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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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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.