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Working in The Transforming
Working without a crystal ball
June 24, 2026
A lesson in uncertainty from a New York City psychic
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The People Part
A pattern you create together
June 10, 2026
Every work relationship is a negotiation you're already in
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The Skills
Working in The In-Between
May 27, 2026
You see an opportunity. You know what you could do. You haven't decided if you want to be the person who does it.
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The Good Work Life
The Vacation Paradox
May 14, 2026
The work arrives. The calendar fills. We move through it, and we plan vacations to recover from it.
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Working in The Transforming
Working in lava cars
April 15, 2026
Your headlights still work and seek, sense, and share is still the move
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How Work Works
We're captured.
March 18, 2026
What is it that allows your best work?
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The Good Work Life
How's work?
March 4, 2026
Not just at happy hour—it's a question worth asking yourself
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Work Design
On the way to results
February 19, 2026
Meaningful progress is the single biggest factor in daily motivation
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Try It
Pick a purpose
February 4, 2026
Who needs cosmic clarity? Just decide on a contribution and take the first step.
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Try It
Who decides?
January 23, 2026
The work is stuck because nobody knows what they can decide
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The Skills
On being lost, on occasion
January 7, 2026
Getting professionally unlost is really about knowing yourself, knowing your situation, and choosing what comes next
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The Skills
What are you telling yourself about this?
December 10, 2025
The storyfield at work
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The People Part
See work from their angle
November 12, 2025
And make the work really move
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The Skills
What's your energy right now?
October 15, 2025
Awareness helps you manage it
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Work Design
Work with meaning
September 30, 2025
Use Job Crafting to make your work more purposeful
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The Good Work Life
What mission are you on?
September 17, 2025
Getting clear about what you're up to at work
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The Skills
The life-changing effects of managing expectations
September 4, 2025
And no, I don't think that's overselling it. Your experience of work (and life)—and your ability to do it well—is shaped as much by what you expect to happen as by what actually does. Here are three ways to work with expectations.
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Work Design
Stopping: An underconsidered strategy for work that no longer meets your needs
August 27, 2025
You've probably heard of technical debt. Maybe you know organizational debt. Let me add work debt: the unnecessary practices, meetings, reports, routines, tasks ... you keep doing because you always have, not because they are valuable.
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The Skills
The "that's not fair" response: Recognizing and managing fairness threats at work
August 22, 2025
Fairness threat responses can last last days. Our performance at work is better when we feel a sense of fairness. Create the personal conditions where fairness becomes a collaboration enhancer rather than a constant source of threat.
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The People Part
Change with people
August 19, 2025
Stop selling, start enrolling
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Try It
Playing the A Game in Conversation
August 5, 2025
Two questions for being an engaged listener … especially when it's unintersting
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The Skills
Friend or Foe: Reduce relatedness social threats to do your best work
July 29, 2025
Relatedness, the R in Dr. David Rock's brain-aware SCARF framework, is our primary need to feel safely connected to others. When this need isn't met, our brains divert cognitive resources toward threat monitoring.
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Try It
Arschbombe!
July 16, 2025
What's your post-vacation reentry strategy?
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The Good Work Life
Your best work happens when you feel good
June 30, 2025
The research supports feeling good = professional effectiveness
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The Skills
Brain-Aware Strategies for Navigating Certainty and Autonomy Threats at Work
June 24, 2025
Certainty and autonomy threats occur when workplace uncertainty or feeling powerless triggers your brain's threat response. Use Dr. David Rock's labeling technique—"Oh, that's just my brain!"—and reframing strategies to manage them effectively.
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The Skills
The benefits of thinking about your thinking
June 17, 2025
That voice in your head has more benefit than you might think. Metacognition is the process we use to plan, monitor, and assess our learning, thinking, and doing. It's is wildly important because it's how we build an awareness of our understanding and performance.
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Work Design
The Wild Freedom of Managing Yourself
June 5, 2025
Creating (and maintaining) the conditions for doing your best work
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The Good Work Life
Notice. Explore. Try a Change.
May 28, 2025
A simple framework for turning what you notice into The Good Work Life
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Try It
Strategic Quitting
May 21, 2025
"Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other."
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The Skills
Managing Status Threats: Brain-Aware Strategies for Before, During, and After
May 14, 2025
Status threats are sneaky. Here are science-backed techniques for managing status threats (the S in Dr. David Rock's SCARF framework) organized into three phases—preparation, in-the-moment, and recovery.
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The Skills
When Your Brain Meets a Bear at Work
May 1, 2025
Understanding Dr. David Rock’s SCARF framework is brain-aware guidance that can be a super-power unlock for creating the conditions to do your best work
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Try It
Appreciative Inquiry: Positive Framing Creates Better Conversations
April 25, 2025
Appreciative Inquiry can transform workplace dialogue by shifting from problem-focused conversations to strength-based approaches that energize colleagues and lead to better outcomes
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The Skills
What do you want?
April 16, 2025
Getting on the path to Prudent Congruence
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How Work Works
Don’t outsource your on-the-job thinking and learning
April 10, 2025
We don't do enough thinking about our big-P processes and what those big-P processes require and what those big-P processes produce before employing them.
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Working in The Transforming
Big ears! Big eyes! Sensemaking at work
April 8, 2025
Sensemaking is the activity of making sense of a situation. It's a crucial skill for navigating changes and enhancing understanding of what's happening at work.
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How Work Works
How your manager’s view of human behavior shapes your experience at work
March 27, 2025
Every management act in our organizations stems from a core belief about human nature. Since so much of our work experience is shaped by arbiters of authority, it’s helpful to probe the theoretical motivations behind their intentions.
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The People Part
Be The Celebrator
March 20, 2025
“What do you do when things go right?”
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Working in The Transforming
Tell more (and better) stories
March 11, 2025
Techniques from “Storyworthy” to enhance everyday communication
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Working in The Transforming
Show Your Work
March 5, 2025
Seeking and sensing are essential for the knowledge work we do, and sharing your work is a win/win/win.
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Working in The Transforming
A funny name for a critical skill
February 17, 2025
Double-loop learning gives us a method to put experience into practice: "If a new idea doesn't work, it's time to try something else."
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How Work Works
Why do we feel like cogs in a machine?
February 6, 2025
The Taylor Bathtub reveals how industrial-era thinking still shapes modern work
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How Work Works
Ten Foundational Ideas for the Now of Work
January 21, 2025
Ten ideas that changed how I see work — and helped me do something about it. Start here if you're trying to understand why work feels the way it does and where to go next.
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The People Part
Let's get ready to rumble
January 9, 2025
Creating space for important conversations by inching our way into vulnerability
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Work Design
We're all in sales now ... so let's get better at selling
November 20, 2024
Selling can be a helpful way to frame a lot of what we do at work
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Job Suck
The Bummer of Job Suck
November 7, 2024
Job suck is that pervasive sense of discontent that creeps into your workday, making even meaningful work feel hollow as purpose gets ground down by bureaucratic machinery.
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Work Design
Introducing: The Work Workout
October 23, 2024
A take action, horizon-expanding, progress-making framework to facilitate intentional change
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Working in The Transforming
Love, problem solving, and figuring it out
October 22, 2024
Figure It Out is a problem-solving and make-progress attitude for the now of work
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Work Design
"The boss may not care about your input, but you should"
October 18, 2024
Input exposes us to the ideas we need that help us formulate novel approaches to the new problems we’re working on. Manage your input to improve your output.
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Try It
Coping with administrivia blues
October 18, 2024
In industrialized management paradigms, we need strategies to cope with the administrivia blues, or the emotional doldrums resulting from administrative work that is trivial, uninteresting, and time-consuming.
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Job Suck
"Seeing" industrialized management ... and the job suck it incubates
October 16, 2024
Managing By Wondering About is a mental model to do more wondering—“Why?” is a powerful question and curiosity is a powerful frame of mind—so we can discover and then change the work practices (+ theories, + conditions, + tools) that, more often than not, lead right to job suck.
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The Skills
What does it mean to be done for the day?
October 2, 2024
Giving yourself permission to be finished: It’s up to us to actively develop a definition of done for each work day to allow your nervous system to rest, recover, and engage with life beyond work
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Working in The Transforming
Work is more like a wilderness
September 25, 2024
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How Work Works
Complexity explains why work is different today: Here's how to identify it and work through it
April 5, 2024
Work is different because of our increasing awareness of complexity. So what is complexity? And what does it change about how we do our work?
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The Skills
The Power of Yet: How embracing Carol Dweck's Growth Mindset can transform your life and career
March 20, 2024
We all have the capacity for development and growth. For anything and everything. A growth mindset is central to helping us (and everyone else!) develop our skills, improve our intelligence, and learn anything.
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How Work Works
Resistance to change is not what you think it is
February 26, 2024
The resistance to change we all speak so expertly about isn't resistance to a new reality, it's resistance to what the new reality might mean for me, for you, for any of us as individuals.
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How Work Works
The reason there's always more work to do
January 16, 2024
Entropy is a useful mental model for understanding why there's always more work to do.
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Try It
Tagging your feedback to calibrate its importance
November 23, 2023
FlashTags provide a collective calibration practice to communicate the importance of feedback.
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Job Suck
Everyone is discontent at work and what we're doing to "solve" it hasn't been working
October 27, 2023
As efficient as organizations are at distributing resources to create value in the marketplace, why are they so bad at leveraging human capability?
