Donald Sull's Active Inertia framework identifies four mechanisms through which the habits, relationships, and beliefs that produced past success can quietly work against future progress — in organizations and in individual leaders.
This diagnostic helps you assess where active inertia may be taking hold in your leadership. It is a tool for reflection, not a performance review — the value is in what you do with the questions, not the score.
Your strategic frame may be filtering out signals that do not fit what you already know.
The habits that drove your success may have become the default response even when a different approach would serve better.
The expectations in your professional relationships may be constraining your ability to act in genuinely new ways.
The values formed through real experience may have hardened into rules that resist examination.