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How PESTLE Analysis Helps Organizations Move from Reactive to Strategic
The world is changing quickly and interdependently. AI developments ripple into workforce expectations. Climate events reshape supply chains. Political shifts alter regulatory landscapes overnight. Economic pressures compound with technological disruptions. And yet, most organizational leaders are still trying to respond to these forces one at a time, as if they’re discrete problems to solve rather than interconnected dynamics to navigate. This is what we call reactive change management, and we’ve written before about why it’s already obsolete. When organizations treat each disruption as an isolated emergency, they end up in whack-a-mole mode, perpetually behind, always scrambling, never building real adaptive…
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Why Thinking About the Future Is a Necessary Liberatory Act
The future doesn’t just happen to us. Someone conceives of a possible future and then builds it. Usually, that someone ends up being whoever has the power to imagine, name, and invest in making their preferred future a reality. Right now, the people who are building our future are the same people who benefit most from our present. This is why futures thinking (the deliberate practice of exploring multiple possible futures) needs to be understood as more than a mere strategic planning exercise. Engaging with the future is a liberatory act in and of itself. Whose Future Gets Built?
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When the Number One Concern of US CEOs Is Uncertainty, Traditional Change Management Is Already Obsolete
The Conference Board just released their 2026 C-Suite Outlook, and there’s one finding that should fundamentally change how we think about organizational transformation. When asked about their top external challenges, 42.9% of US CEOs ranked “uncertainty” as their number one concern. Not recession, tariffs, or even AI disruption. Just pure, unadulterated not knowing what’s coming next. Let that sink in for a moment. Nearly half of the leaders steering America’s largest organizations are saying their biggest challenge isn’t a thing they need to navigate around or through. It’s the absence of the stable ground they thought they were standing on.
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Beyond Reactive: A Framework for Navigating Organizational Change
Every organization is navigating change right now. AI is reshaping workflows faster than most teams can adapt. A new generation of workers is rejecting the assumptions their predecessors accepted. Climate pressures are rewriting supply chains, real estate decisions, and customer expectations. Economic uncertainty has become the baseline, not the exception. And that’s just what’s happening outside your organization. Inside, you’re likely contending with your own transitions: new leadership bringing fresh priorities, technology implementations that promise efficiency but demand new competencies, evolving expectations about how and where work gets done. Maybe you’re in the middle of a restructure. Maybe one is…
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Women in the Workplace 2025 Meets the World Inequality Report 2026
Two major reports on gender and work dropped this week. Read separately, they tell familiar stories, but read together, they reveal something harder to ignore. The first is the 11th annual Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.Org, released December 9th. It tracks women’s advancement in corporate America including pipeline representation, promotion rates, sponsorship, and corporate commitments. The headlines have been appropriately alarmed: companies are rolling back their commitment to women’s advancement. For the first time in the study’s history, women report less interest in being promoted than men and progress is stalling or reversing.
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How Organizations Get Trapped in Short Term Thinking and Change Resistance
Something that won’t surprise anyone who works in organizational development is that most businesses are really bad at both embracing change and planning for the future. Recent research is documenting just how bad, and why these two challenges are fundamentally connected. Understanding that connection is where the real opportunity for change lies. A comprehensive 2025 review of research spanning from 1999 to 2024 reveals something we’ve long suspected: the way most organizations approach “resistance to change” is broken. The classic framing where employees resist, and leadership overcomes, is overly simplistic and fundamentally misunderstands what’s actually happening.
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Top 5 Future of Work Trends for 2026
Last week, we argued that 2025 was the year of the power struggle, a year when the cracks in traditional work became impossible to ignore. What does 2026 have in store for us? We’ve been doing a lot of futures thinking lately. To be clear, we’re not talking about prediction (nobody can fully predict what’s coming), but preparation. We’re scanning for signals and holding multiple possibilities at once. We’re not asking “what will happen?” but “what could happen, and what would we do if it did?” These five trends are forces already reshaping work.
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2025 Was the Year of the Power Struggle
2025 may go down as the year many of us got real clarity on what’s at stake in the future of work: power. Who gets to define what work is? Who controls how it’s organized? Who has agency, and who’s just along for the ride? The signals have been building for years, but 2025 brought them into plain sight. Middle managers are losing their voice. AI is unbundling jobs faster than workers can adapt. People are leaving traditional employment not because they want to, but because the old agreement of loyalty for stability no longer holds.
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Webinar Recap: Understanding Cultural Differences at Work
Our November session brought together a thoughtful group ready to dig into how cultural differences shape our workplace experiences. Felicia talked through the many ways background, identity, upbringing, and social norms influence how we communicate, interpret information, give feedback, handle conflict, and define what “professionalism” looks like. We explored why misunderstandings happen even when intentions are aligned, and how cross-cultural awareness helps teams move from assumption to clarity. We reflected on our own experiences as a group, everything from differing comfort levels with mental health conversations to clashing approaches to work-life boundaries, and how these differences show up in day-to-day…
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What 1400 Women Tell Us About Meaningful Work and the Future of Organizations
When 90% of women report feeling depleted at least some of the time, and rate their overall wellbeing at 6.6 out of 10 (not terrible, but certainly not thriving) we’re looking at more than individual burnout. We’re seeing a systemic signal about how work is working (or not working) for women right now.
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The Unexpected Consequence of Workplace ‘Civility’
Something interesting is happening in American workplaces. On social media and in discussion forums outside of the workforce, the culture wars rage on. Turn on right-wing media and you’ll find endless outrage about DEI, pronouns, “woke corporations,” and identity politics. But inside most workplaces, there’s a desire to “keep politics out of the workplace” and to be “civil.” While workplaces have gone quiet on culture war issues, workers are tired. Economic uncertainty, burnout, trauma from massive layoffs, and growing awareness of wealth inequality may be breeding a different kind of conversation at work.
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How to Turn Workplace Empathy Into Results
Have you ever been in a meeting where leadership sits in a circle of chairs (or on a video), nodding solemnly as employees share stories of pay inequity, microaggressions, or burnout? The CEO tears up while someone takes notes. At the end, leadership says “This has been so valuable. We really hear you.” Then nothing changes. Welcome to the empathy trap, where understanding becomes a performance, compassion gets confused with action, and “listening” becomes an organizational end goal rather than a starting point. We’re Stuck in Empathy Theater While 87% of U.S.