Research Agenda FA
Status: active and evolving · Last revised July 22, 2026
This agenda is the single canonical home for active questions across the Human Transformation work, including questions that arise in leadership, coaching, facilitated programs, organizations, and groups. Leadership pages preserve programs, source material, working notes, and field observations; they do not maintain a separate research agenda.
The agenda records questions, not settled conclusions. A question may lead to an essay, evidence review, field note, program revision, product decision, or formal experiment. It also makes visible when a question has been narrowed, paused, or materially revised.
Status Language
- Open — important, but not yet scoped for active work.
- Being studied — sources, observations, or methods are currently being assembled.
- Field observations available — relevant practice-based observations exist, but causal conclusions are not justified.
- Evidence review available — published evidence has been reviewed in a canonical note.
- Revised — the wording or current interpretation has materially changed.
- Paused — useful, but not currently receiving active attention.
Current Material and Evidence Boundaries
The material currently available, especially for leadership-related questions, includes:
- direct observations from classes and groups;
- facilitation and coaching notes;
- participant accounts and feedback;
- experience working inside organizations;
- translations and study of leadership sources;
- reported examples of action, coordination, participation, or change.
These materials can help form questions and hypotheses. On their own, they do not establish efficacy, durability, causality, or generalizability. A participant’s experience, a facilitator’s observation, and an independently measured outcome are different forms of evidence and must remain distinguishable.
1. Performance and Durable Change
Current status: Being studied
- What shapes human performance: ability, biology, personal history, motivation, identity, language, relationships, goals, or context?
- Why does a person sometimes perform well in a supportive class, team, or coaching relationship and return to an earlier pattern when the setting changes?
- What distinguishes temporary behavior change, skill acquisition, durable learning, transfer, identity change, and transformation?
- How can change be evaluated across time and settings rather than only during a class, coaching relationship, program, or product session?
- What evidence would justify describing a change as durable rather than context-dependent?
2. Language, Perception, and Action
Current status: Open
- Does language only describe experience, or does it help organize attention, interpretation, and action?
- What changes when a person says “I cannot” rather than “I have not been able to do it yet”?
- Which linguistic reframings produce observable changes in choice or persistence, and which are merely changes in wording?
- How should behavioral effects of language be distinguished from stronger claims about neural mechanisms?
- How do context, promises, commitments, requests, and shared vocabulary affect coordination and performance in a group?
3. Identity and Worldview
Current status: Being studied
- What does a person mean by “who I am,” and how stable is that identity across situations?
- Can recognizing or reinterpreting identity change a person’s relationship with the past, other people, and possible futures?
- How do worldview and frames of reference shape what appears true, possible, threatening, or unavailable?
- What distinguishes an identity that supports action from one that becomes a fixed label?
- How is a person’s identity as a leader related to their observable behavior?
- Can an identity-level change persist without continuous reinforcement from the original group or facilitator?
4. Children and Independent Learning
Current status: Field observations available
- How do children develop ownership of their learning?
- Under what conditions can a facilitator gradually leave the center of a learning group?
- Does teaching peers deepen understanding, responsibility, communication, or persistence?
- What allows a group of children to coordinate and continue learning without continuous adult direction?
- What roles do curiosity, ability, goals, relationships, group norms, and access to tools play?
- How should independence be measured without turning it into another form of adult control?
The first public field record is Learning Circle.
5. Groups, Leadership, and Coordination
Current status: Field observations available
- How does a group become a setting in which members support one another and reproduce learning?
- How do language, context, promises, responsibility, and feedback affect coordination and performance?
- Can shared responsibility and commitment develop without permanent monitoring, pressure, or a central authority?
- What remains in a group after the founder, manager, teacher, or facilitator steps back?
- Which leadership practices transfer across organizations, and which depend on a particular culture, relationship, or facilitator?
- How do invitations, payment structures, shared projects, course exercises, and explicit integrity standards affect participation and coordination?
- How can participant experience be distinguished from a causal or generalizable outcome?
6. Quality of Life
Current status: Open
- How much of quality of life is associated with external conditions, and how much with the way the world appears to a person?
- Why may someone with fewer material resources report a better life than someone with greater access, status, or technology?
- Does a new tool reduce human work, or mainly change the form and direction of work?
- What does it mean to make the world “one step better” at the level of lived human experience?
- How can quality of life be discussed without ignoring material conditions, health, safety, and social structure?
Cross-Cutting Method Questions
- What is the unit of observation: a task, person, relationship, group, organization, or period of life?
- What outcome is being examined, and when should it be measured?
- What baseline, comparison, or counterfactual would make an interpretation more credible?
- Which statements are direct observation, participant self-report, interpretation, or independently measured result?
- How will unsuccessful, neutral, contradictory, and incomplete cases be documented?
- What alternative explanations could account for the same observation?
- How can facilitator influence, observer-role conflict, selection effects, maturation, and social desirability be made visible?
- What should remain private, and what permission is required before identifiable material is published?
Current Boundaries
This agenda does not authorize clinical diagnosis or treatment. It does not turn coaching, organizational work, children’s learning activities, or facilitated programs into academic research by naming them research. Stronger claims require appropriate consent, operational definitions, measurement, baseline or comparison, relevant expertise, and review.
The immediate objective is modest: improve the questions, document field settings honestly, connect them to relevant published work, distinguish evidence types, and make revisions visible.