Last Friday I left corporate life for the second time. Today I’m starting something new, and I’m starting it by shutting up and listening.
How this all started
I went to my first SIOP conference in April. I was not prepared for it.
Room after room of researchers presenting work that answers questions I’d spent twenty-five years guessing at.
Some of what I heard:
That moral injury is a leadership problem and not just a soldier’s problem, and that the standard playbook for workplace strain doesn’t touch it, because you can’t fix a values violation by adding resources.
That the accommodations built for neurodivergent employees turn out to be what everybody wanted, the way OXO designed a peeler for arthritic hands and ended up in every kitchen drawer.
That AI initiatives are failing on organizational readiness rather than technology, and that I/O has had rigorous methods for exactly that problem sitting on the shelf for decades.
That middle managers are left with no psychological contract and no good reason to stay.
That executive presence, which nobody can define, is quietly blocking capable people from leadership.
That’s five sessions out of the twenty-five or so I made it to, out of hundreds on the program.
What got me wasn’t any single finding. It was the arithmetic. Decades of evidence about what makes people commit to work, presented to rooms of specialists, while every executive I’ve ever worked with makes these calls on instinct and whatever framework is circulating that year.
As I sat through the conference it became clearer and clearer that the reason so many transformations are failing right now can be explained, and avoided, through the research being presented in those rooms. The problem is that it’s written by academics for other academics. We call this the scientist-practitioner gap.
So I walked out into the French Quarter and decided I was going to commit the remainder of my career to doing something about that: translate this work into something business leaders can actually use with their teams.
So I quit
This is the second time I’ve walked away from a cushy corporate job, so I have some idea what I’m walking into. But this time I’m taking a customer-focused approach to make sure what I build provides the most value to leaders struggling today.
I’m starting by shutting up and listening.
For the next 100 days I’m talking to 100 people about one thing: what actually happens to people when the org changes underneath them. Not the all-hands version. The reorg that went sideways. The rollout everyone was trained on and nobody adopted. The team that didn’t resist anything, exactly, but quietly stopped caring.
I have theories. Twenty-five years of leading teams through reorgs, layoffs, and system implementations, coupled with the I/O research, leads me to one pretty clear conclusion: transformations don’t fail on strategy. They fail because the people asked to execute were never really bought in, and nobody noticed until the numbers came in.
But theories are how you build the wrong thing confidently. So before I build anything, I want to hear what’s real.
If you’re leading through a change right now, or living through one, I’d like 30 minutes. No pitch, no deck, and half the call is yours to ask me anything.
I’ll write up what I hear as I go. Patterns, surprises, and the research that explains what people describe. That’s what this Substack is for over the next few months.
Ninety-nine to go.
I am proud of you! I cannot wait to see where this takes you.
One thing that really resonated with me is that, within an organization, the official announcement of a change is often presented as the conclusion of a decision, when for those experiencing it, the real transformation is only beginning.
Much of the technology needed to simplify processes, automate tasks, and transform how we work already exists. However, having the right tools available does not mean an organization is ready to adopt them. Sometimes we do resist change, especially when it disrupts familiar ways of working, creates uncertainty, or feels like something happening to us without a clear understanding of why.
That resistance is not always expressed openly. It can show up as silence, low adoption, reduced initiative, or simply continuing to work as before, even when the new technology is already available.
That is why I believe buy-in cannot simply be requested after everything has already been decided. It is built by allowing people to participate, ask questions, and see themselves reflected in the change. Perhaps many transformations fail not because the technology is insufficient, but because people never felt they were truly part of the transformation.