For 25+ years, Mike has been investigating a question the best business schools still don't teach — and one that lives deeper than organizational science is trained to look: What are people actually capable of — relative to the context they find themselves in?
The answer became a science. That science is BIQ™.
"Research reveals massive untapped potential within collectives — hidden in the dynamics most organizations never recognize. BIQ is the science that reveals these dynamics — and enables organizations to achieve the breakthrough results conventional approaches miss."— Dr. Michael E Nagel
Mike earned his credibility before his credentials. He rose to Senior Vice President at a global research-driven consulting firm early in his career — where he led teams and owned outcomes. But success left him restless. He'd seen equally talented teams produce wildly different results and wanted to understand why.
That curiosity pulled him back to graduate school to earn his doctorate. The result: a rare combination of executive credibility and scientific rigor that lets him work with leaders as a peer, not a professor.
His research journey began with an unexpected discovery. As a teenager, Mike intuitively transformed a potential parking lot confrontation between rival football teams into genuine connection. This experience sparked his signature research question:
"What are people capable of relative to the context they find themselves in?"
This question drove decades of investigation — research at the University of Manchester under the guidance of Dr's Mike Bresnen (Professor of Organizational Studies) and Andrew Pettigrew (Professor of Strategy and Organization, University of Oxford) — and hands-on work with hundreds of organizations.
Through systematic study of what separates breakthrough collectives from stuck ones, Mike discovered that most organizations focus on surface-level factors while missing the deeper forces that actually determine success or failure.
After decades of research and hands-on engagement — from global Fortune 500 to middle market and mission-driven organizations — a pattern emerged with striking consistency:
Capable leaders. Strong teams. Real investment. And yet the breakthrough never comes.
Not because people aren't trying. Because they're working with an incomplete map.
The paradigms taught in top business schools and deployed by leading consultancies address only the surface — talent, strategy, process. They miss the deeper causal forces that actually determine whether a collective performs at its potential or plateaus well below it.
What emerged from Mike's research is Breakthrough Intelligence (BIQ™) — the science of the causal forces that drive or block collective breakthrough in every organization, on every team.
These forces aren't soft concepts. They're causal. They're knowable. And they're workable — once you're attuned to them.
"I am fully confident that he will succeed in his doctoral studies and will make important contributions to our knowledge about effective management policies and practices."Dr. Robert S. KaplanBaker Foundation Professor, Harvard Business School & Co-Creator, Balanced Scorecard
The research that became BIQ didn't begin in a vacuum. It grew from years of work at the highest levels of organizational strategy — work that caught the attention of scholars who recognized its doctoral potential before Dr. Nagel himself had pursued it. His early work with Kaplan and his later doctoral research became foundational for the discovery of Breakthrough Intelligence — BIQ™.
Today, Mike is one of the few research-practitioners with continuing access to organizations and teams across all performance levels — not just those already on a breakthrough path. That access matters. It keeps the science relevant.
He specializes in the moments that demand the most from a collective: bold goals, strategic transformation, major innovation, organizational change that can't afford to underdeliver. His approach always begins the same way — comprehensive assessment to identify the dynamics accelerating or blocking breakthrough before any intervention begins.
Whether he's delivering a keynote to 250+ senior leaders, designing a multi-day leadership retreat, or facilitating a critical boardroom conversation, Mike creates the conditions where exceptional teams finally perform like the powerhouses they were assembled to be.
Informed by decades of research, practice, and engagement across organizations including:
"I remember the season our ministry began to decline. We lacked many of the strategic capabilities necessary to realize our vision. I went on to partner with Mike for several years. He is one of the most strategically capable people I know. If your ministry needs a breakthrough, I have great confidence that Mike Nagel can help you achieve it."Scott Stevens — Former Lead Pastor, North Way Christian Community
The paradigms shaping modern organizational leadership are incomplete. Not wrong in every way — but incomplete in ways that matter. They address the visible surface of organizational performance while missing the deeper causal forces that actually determine whether a collective breaks through or stays stuck.
Organizations are paying for it in potential they never unlock.
Mike founded Collective Breakthroughs on a different premise: there is a need for a voice that disrupts the modern practice of organizational leadership — one that points to a new compelling frontier and opens a truer, more powerful way to achieve breakthrough results.
We are that voice.
Collective Breakthroughs is an independent source of research, education, and development centered on organizational leadership, the origins of progress, and the fullness of what's real and causal in performance. Leaders who develop BIQ step into an advantage most organizations don't yet know exists.
Whether you're ready to start a conversation or want to see where your team or organization stands first — both paths lead somewhere worth going.