Built from 24 years
of observation.
Grounded in practice. Anchored in validated theory. Deployed from Okinawa. Designed for the people and organizations that institutional systems were never built to see clearly.
Royce Parfait
I spent 24 years in the United States Navy as a Mine Countermeasures Specialist, Quality Assurance manager, and operational leader. I worked in Japan, Bahrain, and across the continental United States. I led people, managed complex systems, and served inside one of the most powerful institutions in the world.
I also watched what that institution did to people.
Not through malice — through structure. Through conditioning systems that were never designed to develop individuals, only to produce function. Through rank hierarchies that mistook compliance for leadership and suppressed the people most capable of changing things. Through transitions that handed veterans a checklist and called it support.
When I separated in October 2024, I built what I needed but never had: a practice framework for understanding the difference between who an institution shaped you to be and who you actually are — and a structured approach for helping organizations stop creating that problem in the first place.
Summit Strategies Group LLC is the result. The programs look different across individual, family, and organizational scales. The problem they’re addressing is the same at every level: conditioning systems suppress functioning, almost no one names the structural root cause honestly, and the people inside pay the price. That’s the thread. That’s what we’re here to address.
Published: Invisible Ranks: Leadership Unveiled (2025)
Practice Framework: CLR Framework (in active development)
Analytical Method: Multi-System Attribution Analysis (MSAA, v1.1)
CLR Framework
Conditioning-Legitimacy Response. An emerging integrative practice framework that explains why institutional conditioning suppresses the awareness-to-action transition — in individuals and organizations — and what structural conditions make change possible.
Why awareness isn’t enough.
People inside dysfunctional institutions often know something is wrong. They can name the dysfunction, describe its effects, and identify what should change. They don’t act. Organizations deploy leadership programs, culture initiatives, and accountability structures. The dysfunction returns.
The existing validated literature explains pieces of this. Bandura on moral disengagement. Tyler on legitimacy. Litz on moral injury. Tajfel and Turner on social identity. None of them, alone, explain the full mechanism — particularly why the awareness-to-action transition fails specifically under institutional conditioning, at both the individual and the organizational level simultaneously. That’s the gap CLR addresses.
The central proposition.
Institutional conditioning systematically suppresses the awareness-to-action transition. Legitimacy perception is the structural moderator — the point at which an individual or organization stops treating institutional authority as automatically justified and begins evaluating it critically.
CLR proposes that this shift in legitimacy perception is not passive or spontaneous. It requires specific structural conditions. Identifying and creating those conditions — rather than assuming awareness alone produces change — is the applied focus of every SSG program.
The tools that operationalize the framework.
ORRA Assessment
The organizational diagnostic instrument. Governs engagement sequencing through the Seed-Soil-Farmer model — Farmer examined first, always. Produces the LHI (Leadership Health Index) composite score, root cause map, and 90-day correction roadmap. Deployed through the SSG Organizational Consulting Division.
PLH Assessment
A scoring and assessment instrument that measures an individual’s position within the CLR framework — specifically the interaction between Psychological Load, conditioning stage, and legitimacy perception. Used in SSG’s individual and transitional programs to calibrate engagement and track movement.
MSAA
Multi-System Attribution Analysis. A structured, post-hoc analytical method for evaluating whether causal conclusions from applied research adequately account for interacting cognitive, structural, environmental, and perceptual systems before those conclusions are used to justify intervention design. Developed by Royce Parfait. Currently at v1.1.
CLR is grounded in, not independent of, validated theory.
Bandura (moral disengagement) · Litz et al. (moral injury) · Hannah et al. (moral potency)
Tyler (legitimacy) · Goffman (total institutions) · Tajfel & Turner (social identity) · Hirschman (exit/voice/loyalty)
Kelman & Hamilton (crimes of obedience) · Karasek (job demands) · Maslach (burnout) · Edmondson (psychological safety)
The CLR Framework is an emerging integrative practice framework currently in active development. It has not undergone formal peer review or independent external validation. The theoretical propositions are grounded in the validated literature cited above and are being tested through SSG program deployments. PLH assessment scoring and ORRA LHI weights are treated as working hypotheses subject to revision as pilot data accumulates. MSAA (v1.1) has not yet undergone interrater reliability testing or peer review. All claims on this site are calibrated to reflect actual development status. SSG programs are built on this framework and accumulate outcome data toward future formal validation.
Invisible Ranks:
Leadership Unveiled
Published in 2025. The documented account of what happens when institutional conditioning goes unnamed — how military and organizational systems shape identity, suppress awareness, and produce leaders who know what to do and consistently don’t do it.
Invisible Ranks is not a critique of military service. It is an honest account of what conditioning systems do structurally — and what becomes possible when people name it clearly. It is the observational foundation from which the CLR Framework was developed.
THE RELATIONSHIP
Invisible Ranks — the observation. What institutional conditioning does, documented from lived experience.
CLR Framework — the mechanism. Why the conditioning-legitimacy dynamic produces what was observed.
SSG Programs — the response. Applied interventions at every scale the problem operates.
“The institution doesn’t just give you a job. It gives you a self. And most people never examine whether that self is theirs.”
— Invisible Ranks: Leadership Unveiled (2025)
How SSG is organized.
Summit Strategies Group LLC
Holds all program IP, curriculum standards, and ethical governance. Delivers ORRA Assessment, Summit Leadership Institute, Summit Mentorship Program, and TIF. All CLR Framework instruments and methods are the intellectual property of SSG LLC.
IP Communication Solutions GK (IPCS)
Japanese Godo Kaisha. Manages client-facing delivery in Japan, bilingual services, and the Family & Military Navigation Service. Invoices Japanese clients in JPY. Operates under SSG strategic direction and ethical governance standards. Director: Ikumi Parfait.
Farmer before Soil before Seed. Always.
Findings never used for adverse decisions.
We refer when the lane ends. Always.
Process transfers at close. No dependency.