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Why Organizational Buy-in Fails and How You Can Fix It
Why does organizational buy-in for change sometimes fail? Organizational buy-in fails when people are given information instead of the opportunity to share their voice. This is a structural and participation problem, and solving it requires a different kind of intervention than most change plans include. The buy-in problem According to a July 2025 Gartner survey of senior-level respondents, organizations that continuously adapt change plans based on employee responses are four times more likely to achieve change success. Adapting a plan based on employee responses is only possible when employees have the structural conditions to respond candidly and without fear of…
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Same Mission, Evolving Work
Our mission has always been about abolishing inequity in the workplace, even as the language around that work has shifted. We believe the future of work must lead to this end-goal. It’s how we get there that’s evolving. Given that everything seems to be changing all at once, we’re focused on how to navigate these changes without losing each other. As long as we have to work together (and we don’t see that ending anytime soon, robots notwithstanding), shared humanity has to stay at the center.
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How You Can Use AI and Still Care About Climate Justice
Data centers are projected to consume up to 1,050 terawatt hours of electricity by 2026, and the environmental costs of that consumption aren’t spread evenly. They’re concentrated in specific communities, often ones that were already overburdened. You don’t need to stop using AI, but rather consider how to use it intentionally, and hopefully for good. Data centers already consume about 1.5% of global electricity, and servers built specifically for AI workloads are expected to jump from 93 TWh in 2025 to 432 TWh by 2030, nearly a fivefold increase.
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Massachusetts Employers: Workforce Training Grants Are Open!
We’ve got great news for our Massachusetts clients. The Workforce Training Fund Program is now accepting applications for State Fiscal Year 2026. commcorp That means funding is available right now to invest in your team’s growth and we’ve just expanded our workshop catalog to give you even more to work with. Here’s the quick breakdown on funding: The Express Program offers grants of up to $15,000 per organization per calendar year, with up to $3,000 per employee per course. The General Program offers up to $125,000 for two-year training grants.
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Introducing the Inclusion Geeks Library
Big news: the Inclusion Geeks Library is officially live at library.inclusiongeeks.com! 🥳 If we had a dollar for every time someone said, “I want to keep learning, I just don’t know where to start,” we’d have a very well-funded library. The inclusive workplace space is full of content. Articles, reports, frameworks, toolkits, research studies, think pieces. The challenge isn’t that resources don’t exist; it’s that finding credible, useful ones without spending hours down a rabbit hole feels nearly impossible.
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How the Great Flattening Exposes the Gap Between Future-of-Work Rhetoric and Reality
At the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, executives and thought leaders painted an inspiring picture of the future of work. The message was clear: AI will handle the routine work, while humans will be elevated to “higher-value” activities such as creativity, judgment, relationships, and purpose. One World Economic Forum piece asked, “What if the real promise of generative AI is not efficiency, but the chance to make work more human?” Pearson’s CTO drew a sharp distinction: “Automation delivers quick, measurable efficiencies; AI-augmented workforces rewire how value is created.” It’s a compelling narrative, and we want to believe it.
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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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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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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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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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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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How to Stay Nimble When You’re a Big Company
Your size used to be your advantage, but now it might be what’s holding you back. Not because being large is inherently bad, but because most big companies were built for a world that rewarded scale, predictability, and control. You optimized for efficiency, created processes to ensure consistency and built approval chains to minimize risk. For a long time, that worked beautifully. But the converging massive external forces shaping your business today don’t care about your organizational structure, your quarterly planning cycle, or the fact that your legal team needs six weeks to review anything that might touch compliance.