The Permission Paradox Why Your People Are Hiding the Very Things You Say You Want Issue 269, June 18, 2026 A senior director at a professional services client recently shared something with me that she had not told anyone else in her organization. Her team of eleven had quietly become one of the most productive units in the company. Turnaround times had dropped. Client deliverables had improved. Her leadership noticed and praised the team’s discipline. What her leadership didn’t know,…

The Identity Problem in Measurement Why Leaders Measure What Protects Them Instead of What Reveals Them Measuring What Matters Series Issue 268, June 11, 2026 A division vice president I worked with at a client several years ago sat across from me with a single page in his hand. It contained five proposed additions to his quarterly scorecard. Four of them he approved readily and without comment. The fifth, a measure of how often projects under his division were re-scoped…

Beyond Demographics – The Psychology of Communication That Actually Drives Engagement Issue 267, June 4, 2026 I asked a room of more than 500 association professionals at the ASAE Membership, Marketing, Communications and Technology Conference this week to try something simple. Turn to the person next to you and share one example of two members who look identical on paper but behave completely differently. They erupted in conversation after conversation in what was a packed room. I had to raise…

Measuring Trust as a Behavioral Asset – How to Operationalize the Most Important Intangible in Organizations Issue 266, May 28, 2026 A client I worked with several years ago published trust survey results showing 84 percent of customers reporting high trust in the institution. The figure was prominently displayed in the annual report, repeated in every stakeholder and governance meeting, and used as a justification for the client’s strategy of competing on relationship quality rather than discounts. Two years later,…

The Readiness Illusion: Why the AI Agent Era’s Loudest Claims Outrun the Evidence Issue 265, May 21, 2026 I have been working with large language models long enough now to have formed a view that runs against the way most of the market is talking about this right now. I sat recently with a request that should have been straightforward. The model produced an output that looked confident and was wrong in ways that mattered. I corrected it. The next…

The Generational Fault Line – Why Your Change Initiative Lands Five Different Ways Navigating the Psychology of Generational Identity During Organizational Transformation Issue 264, May 14, 2026 Think about the last major change initiative your organization launched. Not the strategy behind it or the technology that powered it, but the way it actually landed on the people in the room. Was there a pattern? Did the people who had been with the organization the longest push back the hardest? Did…

Manufactured Engagement When Social Proof Becomes Social Fiction Issue 263, May 7, 2026 In the previous issue and the Artificial Understanding series, I described the comprehension gap and the circular system in which our behavioral data feeds AI systems that shape our behavior without our conscious understanding. I closed the series with a warning about what happens when fabricated behavioral data is injected back into the same algorithmic systems that govern what we see. This fabrication, which I explain later…

Artificial Understanding What Feeds the Machine and What It Means for All of Us Part Three of a Three-Part Series Issue 262, April 30, 2026 Over the past two weeks, this series has examined the comprehension gap that defines our relationship with artificial intelligence. In Part One, I explored how executives are making consequential decisions about AI systems they do not fully understand, creating organizational risk that grows in proportion to the gap between capability and comprehension. In Part Two,…

Artificial Understanding The Human Cost of the Comprehension Gap Part Two of a Three-Part Series Issue 261, April 23, 2026 Last week, in Part One of this series, I examined the comprehension gap that separates what artificial intelligence can do from what the people deploying it actually understand. That piece focused on the boardroom, on the executives making consequential decisions about technology they have not taken the time to genuinely comprehend. The responses I received confirmed what I suspected: the…

Artificial Understanding The Intelligence We Built and the Comprehension We Didn’t Part One of a Three-Part Series Issue 260, April 16, 2026 I attended a virtual event last week that was constructed around consideration and discussion of AI twins for CEOs and C-level executives. The technology discussion was impressive; there are so many options. I geeked out on the framework, policy and procedure points and where progress is happening as we continue to run instead of walk. It was a…