Leadership has been living with a change for months by the time it is announced. The workforce heard about it yesterday. What gets read as slowness or resistance is usually a time difference, and pushing through it works about as well as pushing through jet lag.

The Misread Why Structural Friction Gets Read as Individual Resistance Issue 285, October 8, 2026 Somewhere in your organization right now there is an initiative that isn’t landing. Adoption is thinner than the plan said it would be. The middle of the building has gone quiet. The people you were counting on are asking a lot of procedural questions and almost no enthusiastic ones. So a meeting gets called, and somewhere in that meeting somebody says the word. Resistance. Or…

The Disappearing Middle What Happens When We Automate the Work That Taught People How to Think Issue 284, October 1, 2026 Most of the talk about AI and jobs is about numbers. How many jobs go away, in which fields, and how fast. Those are fair questions, but they are questions about the immediate and near future. The one I keep pondering doesn’t seem to be getting much attention. What happens five years from now, ten years from now, when…

Receptacle or Receptor? What a Podcast Guest Said About Customers, and Why It Applies to Everyone an Organization Touches Issue 283, September 24, 2026 Somewhere in the middle of my conversation with David Edward for this season of The Human Factor Podcast, he said something I told him on the spot I would steal. He was describing a manufacturing client whose leadership had spent years perfecting the production side of the business, making it faster, cheaper and more measurable, while…

The Same Hole, Dug Faster Lateral Thinking, an Unpaid Invoice, and What Is Still Worth Paying For Issue 282, September 17, 2026 Sarah Tucker is the author of Edward de Bono: Love Laterally, a biography of the man who gave us the phrase lateral thinking, and this past weekend the Wall Street Journal ran a short piece of hers under the headline The Cost of Thinking for Free. She had been invited to speak to about thirty senior people in…

Small Waves The Transition Is Already Happening, One Office at a Time Issue 281, September 10, 2026 A few weeks ago at the beach, I fell into a long conversation with a man who runs a real estate firm. A successful outfit, the kind of place that has been a fixture in a small market for years, the name on the signs you drive past on the way in. We got to talking the way two people who run businesses…

Who Owns That Number? Why Organizations Can Add a Measure and Never Subtract One Issue 280, September 3, 2026 Which of these measures would you remove? I’ve started asking that in every room where a dashboard is on screen, and the answer is almost always the same silence. Not defensiveness. Not annoyance. But puzzled looks, as if I’d asked which of their body parts they’d like to give up. Which for me is always a fun visualization as I wonder…

The Conditions Nobody Chose A Late Summer Sampler on Leading When the Ground Won’t Hold Still Issue 279, August 27, 2026 A client asked me a question earlier this year. It wasn’t about strategy. It wasn’t about technology, nor about any of the things we are usually brought in for. She asked how she was supposed to plan anything at all. Her material and operational costs had increased three times in eighteen months. Her pricing had to follow suit as…

The Proxy Collapse What Happens to People When the Proof Stops Working Issue 278, August 20, 2026 In the last days of July, a debut crime novelist named Jerry Falade lost just about everything a writer can win. His first book had sold in a fourteen-publisher auction, a two-book deal reported at $2 million. Film interest was circling. Then his own agents withdrew it. Not because a detection tool flagged it. His agency said it could not authenticate how the…

After the Theater What the First Ninety Days of Real Change Look Like Issue 277, August 13, 2026 Two weeks ago I presented Transformation Theater at the Bridge Conference in National Harbor. It was a small but full room, and that turned out to matter. Partway through the session I asked the leaders in the room to score six statements about their own organizations, the same six that now anchor the Transformation Theater Diagnostic. Most scores landed between six and…