Welcome to the 3rd installment of a 4-part blog series called Q&A with Leadership Archway. If you missed the first two, I invite you to check them out:
Leadership Archway™ offers a comprehensive exploration of human sustainability, global trends, and the increasing prominence of the neurodiverse workforce. Survival means meeting deadlines despite fatigue. Thriving involves creative, sustainable work that energizes people. If you equate presence with well-being, you're only recognizing survival, not true vitality.
3. Are we constructing organizations that foster survival or that promote thriving?
This question profoundly shifts our perspective because it goes beyond mere rhetoric, to what should be considered a strategic diagnosis. In the game we call “life” organizations and people are either thriving or merely surviving. The ability we have to make decisions has a big part to play our journey through “life.” You may see this coming; did you know that burnout affects your ability to make decisions? Yes it does! (If you did not know, now you do and for more information check out The real leadership equation – Readiness, Willingness, Openness ).
In addition, I am going to draw upon some insights from a mentor and friend Dr. Jay Prag. To channel my inner Prag, game theory isn’t just about abstract math or economic puzzles. I mean it is but, if we want to apply it in real life we need to go beyond equations. I see this as a practical lens for understanding how real people and organizations make decisions, especially under pressure, with limited information, and competing incentives.
Game theory, as defined and explored by Jay Prag & Amanda Ishak Prag in their book Useful Game Theory: Fundamentals of Decision Making (2024).
Game Theory is an attempt to formalize the structure and outcomes of a situation when two or more people are making choices that together lead to an outcome. No one player can unilaterally determine the outcome; it depends on the decision of both people. This is a discipline that looks at how these decisions are made, with an eye toward how to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
While survival may appear productive from the outside, it comes at a significant cost: Silent burnout, attrition, and disengagement (For more information see my last blog post on, what if burnout isn’t your employees’ weakness, but your organization’s intelligence system trying to get your attention). Thriving, on the other hand, is not about comfort; it is about designing capacity, rhythm, and sustainability into the system.
Applying the lens of game theory, most organizations find themselves trapped in a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Both employers and employees fear that if they take the first step towards humanity (e.g., rest, boundaries, regenerative pacing), the other party will exploit their efforts. Consequently, both parties default to survival.
As Prag & Prag aptly put it, “The game rewards short-term protection over long-term trust.”
Survival Culture: An unspoken game with high costs. Too many organizations have normalized “high performance” environments where chronic stress, overextension, and emotional suppression are rewarded. So, what does survival look like?
According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Mental Health and Well-Being (2022), workplaces must support psychological safety, connection, and autonomy if they want to build thriving environments. Without structural support for recovery and rest, even top performers will eventually break down.
A survival-based model leads to:
📊 Game theory framing: This is a zero-sum culture: my success must come at the expense of yours (or mine). It incentivizes over-functioning as a dominant strategy, even if it leads to mutual loss in the long run.
Thriving Organizations: Redesigning the Game. After exploring the traps of survival-mode strategy and burnout as a zero-sum game, we arrive at the pivot point: What does it take to build a workplace that actually supports human thriving, not just endurance?
Thriving organizations are not soft or slow, they are strategic and built to last because they are built on alignment, sustainability, and capacity, not depletion.
Thriving means:
📊 Game theory framing: Thriving requires cooperative equilibria, where everyone benefits more when we coordinate around shared rhythms, values, and trust.
Here is the catch, cooperative games only work when two conditions are met:
“In repeated games, how you treat people today affects whether they cooperate tomorrow.”
(Useful Game Theory: Fundamentals of Decision Making, 2024)
That’s why thriving cultures require intelligent systems design, ones that don’t just incentivize production, but reward restoration, inclusion, and alignment.
Thriving Requires: Inclusive Neurodivergent Design (ND). Traditional workplaces are often built by and for neurotypical behavioral norms: linear workflows, fixed-time schedules, constant multitasking, and unspoken social rules. This is misaligned with how many neurodivergent professionals (those with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, or sensory processing sensitivity) work best.
Here’s what ND professionals often bring to the table:
Studies show that 30–40% of neurodivergent employees mask or suppress core traits in order to “fit in.” The cost? Decreased productivity, higher burnout, and reduced innovation.
Thriving workplaces embrace difference as design intelligence and means building systems that include:
When neurodivergent needs are supported (not pathologized) organizations expand their adaptive intelligence, and everyone thrives.
📊 From a game theory perspective, neurodivergent inclusivity is one way we shift the game away from zero-sum culture, changing rigid dominance to regenerative advantage.
The Cost of Inaction: So, what if we do nothing? Unfortunately, inaction has a cost and it's not just emotional, it’s also strategic. In game theory, failing to respond to systemic signals doesn’t neutralize the game, it worsens it. When leaders ignore biofeedback and cultural data insights (e.g., burnout, disengagement, high turnover) they aren't avoiding disruption. On the contrary, they're reinforcing a dysfunctional equilibrium.
This is what game theorists call a “suboptimal stable state.”
Translation: The game continues, but no one is actually winning.
From Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” framework, we know that people commit to purpose, not pressure. Employees will rally for something bigger than themselves, if they believe the system will honor that commitment. One of pre-requisites for this is trust, without it even the best strategy becomes noise. Here is the truth, purpose becomes performative without systems that support well-being.
Why Executives Can’t Afford to Stay Silent:
Your smartest people are watching what the system rewards, and they’re asking:
“Do I have to lose myself to succeed here?”
This is your tipping point: Staying in survival mode preserves the short-term illusion of control, while stepping into thriving mode allows you to build a legacy that scales sustainably. As Prag & Prag would say, in repeated games, your moves today shape cooperation tomorrow.
📊 Game theory framing: You’re playing the game as designed and the only way to change outcomes is to change the rules.
Leadership Archway: Sustainability, Redesign, and the Shift. We’ve examined the cost of surviving and the conditions for thriving, but strategy alone won’t get us there. If we want different outcomes, we have to change the rules of the game. That’s where Leadership Archway™ comes in.
We treat burnout as biofeedback and a cultural data insight, not a failure. In game theory, information is everything, and burnout is one of the clearest signals a system can send. It’s not a personal weakness, instead it’s the organization’s nervous system trying to tell the truth.
Like a kaleidoscope, each piece of data (e.g., turnover, disengagement, masking, low morale) on its own may feel random but together they reveal a pattern, a system that’s no longer working. When leaders learn to read these signals instead of silencing them, they unlock a powerful source of strategic insight.
Leadership Archway™ helps decode these signals by asking:
As Prag & Prag put it, “If players can’t trust the game, they’ll start playing just to survive.”
🧠 Designing for Human Sustainability: Thriving isn’t an accident; it’s a deliberate process built through rhythms, rituals, and structures that nurture capacity, creativity, and compassion.
At Leadership Archway™, we use methodologies grounded in:
We help organizations shift from extraction to regeneration by asking:
When those answers start to shift, so does your culture.
📈 From Reaction to Redesign: We believe leadership isn’t just about outcomes. It’s about designing the conditions where outcomes emerge, sustainably. Here at Leadership Archway™ the goal isn’t about managing burnout but rather, about transforming the system that causes it. We don’t want to tweak the game; we want to help you redesign it. Why, because when you change the rules, you change the outcomes. Take this as your invitation to build something different, not just for now, but for the future.
💡The Shift Ahead: The future of leadership isn’t just about speed or data-driven decision-making. It’s about being more compassionate, intelligent, and inclusive by design. We are not doomed to survive-only systems but, we are doomed if we keep playing the same game expecting different outcomes.
“If you want different results, you have to play a different game and design it to reward what you actually value.”
When we shift our focus from asking “How can we extract more from people?” to “What do people need to give their best?” we make a significant leap from a survival-oriented culture to a thriving ecosystem. This is the Leadership Archway™ difference: A regenerative model of leadership that fosters longevity, creativity, and collective intelligence.