Pods
Before the how, the why. This page lays out the **People Management Physics** that pods are built on — the underlying forces that govern how people work, grow, and relate to one another at LiminalArc. These aren't policies. They're the natural laws we design around, and every pod leader practice downstream is an expression of them.
The Core Insight Account work does not equal career development. They are separate forces — and conflating them creates friction for both the individual and the firm.
The Premise
Physics refers to the underlying principles and forces that govern how people work, grow, and relate to one another at LiminalArc. Policies can be argued with, waived, or rewritten. Physics can't — you either design with the forces or you fight them. The seven principles below are those forces. Read them as the firm's operating assumptions about people, and pods as the structure we built to work with them rather than against them.
The Model
Each principle describes a force already acting on every team member, whether or not we name it. Together they explain why the pod — not the account — is the home of a person's relationship to the firm.
Principle 01
An org chart shows one structure; people live in three.
Every team member operates inside three structures simultaneously. The Value Structure is how we deliver outcomes to clients — organized around accounts, client-facing, and temporary by nature. The Learning Structure is how people grow — organized around Centers of Excellence and Communities of Practice, owned by the individual and the firm, not the account. The Formal Structure is how the firm is organized — intentionally kept flat and messy, optimized for trust and long-term career health rather than command-and-control.
Principle 02
Your account is where you deliver value. Your pod is where you belong.
In most consultancies the account is the center of gravity: people join a project, grow on it, and leave when it ends. We invert this. Career decisions are made at the pod level, not the account level; firm information flows through pods; and a team member's sense of belonging should survive any project ending.
Principle 03
A practice is a gravitational field, not a department.
A practice is the organizing unit for a skill family — with no budget authority, no headcount mandate, and no delivery responsibility. It simply pulls together people who share a skill domain: Consulting, Product, and Engineering today. Practices define the language of growth — the competency models, skill assessments, and career ladders live inside them. They are the Learning Structure made concrete.
Principle 04
The right amount of hierarchy is the minimum required to decide clearly.
Hierarchy is contextual, not structural. On a client account it exists because delivery requires it — someone has to call the shot. In a pod it is lighter, because the purpose is belonging, growth, and firm relationship. We say "flat and messy" intentionally: flat means we resist adding management layers for span-of-control optics; messy means reporting lines and working relationships aren't always the same, and we don't pretend otherwise.
Principle 05
The stronger the alignment, the more autonomy we can safely grant.
Empowering people without aligning them is just chaos redistribution. Autonomy and alignment are not opposites — they are multipliers. Pod leaders invest heavily in alignment conversations on values, strategy, and what good looks like, not just status updates. Accountability then flows naturally: people who understand the "why" own the "what."
Principle 06
No one owns your career but you — and no one should navigate it alone.
The firm makes the career architecture legible, builds the structures (pods, practices, CoEs) that enable growth, and connects people to opportunities. The team member knows where they are and where they want to go, shows up to those structures, and gives their pod leader what's needed to advocate for them. Growth is not a performance review — it's an ongoing, two-way conversation embedded in the formal structure.
Principle 07
Firm information flows through pods, not accounts.
An invisible cost of consultancy life is that information lives on accounts — and when the account ends, it disappears, leaving people the last to know things that affect them. Strategic direction, career opportunities, changes to comp and levels, and culture all need a reliable channel. This isn't about excluding accounts — it's ensuring every team member has at least one dependable line to the firm, and that line is their pod.
At a Glance
Seven forces, and what each one looks like in practice. If you only remember one row, make it the last: firm news comes through the pod.
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