Sin to Synergy
The Seven Deadly Skills
By Glen Horn. 102,787 words. The foundational volume of the Sin to Synergy series — setting out the complete framework: seven dysfunctions rooted in the classical seven deadly sins, mapped to seven learnable skills and seven professional archetypes.
The book opens with The Space Between, a novella giving the seven skills and seven dysfunctions human form before the analytical argument begins. It closes with a full self-critique — the framework's own case against itself, answered on its own terms.
Fourteen books.
Two ways in.
The parent manuscript grows into two companion series of seven books each, one for every skill. The Archetype Series develops the skill itself, through the seven layers of mastery. The Dysfunction Series goes deeper into the dysfunction the skill displaces — its roots, its anatomy, its costs, and the psychology that sustains it. Each is a complete work; together they form the full developmental map.
Seven books.
Seven skills, fully developed.
The Courage to Own It.
The Art of Giving First.
The Practice of Genuine Creativity.
The Intelligence of Every Voice.
The Power of What You Already Have.
The Practice of Full Presence.
Loyal to the Outcome.
Seven books.
Seven patterns, fully examined.
The Defended Self.
The Closed Fist.
The Performance and the Void.
The Measuring Gaze.
The Competitor's Compass.
The Art of Safe Absence.
The Virtue of Wrong Direction.
Thirteen papers.
The framework, tested against the literature.
Alongside the books, the framework is developed as a series of academic working papers, each submitted or in preparation for a specific peer-reviewed journal — testing individual claims of the Sin to Synergy framework against the established literature in fields from organisational behaviour to diplomatic negotiation to clinical patient safety.
A critical assessment of the La Soglia programme design, its theoretical foundations, and its claims to distinction.
Why organisational interventions fail, and what a systems diagnosis reveals.
A leadership-level mechanism for organisational truth suppression.
Recovering the Aristotelian tradition for contemporary practice.
Personal skill development as a complementary mechanism for collective intelligence.
Extending Burt's network theory to individual developmental practice.
Why knowing about collaboration does not produce collaborative behaviour.
Why internal coherence enables interpersonal skill development.
Why the least automatable human capabilities are the most underdeveloped.
Towards a theory of emergent collective intelligence in teams.
Who pays when leaders cannot be wrong.
A seven-skill developmental framework for addressing clinical team dysfunction.
A seven-skill framework for multilateral negotiation.
The Complete Practitioner
The Seven Deadly Skills as a Single Practice
By Glen Horn. 8,009 words. A companion piece to both the Archetype Series and the Dysfunction Series, addressing what it calls the costume error — the natural but mistaken habit of reading an archetype as an identity to occupy rather than a role to play, and stopping at the first one that fits.
Where the fourteen companion books each develop a single skill in depth, this piece addresses their simultaneous deployment — how one person, reading the room and filling the gap, can hold the conditions for excellence across all seven at once, and why mastering all seven is both possible and necessary.
The Renaissance Series
and two companion essays
On the Rediscovery of Human Capacity Across Five Centuries.
Why Individual Brilliance Has a Structural Limit — and Who Built It.
How the Hero's Journey Became the Most Expensive Myth in Leadership.
Why Creative Tension Is the Most Valuable Thing Organisations Consistently Destroy.
