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…

The Identity Renegotiation: the process of renegotiating what a person’s expertise, judgment, and standing mean when intelligent systems begin doing work that used to define them. Issue 276, August 6, 2026.

Transformation Theater The Elaborate Rituals of Change That Produce Everything Except Change Issue 275, July 30, 2026 A nonprofit executive called me recently, frustrated and exhausted. Her organization had launched eleven change initiatives in the past two years. A new CRM. A strategic plan refresh. A culture transformation. A digital fundraising overhaul. A board restructuring. And enough others that she had stopped counting them. Then she said something that has stayed with me. “We are doing everything right. We hired…

The Harmony Reflex Why Disagreement Feels Like Danger Before It Feels Like Information Issue 274, July 23, 2026 A vice president at a financial services client described a moment to me that she had never mentioned to anyone. In a strategy session with eleven colleagues, the group converged on a market assumption she believed was wrong. She had the data. She had spent three weeks on the analysis. When the room turned to her, she heard herself say, “That works…

The Trust Gap: A Midsummer Sampler. Issue 273, July 16, 2026. Eight pieces from five years of Ideas and Innovations trace one thread: trust between organizations and customers, leaders and their people, and now humans and machines. The machine era did not create the trust problem. It exposed it.

Patience, Repeated What a Season Inside the Human Factor Revealed About Why Change Fails, and What It Actually Asks of Us Issue 272, July 9, 2026 Before recording the final episode of the Human Factor Podcast’s second season last week, I went back and listened to the very first one. I wanted to hear whether the thesis still held. The thesis was simple. The reason roughly seventy percent of transformations fail is not the technology and not the strategy. It…

The Confidence Transfer What Happens to Organizational Expertise When We Trust the Machine Over the Person Issue 271, July 2, 2026 A senior analyst at a client organization watched a meeting go a direction she knew was wrong. The team was weighing a forecast, and she had fifteen years of direct experience with exactly this kind of decision, the kind of pattern recognition that does not reduce to a slide. She said so. She explained her reasoning, named the specific…

The Empathy Outsource What Happens When the Care Was Real but the Author Was Not Issue 270, June 25, 2026 A manager at a client organization told me about a message she received from her director on the morning after her father’s funeral. It was warm, specific, and unexpectedly moving. It acknowledged her loss, named the particular strain of returning to work too soon, and told her to take whatever time she needed without guilt. She read it twice. And…