The R6 model is not an abstract theory. Its axes of tension — posture, coordination, realisation — manifest concretely in the decisions organisations make every day, with measurable consequences: millions of dollars lost or saved, performance destroyed or rebuilt.
The three analyses that follow are built on real, documented and verified cases. They are not intended to stigmatise organisations or teams — in every failure, the people involved were often competent and well-intentioned. What they reveal is how the invisible architecture of an organisation — its rules of the game, its incentives, its silences — shapes individual behaviour far more powerfully than will or talent ever could.
IBM invests $62 million and four years building an AI capable of eliminating cancer. The project never treats a single patient. At the same moment, Microsoft — widely perceived as an ageing, arrogant company — quietly begins transforming its internal culture. Its share price increases tenfold.
This first case explores the posture axis at the strategic level: why the world's most advanced technology can fail for want of human alignment, and how a simple redefinition of what competence means can unlock an entire organisation.
The Canadian government launches a payroll system for 290,000 civil servants. The project ends with damages running into billions of dollars — not because the technology was defective, but because nobody dared say that something was not working. Meanwhile, Etsy deploys between 30 and 100 production releases per day — and gives its engineers an award when they make mistakes.
This second case explores the coordination axis and the question of psychological safety: how the fear of flagging a problem can cost infinitely more than the problem itself, and why the freedom to fail is a rigorous method — not an absence of standards.
Companies around the world invest heavily in "data lakes" that turn into unusable swamps. Airbnb, in 2016, creates an internal university to teach its 4,000 employees — in marketing, HR, finance — to query databases themselves. Within months, the usage rate of internal data tools rises from 30% to 45%. Requests to data scientists are drastically reduced.
This third case explores the realisation axis: the difference between accumulating a technical resource and building an organisational capability — and why investing in distributed training delivers more value than investing in storage.
These three cases share a common lesson: transformations that succeed are never purely technological. They are always, simultaneously, transformations of posture, coordination and realisation — the three axes of the R6 model.