The Source Code: Coaching Frameworks for Founders and Leaders (Open and Free)

Most coaching frameworks for founders live behind a paywall, a certification, or a coach who explains them one hour at a time. Mine don't. The Source Code is every named framework I use with real clients, written up properly and published free at /source-code. Every tool built and tested across 18 years and more than 10,000 hours of coaching, including six years coaching for Tony Robbins. This page is the map. It tells you what each framework does, which problem it solves, and where to start.

What is the Source Code?

The Source Code is an open library of coaching frameworks for founders and leaders. Each one is a named, step-by-step protocol for a specific problem: a hard conversation, a slow decision, a culture drifting off course, a founder running on fear. Everything is free, complete, and written to be run without me in the room.

Why publish coaching frameworks for founders free

Simple rule I set years ago: any tool I explain more than once gets documented. After a thousand-plus clients, the same problems kept walking through the door wearing different company logos. The conversation you keep putting off. The co-founder decision that's been stuck for a month. The values poster nobody believes. I got tired of watching good frameworks die in someone's session notes, so I wrote them all down.

And I publish them free because of how I think coaching should work. My job is to build capability, not dependency. A coach who hoards the method is selling you a subscription to himself. If you can read a protocol, run it with your team, and never call me, that's a win. The founders who do call me are the ones who want a partner in the room while they install this stuff under real pressure, and that's a much better conversation to have.

One more reason. Frameworks are not the hard part. Doing them when your board is unhappy and your best engineer just resigned, that's the hard part. Giving away the frameworks costs me nothing and tells you exactly how I work before you ever pay me a dollar.

Below is the whole library, grouped by the problem you'd search for at 11pm. Every linked title goes to the full protocol.

Frameworks for hard conversations

More founder pain concentrates here than anywhere else. Google spent years studying what makes teams work in Project Aristotle, and the top answer was psychological safety: people need to know they can speak up without getting punished for it (Google's re:Work has the research). These seven frameworks build that safety, then use it.

The Location of Leadership. Above and below the line. At any moment you're either open and curious (above) or defensive and committed to being right (below). Everyday version: your co-founder questions your hire, and you feel your jaw set before they finish the sentence. That's below the line. This protocol teaches you to notice it and shift before you speak. It's the diagnostic underneath everything else in this library.

The Micro-Trust Protocol. The marble jar. Trust isn't built in grand gestures, it's built one marble at a time: you kept the small promise, you remembered the thing they told you, you showed up when you said you would. This protocol turns trust from a vibe into a practice, so the hard conversation has enough in the jar to survive it.

The Effective Feedback Protocol. Clear is kind. Vague feedback feels polite and is actually cruel, because the person keeps failing at a thing nobody named. This is the structure for saying the clear thing without shaming anyone.

The Radical Calibration Protocol. Feedback as a daily habit instead of an annual event. Two questions, sixty seconds, after every significant interaction. Small and boring, which is exactly why it works.

The Radical Reception Protocol. The other side of the contract: how to receive feedback without armour. Most leaders ask for feedback and then punish the first person brave enough to give it. This one fixes the receiving end.

The Conflict Protocol. Preparation for the conversation you've been avoiding. What you want, what they probably want, what you'll say first, where it could go wrong. You walk in prepared instead of hoping.

The Coaching Standard. What real coaching demands from both sides of the table: the mental models, the accountability clause, the deep work standard. Use it to run coaching inside your company, or as a filter before you hire any coach, including me. If you want the team-wide version of this idea, I've written up The Coaching Standard: How to Turn Your Team Into CoFounders. CoFounders, one word, is my term for team members who think and act like owners.

Frameworks for pressure and state

You can't lead well from a body that's flooded. These five are about what happens inside you before anything happens in the room.

The Zero-State Protocol. Clearing the emotional charge before a big decision. Resentment, guilt and old frustration all sit on the scale when you weigh your options, and they push it. This protocol gets you back to zero first, so the decision is about the decision.

The Triad. Change your state before you walk in. Three levers: what you do with your body, what you focus on, and the words you use with yourself. Everyday version: two minutes before the board call, stand up, breathe properly, and swap "don't stuff this up" for "what does this room need from me?" Sounds small. It isn't.

The Anti-Fragile Forgiveness Protocol. Turning emotional friction into fuel. Founders carry grudges like ballast: the investor who passed, the co-founder who left, their own mistakes most of all. This is a working protocol for putting it down, not because it was okay, but because carrying it is costing you decisions.

The Co-Regulation Protocol. How two people keep each other steady when the stakes are high. Your team borrows your nervous system whether you like it or not. This one makes that borrowing deliberate.

The Flow Protocol. Building deep focus on demand instead of waiting for it to visit. The conditions that produce flow are trainable: clear goal, no interruptions, a challenge just past your current edge.

Frameworks for decisions and strategy

Slow decisions kill more startups than bad ones. These six speed you up without making you reckless.

The Decision Architecture. The full protocol for high-stakes calls, including the pre-mortem: before you commit, imagine it's a year from now and the decision failed, then write down why. Everyday version: before signing the office lease, spend twenty minutes listing every way it becomes the thing you regret. You'll catch risks that optimism was hiding. This is also where the one-way and two-way door test lives. A two-way door you can walk back through, so decide fast. A one-way door you can't, so slow down. Jeff Bezos put the distinction in his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, and it's still the best decision-speed tool I know.

The Velocity Protocol. The one-way and two-way door test turned into a team habit, so decision speed stops depending on you personally being in the room.

The North Star Protocol. Engineering strategic clarity: the one direction that lets you say no to nine good opportunities because they're not the right one. The North Star becomes your barometer with the team. "Is this moving us toward it?" ends most priority arguments in one sentence.

The Optionality Engine. Designing your business so more paths stay open, not fewer. Cash buffers, skills that transfer, revenue that doesn't all depend on one client. Options are how you stay calm when the market isn't.

The Essential Momentum Protocol. Finding the one thing your business does best and pointing everything at it. This is where the flywheel shows up: each push on the same wheel makes the next push easier, the way a good referral brings a client whose results bring two more referrals. Momentum compounds only if you stop pushing six different wheels.

Top Goal Theory. The two-hour rule. Two hours a day on your single most important priority, before email, before meetings. Most founders spend close to zero. Five hundred protected hours a year changes what a year can produce.

Frameworks for getting out of the bottleneck

Everything routes through you, and it's breaking. These three are about scaling your judgment instead of your hours.

The Ferguson Protocol. Named for Alex Ferguson's Manchester United, where the assistant manager ran training so Ferguson could watch, think and decide. The protocol: stop being the busiest person in the company and become the clearest one. You need a second chief.

The Two Chiefs Protocol. The practical build-out: how to actually install that second leader, split the decisions, and stop silently taking the job back when they run a play differently than you would have.

The Context Transfer Protocol. Why senior hires dropped in from outside so often fail. It's rarely talent. It's context: they don't know why things are the way they are, and nobody thought to tell them. This protocol transfers the context on purpose, before the failure, not in the exit interview.

If you're reading this section with your jaw tight, that's usually the point where a structured engagement beats a library. Book a Discovery Call and we'll look at your specific bottleneck together.

Frameworks for culture and hiring

Culture is what people do when you're not in the room. These five make that deliberate instead of accidental.

The Values Discovery Protocol. Finding the values your company actually runs on, from evidence, not from a whiteboard of nice words. You mine the moments the team is proud of and the moments that made them wince, and the real values are sitting right there.

The Values Integration Protocol. The enforcement loop. Values only become culture when they decide who you hire, what you praise, and who you exit. If your top biller can break a value and keep their job, that value is gone, and everybody watched it go.

The Near Enemies Framework. Every value has a near enemy: a fake version that looks almost identical and rots the real thing from inside. The far enemy of honesty is lying, easy to spot. The near enemy is "radical candour" used as a licence to be cruel. Everyday version: a team that calls silence "harmony" doesn't have harmony, it has fear with good manners. This framework teaches you to tell the twin from the real thing.

The A-Player Scorecard Protocol. Hiring by defined outcomes instead of gut feel. You write down what success in the role produces in twelve months, then interview against that, not against charisma.

The Herb Brooks Protocol. Named for the coach who built the 1980 US Olympic hockey team. He famously wasn't looking for the best players, he was looking for the right ones. All-star teams fail because talent doesn't add up, it interacts. This is the protocol for selecting for fit and complementarity, not just raw ability.

Frameworks for time, focus and clarity

Where your week actually goes, and how to get it back.

The Time Audit. Track a real week, then sort every hour into what only you can do, what someone else could do, and what shouldn't be done at all. Most founders find a full day a week hiding in category three. Uncomfortable, and worth it.

The Clarity Framework. The 5Cs. A short sequence for cutting through mental noise when everything feels urgent and nothing feels clear.

The Daily Communication Clarity Protocol. Ending the fear-based download, where updates are long because nobody's sure what the boss actually wants to know. Short, structured answers that give people certainty instead of noise.

The Draft-to-Craft Protocol. From paralysis to polish in three phases. For the founders who can't ship the deck, the post or the plan because it isn't perfect yet. The ugly first draft is a phase, not a verdict.

Frameworks for antifragility

The frame under the whole library. Antifragility is Nassim Taleb's idea from his book Antifragile: some things break under stress, some things survive it, and some things get stronger because of it. Muscles are the everyday example. Stress them, rest them, and they grow. The goal isn't a founder who withstands chaos. It's a founder who gains from it.

The Operating System for Chaos. The full mindset build: how to set up your thinking, your habits and your recovery so that volatility feeds you instead of draining you.

The Anti-Fragile Founder. From reactive to centred. The personal version: confidence built on clarity of who you are and what you want, not on last quarter's numbers, because outcome-based confidence breaks the first time outcomes do.

The Foundation Principle. Why simplicity scales and cleverness doesn't. Complex systems have more ways to break. Simple ones bend, hold, and get repaired fast. Applies to your product, your org chart and your calendar equally.

Where these frameworks came from

None of this was invented at a whiteboard. Every protocol in the library earned its place the same way: a real client hit a real wall, we built or borrowed a tool to get through it, and the tool worked more than once with more than one person. Then it got a name and a write-up.

I name my sources openly, because hiding the scaffolding is a guru move and I'm not a guru. Taleb gave me antifragility. Bezos gave me the two door types. Brené Brown's research sits under the trust and feedback work. Jim Collins is behind the flywheel thinking. The above and below the line frame comes from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. What I add is the adaptation: taking an idea from a hedge fund, a football club or a psychology lab and turning it into a protocol a founder can run on a Tuesday with a team of twenty.

The other source is failure. A good number of these exist because I watched something go wrong, in a client's company or my own work, and refused to let the lesson evaporate. The Context Transfer Protocol exists because I watched expensive senior hires fail for reasons that had nothing to do with talent. The Anti-Fragile Forgiveness Protocol exists because I kept meeting brilliant founders whose best thinking was being taxed by a grudge. The library is a record of solved problems. Yours is probably in there.

How to actually use this library

Don't read them all. That's collecting, not changing, and collecting frameworks is its own near enemy of growth.

Do this instead. Pick the one problem that's costing you the most sleep this month. Find its section above. Read that one protocol properly, then run it for two weeks before you touch another one. A framework half-installed under real conditions beats ten frameworks admired from a distance. When it holds, stack the next one.

If you lead a team, pick one protocol and run it together. The Effective Feedback Protocol or the Values Discovery Protocol are the best starting points for a group, because everyone feels the result within a fortnight.

And if you want a partner in the room while you install this under real pressure, with real accountability, that's the actual job I do. The library is free forever. The engagement is for founders who want it to stick. Book a Discovery Call