I Built Something. Come Break It.
The Corpus: the second of its kind among academics - the first among organization scientists
I’ve spent the last two months building something I’ve only seen one person attempt.
→ Explore the Adaptive Adoption Corpus
If you like, please restack and share. If you think, “ew, gross” tell me why - you are the first people to see this!
The Problem It Solves
The internet is an averaging machine.
Ask any AI about organizational change and you get the consensus. The SEO-optimized. The algorithmically safe.
The Corpus draws on a body of scholarship with a 30-year evidence base, peer-reviewed foundations, and a documented intellectual lineage — positions taken, defended, and revised in public, across eight books and dozens of white papers.
Not the average of what everyone thinks. What one person has argued, tested, and staked their reputation on.
I’m Client Zero
When I started giving talks on AI in 2017, it was theory. Theory helps but doesn’t solve business problems. I wanted to feel the same pain my clients feel — building something real with my own hands.
But what could I build, I don’t sell products, I sell ideas.
One person. No team. No engineering degree. No budget.
The pipeline, the chunking, the embeddings, the query layer — built using Claude, from scratch, in a few weekends. The engineering isn’t a footnote. It is the argument: AI collapses the gap between imagination and execution.
If I can do this at 60 with a philosophy degree, your workforce can do far more with far less excuse. Here is what is under the hood.
What You Can Do Here
Ask the hard questions.
To get to grips with an author, you buy their books, spend hours reading them, or use the index and hope your interests are covered. Across eight books and dozens of papers, that is an oppressive and expensive project.
In the Corpus, you can ask:
Why I’m Sharing This With You First
You’re reading this because you subscribe to Think Bigger Think Better — which means you care about the substance, not just the headlines. I want your eyes on this before I take it wider.
Browse it. Poke at it. Try to break it.
What lands? What’s confusing? What’s missing? What would make this indispensable to someone navigating AI adoption in their organization?
→ Explore the Adaptive Adoption Corpus
This is the kind of thing I build when I stop writing about AI and start building with it. More on that soon.
Paul
If you’re new here — I’m Paul Gibbons. I write about a lot, but perhaps most on leadership, AI adoption, and why most organizations are approaching both wrong. Subscribe if that’s your kind of trouble.