. Many organizations struggle to redesign their structures and transform their workforce.
The emerging Global Agent Economy will transform entire industries. Agents will increasingly participate in marketplaces, make purchases, and manage supply chains.
Ambitious leaders have enormous opportunities to transform enterprises, build new ventures, and reshape how industries evolve.
Meeting the challenge
on multiple fronts
Anticipate threats, seize opportunities as AI remakes the world
The accelerating pace of technological and industry transformation overwhelms many leaders and can delay the changes they urgently need. Organizations need an intelligence capability that provides a coherent picture of what is changing, where, and why, and identifies threats and opportunities early enough to act.
Accelerate innovation and organizational evolution
When the external environment changes faster than the organization can evolve, survival is at stake. Leaders must aim for a tenfold increase in the clock speed of innovation and organizational change. This requires rethinking how the organization senses, decides, learns, and acts.
Redesign your organization for maximum adaptivity
Most organizations are optimized to perform the work they did yesterday. Large inventories of work in process, slow decisions, and rigid structures leave little capacity to change direction. Leaders must redesign their organizations to learn and adapt rapidly while delivering results.
Conquer the complexity of the past to build the future
Decades of accumulated dependencies make organizational change difficult: moving one piece requires moving many others. Leaders must understand how processes, systems, and organizational structures depend on one another, then reduce the coupling that prevents them from changing independently.
Turn your workforce into a force
People rely on informal networks to get work done across dysfunctional formal structures. Those networks can harden into cliques that make the organization even harder to rewire. Leaders must address both structures and behaviors, developing a workforce in which more people take initiative, assume responsibility, and drive change.
Shockproof your culture
There is not enough time to rely on small, incremental changes. Winning requires rapid, bold moves that often run counter to the existing culture. Leaders must persist through the resulting culture shock, establishing new norms through clear messaging, aligned incentives, and their own behavior.
Build brands that thrive in the global agent economy
As AI agents take on product selection, they threaten to commoditize brands whose influence depends on human attention and habit. Organizations must learn to compete for selection by agents. In categories where humans continue to choose, brands will have to work harder to stand out and give people a reason to insist on them.
Transform your industry and build new industries
Product innovation is not enough. Leaders must examine how they can transform the structure of their industries, including how they create, coordinate, and capture value. As AI-fueled competition spreads, building entirely new ecosystems becomes a strategic priority.
Build multiple futures with a higher-order organization
Organizations can go only so far by transforming themselves. To go further, they must become platforms for building new businesses, bringing intellectual property, infrastructure, capital, and talent together in new combinations. A higher-order organization can pursue multiple futures without requiring every new business to inherit the constraints of the past.
Develop leaders who accelerate change
Organizations must recruit and develop AI-native leaders who continually increase the tempo of operations, innovation, and organizational evolution. Classroom education is not enough. These leadership capabilities must be developed through responsibility for real outcomes, experience, and feedback.
How we operate
We work with partners through jointly managed programs with ambitious objectives. Within each program, we undertake focused missions that build on one another as the work progresses.
Programs
Programs provide the funding, direction, and continuity for our work together.
Initiating the program
Together, we agree on the program’s objectives, scope, constraints, initial funding, and joint management. The scope sets how much of the organization, and which parts, the program focuses on. Constraints, such as security, regulatory compliance, and internal policies, shape the kinds of solutions we can develop together. We identify the first mission and establish how we will make decisions and review progress.
Each program has three kinds of objectives:
- Implementation: What we intend to accomplish or create
- Learning: What we intend to discover, test, or validate
- Capability transfer: What knowledge, skills, methods, or tools the partner organization will gain
Program operations
Joint PII–partner program management launches and coordinates missions, allocates resources, and addresses obstacles. We set priorities and keep the work directed toward the program’s objectives.
Program reviews
Regular reviews assess progress against the program’s objectives and bring together lessons from the work. We use these reviews to adjust priorities, resolve issues, and agree on subsequent missions.
Missions
Missions turn program objectives into focused work. Each has a defined scope, a joint team, and clear criteria for success.
Mission objectives
We agree on what the mission should accomplish, what we need to learn, and what capabilities the partner team should gain. A mission might investigate an opportunity, test a new organizational design, or implement a new way of working.
Mission design
We define the approach, team, milestones, and requirements for access and participation, and clarify the constraints the mission must work within. We identify the PII frameworks, strategies, and tools we can apply, and what we will need to develop or test.
Mission execution
We work alongside the partner team to carry out the mission, adapting our approach as evidence emerges. Capability transfer takes place through joint work, mentoring, and targeted instruction.
After-action review (AAR)
Each mission concludes with an AAR. Together, we assess results against its objectives, examine what worked and what did not, and identify what should change. The AAR findings inform subsequent missions, program reviews, and PII research.
Is your organization a good candidate?
We partner with organizations whose leaders aim for radical improvements under adversarial and unpredictable conditions.
If that describes you, let’s discuss your goals, the challenges you face, and whether there is a basis for working together.
Discuss collaboration