IDEAS
A different way to look at the work.
Insights on leadership, decision making, and the near enemies that keep capable people and organizations stuck.
START HERE
Three ideas to get you started
New to Residy or the Near Enemies framework? Start here. These pieces introduce the core ideas and show how they apply in leadership, organizations, and real estate.
LEADERSHIP
Why the Apparent Problem Is Rarely the Actual Problem
Capable people often work hard on the wrong problem. Here's how to get beneath the surface.
FRAMEWORK
What Is the Near Enemies Framework?
The near enemies framework explains how strengths can become liabilities — and what to do about it.
ORGANIZATIONS
The Near Enemies of Organizational Life
Common Near Enemy pairs that show up in teams, institutions, and complex systems.
EXPLORE IDEAS
Latest Ideas
Who Else Needs to Be in This Conversation?
Some expensive mistakes are not caused by a lack of expertise. They happen because the expertise is fragmented, and the person holding the missing piece was never brought into the conversation.
The Near Enemies of Organizational Life
Organizations have Near Enemies too. Real collective strengths can become blind spots when they start answering questions they were never meant to answer.
When More Supply Doesn’t Mean Lower Rents
More supply does not automatically mean lower rents. The useful question is what the supply number is actually telling you about competition, product, demand, and where the market is adjusting.
Grace Is Not Access
Understanding why someone behaves the way they do does not obligate you to keep structuring your life around it. Grace can shape how generously you understand someone without deciding how much access they should have to you.
Why the Apparent Problem is Rarely the Actual Problem
The problem we can name is often real, but incomplete. The real work is figuring out what sits underneath it and what the apparent problem is obscuring.
Everything I Do Is the Same Move
Teaching, advisory work, Near Enemies, and even real estate finance looked like separate workstreams for a long time. They weren’t. They were the same diagnostic move in different rooms.
Accountability vs. Self-Blame
Accountability asks what was yours and what you will do differently. Self-blame keeps expanding the assignment until the whole outcome becomes evidence against you.
Expertise as a Blind Spot
Expertise gives us speed, pattern recognition, shorthand, and judgment. It can also make us so fluent in a frame that we stop noticing it is a frame.
The Loyalty Trap
Silence is not inherently wise or cowardly. The harder question is what the silence is serving, and whether loyalty has started asking you to give up truth, judgment, or yourself.
Reflection vs. Rumination: Why Thinking Harder Is Not the Same as Thinking Better
Reflection and rumination can look almost identical from the inside. The difference is direction: reflection extracts something useful and carries it forward. Rumination keeps asking thought to produce an answer it may not be able to produce.
How to Find the Hidden Obstacle That Is Actually Preventing Progress
A project that looked like a construction-cost problem turned out to be a parking assumption nobody had thought to revisit. Sometimes the fastest way forward is to treat the given as a variable.
Why Smart Organizations Solve the Wrong Problem
Leadership teams can work very hard on alignment, communication, or execution and still get nowhere because the stated problem is only where the consequences are showing up. The actual problem is often one level underneath.
When Strength Becomes a Liability
A strength can be completely real and still end up doing the wrong job. For leaders, indispensability can look a lot like effectiveness until the organization can’t scale without them.
Why High-Performing Leaders Get Stuck When Everything Looks Fine
Some of the most dangerous problems in high-performing organizations do not look like problems. They look like progress, especially when the assumptions underneath them have stopped being questioned.
What Is the Near Enemies Framework?
Near Enemies is a framework for understanding how real strengths can distort, overreach, or take on jobs they were never meant to do, and why those patterns are so hard to see from the inside.