The conflict between where you are and where you want to be has a structure. This book teaches you to see it — and gives you a systematic method for changing it.
The method is called the Evaporating Cloud, and the approach you'll learn here is the Perry Approach — a ten-phase process developed through years of practice with real conflicts in real organisations, from aviation to healthcare to manufacturing to union–management relations.
You won't find abstract theory here. Every concept in this book has been tested in rooms where people genuinely disagreed, where the stakes were real, and where getting it wrong had consequences. The exercises are designed for your conflicts — the ones you're living with right now.
What makes this approach different is where it starts. Most conflict methods ask you to negotiate, compromise, or find middle ground. The Perry Approach asks a different question: what assumptions are holding this conflict in place? Once you can name those assumptions and test them, conflicts that seemed permanent begin to dissolve.
Who This Book Is For
Leaders, coaches, facilitators, practitioners, and anyone repeatedly stuck in the same internal or organisational conflict.
You know this conflict. You live with it. It's the gap between how things are and how you believe they could be — in your team, your organisation, your career, your relationships. It's the thing that keeps you awake at 2am, not because you don't care, but because you do.
You've probably tried to close this gap before. You've had the conversations, made the case, pushed for change. Sometimes it worked for a while. Then things drifted back. The same arguments returned. The same frustrations. The same feeling of being stuck in a pattern you can see but can't shift.
This book teaches you how to see that structure. And once you can see it, you can change it.
Why This Is Different
Most conflict approaches try to negotiate between positions. The Perry Approach looks for the assumptions that make the conflict seem necessary and dissolves them.
How to Use This Book
This book works four ways. Choose the path that suits you — or use all four.
Read freely. The full book is here, open and complete. Each chapter builds on the one before, but you can also dip in when you need a specific tool or insight. Work the exercises as you go — this is a practice manual, not a textbook to consume.
Take the guided course. Rising Above the Clouds - The Course wraps the same material with short video introductions, downloadable templates, chapter quizzes, and practical assignments — plus RIC (your AI Rapid Improvement Coach) and weekly live Conflict Club sessions. Subscribe for as long as you need.
Talk to the book. This book is designed to be conversed with, not just read. Take any chapter and paste it into an AI like Claude — ask it to explain a concept in the context of your own conflict, challenge your assumptions the way a thinking partner would, or walk you through an exercise with your real situation in mind. The learning deepens when the ideas are contextualised to what you're actually living with.
Listen to it. Copy any chapter into a text-to-speech reader like ElevenLabs and turn the book into an audiobook you can listen to on the move.
Course subscribers get this taken further. RIC (the Rapid Improvement Coach) is a practitioner AI built specifically for this methodology. RIC guides you through the Perry Approach one step at a time, coaching you through each phase with your own conflict. The difference between a general AI and a purpose-built guide is the difference between reading a map and having someone who knows the territory walk beside you.
The course includes guided learning, RIC (your AI Rapid Improvement Coach), and weekly live Conflict Club sessions — everything you need to make the method yours. Subscribe for as long as you need.
What You'll Be Able to Do
By the time you've worked through this book and its exercises you will be able to:
- See why you're stuck — map the conflict between where you are and where you want to be, and understand the structure that's holding the gap open
- Name the assumptions keeping you there — surface the beliefs that make the current situation feel permanent, and test whether they actually hold
- Find the way through — develop solutions that dissolve the conflict rather than splitting the difference — breakthroughs that honour what matters on both sides of the gap
- Help others do the same — facilitate the process for teams, leaders, and organisations working through their own version of this conflict
- Make it a practice — turn this from a one-off exercise into a way of thinking you carry into every tension, decision, and change
A Living Book
The moment a traditional book is published, it begins falling behind. The author's thinking moves on, new applications emerge, practitioners discover things the author hadn't considered — and the printed pages can't change. The book becomes a snapshot of what was known then, not what is known now.
Rising Above the Clouds works differently. This is a living book — updated as the practice evolves. New insights from Conflict Club sessions get folded in. Exercises are refined as we learn what works for practitioners at different stages. New applications extend the book as they emerge. The writing stays honest: if our thinking develops or a clearer explanation appears, the text is updated, not left as a historical artefact.
There is no print run to exhaust, no edition cycle to wait for. The book you're reading today is the current state of the practice.
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