Triangular Alchemy of Modern Business

Why leadership today no longer controls, but holds tension

New Work has not failed—but it has been disenchanted. What began as a promise of freedom and self-determination now leads, in many organizations, less to orientation and more to uncertainty. Technological systems, data-driven decisions, and accelerated markets are shifting the internal logic of organizations—often faster than their interpretive frameworks can keep up.

What leaders perceive as chaos is, in truth, friction.

The intuitive response to this uncertainty is a call for clearer leadership, more structure, more control. A return to the familiar. Understandable—and yet too short-sighted. Because this response treats symptoms, not causes. It attempts to restore order without understanding why it was lost.

Organizations today are not at risk of faltering because their people are incompetent, but because forces are at play that no longer naturally align. What leaders perceive as chaos is, in truth, friction. Friction between logics that operate simultaneously—and obstruct one another. The real danger does not lie in the existence of these tensions, but in the fact that many organizations lack a shared language, a coherent mental model, and the structural anchoring required to engage with them productively.

If we look more closely—beneath the everyday noise of meetings, targets, quarterly reviews, and innovation rhetoric—a deeper geometry becomes visible. A pattern that does not reveal itself in the activities of an organization, but in the tensions that shape it.

In conversations with CEOs, founders, transformation leaders, and organizations at various stages of crisis or metamorphosis, the same constellation emerges repeatedly: an interplay of three competing logics—incubation, efficiency, and investment—each indispensable, each powerful, and each fundamentally in tension with the others.

I call this constellation Triangular Alchemy.

It describes the architecture of the becoming organization—an organization for which continuous transformation is not an exception, but the norm.

Triangular Alchemy is not a management method. It is not a reinvention of “explore versus exploit,” nor a matrix distilled into a polished consulting slide. It is not a model to be implemented. It is a way of seeing—a perceptual instrument that allows us to understand organizations as living systems and to grasp their dynamics.

Forge (Incubation)

The first logic begins where the perception of what organizations actually do starts to shift—what they bring to market.

Conventionally, companies sell products and services. Sales remains central: it is the source of investment and the engine of growth. But beneath this surface lies a second layer. Many successful (tech) companies today do not primarily sell licenses or units—they forge. They enable customers and partners to grow, so that they return and create more value.

What matters is not the individual product, but the ecosystem in which it becomes effective.

This pattern is not new. Breweries, for example, could only grow if restaurants and bars thrived. They, too, forged and incubated their customers. In today’s world, this principle becomes universal: growth increasingly emerges from the outside in. Innovation arises where organizations connect to their environment—to customers, partners, and markets.

Progress is nonlinear, improvisational, and often inefficient in the short term. And yet it is the energy source of renewal. It asks questions organizations tend to forget in times of success: What is emerging? What is being learned? Which possibilities remain unseen?

Forge is less a function than a way of being—and it exists in structural tension with the second logic.

Efficiency

Efficiency is the stabilizing counterforce to forge. It ensures reliability, continuity, and trust. It is the part of the organization that delivers—quickly, reproducibly, and predictably.

Every adaptive organization needs this stability: defined processes, automation, and clear structures.

Operational excellence means disciplined adaptability: delivering today while learning how to deliver better tomorrow. Efficiency does not arise from mechanical optimization, but from clarity—between vision, action, and outcome. It is visible in cultures where problems surface early, root causes are understood, and waste is consistently reduced.

Humans and technology enter a new equilibrium: management becomes increasingly technological, while humans become carriers of judgment and progress.

But efficiency has a shadow side. When it becomes dogma, it begins to optimize the past at the expense of the future. Organizations appear stable, but become fragile. They deliver perfectly what has long since lost relevance.

Efficiency secures the present—but it cannot create the future.

Investment

If forge is the driver and efficiency the functioning engine, then investment is the compass.

It operates on a different time horizon. It does not ask about quarters, but about futures: Which future is being anticipated? Which capabilities must be built before they are needed? Which bets must be placed today to remain capable tomorrow?

Every organization today must learn to invest like a venture capitalist—beyond traditional budgeting logic. Budgeting preserves the present; investment shapes becoming.

Investment does not primarily seek innovation internally, but in the market, with customers, and within technological developments. It is a learning logic—and the organizational expression of possibilism: the belief that the future is not predicted, but enabled.

The Necessary Friction

Forge, efficiency, and investment exist in tension.

Forge disrupts efficiency.
Efficiency restrains forge.
Investment demands sacrifice from both.

This tension is not a flaw—it is the precondition for development.

If organizations misunderstand these dynamics and attempt to harmonize them too early, creativity collapses, excellence stagnates, and the future becomes mere performance.

Work itself takes on a new meaning within this field of tension. It is no longer solely an expression of individual autonomy, nor merely the execution of predefined processes. Work becomes the medium through which contradictory logics must operate simultaneously—between renewal and reliability, between present and future, between freedom and responsibility.

If organizations succeed in holding these logics in productive tension, transformation becomes possible. A flywheel begins to turn.

But it does not turn by itself.

It requires Anticipatory Leadership—leadership not as control, but as the conscious orchestration of tension. Anticipating, not reacting. Holding, not smoothing.

More on The Becoming Organization, Anticipatory Leadership, and Triangular Alchemy can be found in the new book:  ‘The Quantum Economy – Will Capitalism Save The Mensch?’