The Burning Man
Index™
Measuring the distance between the story an institution tells itself — and the world it actually operates in.
There's a particular species of terror that grips institutional leaders in 2026, and it has nothing to do with the conventional fears — competition, regulation, market share. It's something more primal: the sudden, vertiginous realization that the playbook itself has become obsolete. Not just outdated. Not merely in need of revision. But fundamentally, catastrophically unfit for purpose.
The question is whether that story still matches the world it operates in.
Most institutions that fail in 2026 won't fail from a single catastrophic event. They'll fail because they're trapped in a doom loop — a self-reinforcing cycle where the response to declining performance is to double down on the very playbook that caused the decline. Optimize harder. Restructure again. Launch another initiative inside the same collapsing logic. The loop accelerates. The gap between narrative and reality widens. And at some point, the gap becomes unsurvivable.
Modern strategy isn't about optimizing within the loop. It's about exiting it.
Blue Spoon spent the last year building The Burning Man Index™ — a scoring framework that measures how close an institution is to system collapse. Not financial collapse. Narrative collapse. The moment when the story the organization tells itself about itself stops working — and the doom loop locks in.
Five Dimensions of Institutional Coherence
Narrative Coherence
Does the story match the world? The gap between institutional self-narrative and observable reality is the single most reliable predictor of collapse.
Leadership Freshness
Architects or custodians? Organizations led by builders operate differently than organizations led by maintainers. The distinction is existential.
Ecosystem Awareness
Living system or walled garden? Institutions that sense and respond to their environment survive. Those that wall themselves off become fossils.
Strategic Altitude
System design or operational weeds? The difference between leaders who redesign the game and those who optimize moves within a game that no longer exists.
Creative Destruction
Building new or defending old? The willingness to cannibalize your own position before someone else does it for you.
What the Index Found
Amazon
The Keystone SpeciesAmazon solved the cold network problem, invented self-generating markets, and is now quietly reorganizing healthcare into six pillars. It doesn't compete within systems. It builds them.
OpenAI
Sprinting Toward a WallSprinting toward a data wall while pretending it can see beyond it. Offering free AI to biotech for drug royalties is like offering free Word to Stephen King in exchange for book royalties.
European Union
The Thesis in Pure FormThe diagnosis is brilliant — Draghi's "slow agony" report called for €800B in annual investment — and the patient refuses to take the medicine. One year later, only 11.2% of his 383 recommendations have been implemented.
Boeing
Engineering Displaced by Financial EngineeringAn aerospace titan that can't keep its own bolts in order. Financial engineering displaced actual engineering. That's not a metaphor. That's the diagnosis.
The full Index is live.
All 27 institutions — scored, ranked, and diagnosed across five dimensions of institutional coherence.
View the Burning Man IndexThe framework comes from When Burning Man Comes to Washington: A Field Manual for Riding Chaos, which applies complexity theory and systems thinking to the question every leader is asking right now:
What do you do when the playbook stops working?
The Burning Man Index™ is a proprietary framework of Blue Spoon Consulting®, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon works with leaders who have recognized that the doom loop is real — and are ready to exit it.