Free to read, search, and study on this site. Cite with attribution; no redistribution or commercial reuse (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) — License & Terms.
Findings & FAQ
Reading the study
What the corpus says, and the practical questions about using it.
[TO BE PUBLISHED] Headline findings — what two hundred scored cases say about where the loop breaks, the Culture Trap, and the Asymmetry Principle — will be summarised here from the book’s synthesis, as validation the reader can inspect rather than a substitute for the book. The computed distributions are already on the study overview.
- What is the OTA-200 Study?
- The empirical base of the book: 200 episodes of organisational success and failure — 100 of each — reconstructed from cited sources and scored on the same fifteen-cell grid of five modalities crossed with the three OTA phases.
- Can I download the corpus?
- No. The corpus is free to read, search, and study in full on this site, but there is no export or bulk download, and redistribution is not licensed. If you need to reference a case, link to it and cite it with attribution — see License & Terms.
- How do I cite a case?
- Cite the study, the case ID, and the methodology version — for example: OTA-200 Study, Case F-018 (Kodak), methodology v4 — and link to the case page on this site.
- Why give the research away when the book is for sale?
- Because the data is not the book. The corpus and methodology are open so the claims can be checked; the book carries the case narratives, the synthesis across all 200 cases, and the toolkit. The evidence is free — the argument is the book.
- How were the cases scored?
- Under a published, versioned methodology (currently v4), with blind quality-control review and a separate source-verification audit. The methodology page describes selection, sourcing standards, the scoring grid, and QC.
- What do the percentages on a case mean?
- They are attribution weights, not grades. A phase or modality weight says how much of that episode’s outcome the scoring attributes to it. A phase can be executed admirably and still carry little of the outcome.
- I think a case is wrong. What do I do?
- Use the structured correction form. Submissions are triaged by error type and assessed impact; implemented corrections are published in the Corrections Log with credit (opt-in) to the person who found them.
- Will the corpus change over time?
- Yes — deliberately and visibly. Corrections and updates are applied to the case records and logged publicly, and material methodology changes increment the version. A dataset that never changes is not being maintained.