Deconstructive mental analysis.
A precise, repeatable procedure for examining the assumptions that organise experience — and for keeping the result stable when it is tested.
To make the activity of the mind visible while it is happening.
Not afterwards, in the reconstruction — where the mind has already tidied the sequence into a story about a decision that was, on reflection, obviously correct.
Most training aimed at judgment works on content: frameworks, checklists, catalogues of bias. Content is useful and it is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that the apparatus generating the judgment is invisible to the person using it at the moment they are using it, and becomes visible only later, when the decision has already been made and defended.
The method has one aim: to shorten that delay to nothing. What follows is the sequence by which that is trained, the capacities it develops, where it comes from, and what we measure. The limits are set out in the same detail, because a method described only in its strengths is a sales page.
Four movements, run in order — and the order is not decorative.
Each movement is defined, repeatable and documented. Nothing is asked of the participant beyond honest observation, which turns out to be a great deal.
Baseline & mapping
Before any work begins, a calibrated intake documents the terrain: the dominant loops, the decisions that reliably stall, the situations in which attention narrows, and the current operational load. Validated research instruments are administered at this point rather than later, so that the starting position is recorded rather than remembered.
This matters more than it sounds. Memory of one's own mental state is reconstructive and flattering. Six weeks into work of this kind, almost everyone reports having been worse at the beginning than they actually were — which feels like progress and is an artefact. A written baseline is the only defence against that, and it is also the only thing that makes the closing measurement mean anything at all.
Mapping is also where we establish what the participant actually wants, which is frequently not what the application said. That conversation belongs at the start, before anyone has invested in a version of the answer.
Deconstruction
This is the core of the method and the part that cannot be hurried. Guided analysis takes a specific, live assumption — not a belief held in the abstract, but one that is currently organising the participant's experience — and examines it directly: what it asserts, what it is built from, and whether the thing it refers to is findable when it is actually looked for.
The work is first-person and empirical in the ordinary sense of the word: the participant looks, and reports what is there rather than what the model predicts should be there. Nothing is taken on assertion, including anything we say. An assumption that survives inspection is left alone. Most of the assumptions that generate internal conflict do not survive it, and what changes afterwards is not the content of the thought but the authority it carries.
This movement is uncomfortable for some people and unremarkable for others, and we do not know in advance which. That is one of several reasons the work is done in small numbers, with a named instructor, under screening — rather than at scale.
Stabilisation
An insight that occurs once, in a quiet room, under favourable conditions, is not yet a capability. Stabilisation is the unglamorous majority of the work: training attention to hold its position while conditions push against it — fatigue, time pressure, hostility, public exposure, and the particular pressure of being watched by people whose opinion is materially expensive.
The practices here are ordinary and repetitive, and at some point the participant will find them boring. That is expected and it is part of the design. Attentional stability is a substrate: without it, the observation trained in the second movement is available only under easy conditions, which is precisely where nobody needs it.
Progress in this movement is measured rather than felt. Self-report about one's own attention is unreliable in both directions — people in the middle of real gains often report none — which is why the instruments are administered again rather than the question simply being asked.
Integration
The state is applied to actual decisions, actual people and actual consequences: the board meeting that is already in the calendar, the person who has to be let go, the position that has become a matter of pride. Structured transfer work runs alongside the rest of the programme rather than being appended to the end of it.
We regard the frequent absence of this movement as the central weakness of the corporate mindfulness format — weeks of practice that never touch the work, and a measurable change on a questionnaire that never leaves the room in which it was measured. Improvements on laboratory attention tasks have not been shown to transfer to working life, and a programme that does not attempt the transfer explicitly is relying on it happening by accident.
Without this movement the work remains an interesting experience and changes nothing.
Ordinary words for well-studied constructs.
Everything in the programmes develops one of four capacities. Each has a name in the research literature and each is measurable — which is not the same as saying each is well measured. Where the measurement is weak, we say so here rather than in a footnote.
Attentional stability
The capacity to place attention where you intend and keep it there while conditions push against it. In the literature this sits with sustained and executive attention, and it is the construct with the clearest support behind it: the best available meta-analysis puts the effect of attention training at roughly a quarter of a standard deviation — Hedges' g ≈ 0.29 (Verhaeghen, 2021, Mindfulness).
That effect is real, replicated and modest. It is also an effect on laboratory attention tasks: whether it shows up in a meeting or a board decision has not been demonstrated, and we do not claim that it has. This capacity is the substrate. Without it the remaining three are reachable only under conditions that do not resemble the ones you work in.
Meta-awareness
The capacity to notice that you are thinking, while you are thinking. Not to stop thought — that is neither possible nor useful — but to be present to it as an event rather than absorbed in it as a reality. In the research literature this is studied as decentering, and it is measured with the Experiences Questionnaire.
We are careful about how much that measurement is worth. The instrument has been validated as an instrument; that is not the same as evidence that decentering causes anything, and researchers in the field disagree about whether it is one cleanly measured construct at all. We work with it because it is coherent and measurable, not because it has been shown to be the mechanism.
Cognitive defusion
The capacity to hold a thought as a thought rather than as a fact about the world. The distance between “this project is failing” and “I am having the thought that this project is failing” is small in words and very large in consequence. The construct the literature uses is cognitive fusion, measured with the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire.
Defusion is the capacity that appears soonest in the room and is the hardest to keep. Under load, thought re-fuses with fact quickly and without announcing that it has done so. That is why this is trained through repetition rather than explained once and understood.
Flexibility under load
The capacity to update when the situation changes — including, and especially, when updating is expensive to your position, your reputation or your self-image. The research construct is psychological flexibility, and it is the weakest of our four.
The field's standard instrument, the AAQ-II, has documented discriminant-validity problems: it correlates more strongly with depression, anxiety and stress than with an actual measure of experiential avoidance (Wolgast, 2014, Behavior Therapy 45(6), 831–839; Tyndall et al., 2018, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science 12, 278–284). We report it as a distress index rather than as a flexibility score, and we report this construct as our weakest, because that is what it is.
This is not a course.
There is no curriculum, and nothing here is information you did not already have. The work is with attention itself — noticing what it is doing, while it is doing it. That is why the programmes are built around practice and observation rather than content, and why the shortest description of the method is not “learn this” but “look at that.”
The work is with the instrument, not with more information.
These methods did not originate in a laboratory.
They come from contemplative traditions that spent centuries doing one thing with unusual rigour: investigating how attention constructs experience.
The closest relatives of what we teach are the non-dual lineages — Dzogchen, Advaita Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism — traditions distinguished by their focus on direct investigation of awareness rather than on belief or ritual. We name them because that is where the method comes from, and because naming it is the only honest option available.
Over the last three decades, cognitive science has independently operationalised much of what those traditions described, under names such as decentering, meta-awareness, cognitive fusion and self-referential processing. We work in that overlap, and we teach in the second vocabulary because it is the one that can be checked.
We are candid about the origin for two reasons. Presenting old methods as new discoveries is dishonest. It is also trivially easy to disprove.
What we have removed is everything that does not survive translation: the metaphysics, the belief commitments, the vocabulary of attainment, and the social apparatus that surrounds a tradition. What remains is a training method, taught as a training method, by a company you are paying. Nothing here requires you to accept a claim about the nature of reality, and nothing here is improved by your believing one.
What we measure, and what the measurements are worth.
Instruments are administered before the programme and again at the end. Results go to the participant with an interpretation, including where nothing changed. Completion is voluntary and does not affect a place.
| Instrument | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Experiences Questionnaire | Decentering — observing a thought as an event rather than as a fact about the world. |
| Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire | Fusion with thought content — the degree to which thought is taken as description rather than as event. |
| Mindful Attention Awareness Scale | Dispositional attentional awareness in everyday activity. |
| Acceptance and Action Questionnaire II | Psychological inflexibility — reported by us as a distress index, for the reason given below. |
| Perceived Stress Scale | Subjective stress load. Collected for the participant's own report; never published by us as an outcome. |
| Sustained-attention task | Performance under sustained attentional demand — with the trade-off described below. |
Two caveats, which travel with the instruments everywhere they are named.
The AAQ-II is the field-standard measure of psychological inflexibility and has been criticised on discriminant-validity grounds — it correlates more strongly with depression, anxiety and stress than with an actual measure of experiential avoidance (Wolgast, 2014, Behavior Therapy 45(6), 831–839; Tyndall et al., 2018, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science 12, 278–284). We report it as a distress index, not as a flexibility score.
Sustained-attention tasks index a speed–accuracy trade-off as well as attentional lapse (Dang, Figueroa & Helton, 2018, Experimental Brain Research 236, 2255–2262); we report and control for that, and we do not describe the result as objective attentional performance. Improvement on a laboratory attention task has also not been shown to transfer to working life — the meta-analytic attention effect (Hedges' g ≈ 0.29; Verhaeghen, 2021, Mindfulness) is measured on exactly such tasks.
About the research we cite. The studies referenced on this page were conducted by the named third-party authors, on their own interventions and populations. They are not studies of our programmes. We have not conducted clinical trials of our programmes, and we do not claim that findings from other research transfer to our programmes or to you. Our programme design is evidence-informed: it draws on published research by others. It is not “evidence-based” in the clinical sense, and we do not use that phrase. Full sources, with designs, samples and limitations, are on Evidence and limits.
The method is only useful applied.
Admission is by application and interview. Every applicant completes a health and history screening and speaks with a member of our teaching team before a decision.