What changes on Monday morning.
Five pathology-specific interventions a manager can run without a consultant.
The EMI framework names five organizational pathologies that surface when a workflow is being retired. The 1-pager and the paper say what each one is. This page says what to do when you see one. Each intervention is anchored to one EMI dimension and self-contained — no training, no certification required to run it.
Identity Portability Worksheet
A one-page artifact a manager fills out with each affected senior IC, in a single 45-minute conversation. Three prompts: (1) what capability do you carry that survives this workflow, (2) what is this workflow actually retiring — the artifact, the practice, or the relationship, (3) what is the next thing you want your name attached to. Output is the bridge between identities. Cost: one calendar slot. Return: every downstream conversation in the rollout becomes 70% cheaper.
The IC introduces themselves to a new stakeholder using the bridge sentence — without prompting — within 60 days.
Sunset Audit Checklist
A 12-item checklist run by the workflow owner, scheduled the day the retirement is announced for the date 30 days later. Surfaces the zombie artifacts running in parallel — calendar items, shared docs, Slack channels, dashboards, integrations, role names, identity anchors. Each item gets a yes/no plus an owner for decommissioning. Re-run at 60 and 90 days.
By day 90, the workflow is unfindable in the team's daily artifacts — a new hire could not reconstruct it from what is on the surface.
Vaccination-via-Sandbox Playbook
A schedule of three small workflow retirements run as full training reps for the org's immune system, in the 90 days before any big retirement is announced. Each sandbox runs the full retirement arc: announce → identity portability → sunset audit → ritual → debrief. The point is acquired immunity, not the workflows themselves. By the third sandbox, leadership conversations should be using new vocabulary — that is the signal that the immune system has learned.
Leadership-team conversations use 'allergic reaction', 'sunset ritual', 'identity portability' voluntarily by sandbox three. Vocabulary shift is the cheapest measure of immune learning.
Integration Rituals Guide
Four group rituals to dissolve the old in-group's exclusivity and give the new way of working a group to belong to. Story Exchange (origin stories told side by side). Bridge Appointments (two ambassadors each direction). Vocabulary Trade (each side names ten words the other does not yet know). First Decision Shared (the first significant decision is wrestled through together). Sequence matters — running them out of order cuts the effect roughly in half.
Six months in, a new hire who joins after the rituals cannot tell which side anyone was originally on. Old and new have collapsed into a single 'us'.
Retirement Co-Design Template
A structured template the affected team fills out with the manager — not the manager's announcement that the team responds to. Forces seven decisions to be co-owned: what is being retired, why now in the team's voice, who decides specifics on wind-down, who gets named credit, what the team owns next, how long the bridge is, what success looks like at 30/90/180 days. Output is a one-page artifact, signed, that becomes the rollout's source of truth.
Within 60 days, a member of the affected team voluntarily proposes a second retirement — in writing — using a draft of the same template. Quiet quitting cannot co-exist with a team proposing its own next retirement.
Want the full templates?
The full intervention library — with run scripts, manager talking points, and the actual worksheets — is delivered as part of an EMI engagement or as a standalone artifact for transformation leaders running it inside their own org.