Zero-Based Doctrine

In 1969 an accountant at Texas Instruments went looking for waste and found something worse: inertia deciding how the company ran. Peter Pyhrr’s fix was zero-based budgeting. Every cycle, every expense starts from zero and earns its way back in, whatever last year said.

We all know that with this AI transformation, companies should re-evaluate how they operate. Definitely not a hot take. But what about the company’s set of beliefs, goals, working agreements, and everything else that originates the processes? Donella Meadows would call that layer the paradigm, the deepest practical place to intervene in a system, and I endorse intervening in a more grounded manner: give it the Pyhrr treatment.

How did the Agile Manifesto come to be? Seventeen practitioners met at a ski lodge in Utah after spending years inside real companies running lightweight methods that worked, under different names. Over a weekend, they uncovered and distilled the principles they were already living and wrote them down. Extracted from practice, backed by the trenches.

AI-native is different than AI-first while better devops is still devops. There is no improving waterfall into agile.

Every few months a step change in the models resets what the tools can do, and the tools reset the ways of working built on top of them. Until that settles, nobody can claim a best practice as lasting, and whoever claims it hardest should be trusted least.

So what can you do before the puck stops? Lead with vision and read the movement. The next moves do not need the destination.

For larger organizations, identifying the areas most likely to change is already progress. Starting the evolution, moving from run the bank to change the bank, is progress too, and definitely not enough.

On AI, if you are not leading it (you are probably not Anthropic or OpenAI), you are fine being neither the first nor the last to start using something. But that has to be decided on purpose.

And this is the whole point: audit your own doctrine, one premise at a time. Starting clean, with the tools that exist today, would we still choose this? Some premises will survive. A few will turn out to be last decade’s budget, renewed every year without a conscious decision being made by anybody.

I have my own set of bold predictions that I am keeping warm for a future post. For now, understanding what your set of practices is, when each was last chosen, and why, will elevate your awareness. And awareness is what raises your ability to transcend paradigms.