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I’ve been thinking about the relationship between psychological safety and adaptability. I'm a musician and a folk singer. There’s an old song in my folk repertoire, “Lead, Kindly Light,” with a line I’ve always loved: “Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough, for me.” I think there’s something in that idea for anyone leading people through change. We rarely get to see the distant scene. Innovation means trying things before we know exactly h

My friend and former leadership development co-facilitator posted this Sbux cup, and I haven’t stopped laughing about it since. Apparently it says something else. But all I can read is: “Stay floppy.” Honestly, after years of facilitating workshops on change agility, adaptive leadership, emotional intelligence, and navigating uncertainty - this accidentally feels like excellent advice. The people and organizations that adapt best are rarely the most rigid. They’re the ones wh

Years ago, I was working with colleagues on an enterprise leadership program that would eventually reach nearly 100,000 people. We were doing a lot of cross-functional alignment, and I suggested we clarify roles and responsibilities with a RACI. One of my colleagues suggested RAPID instead. His point was that we’d already done a pretty good job defining who would responsible for doing the work. The ambiguity we were running into was underneath that: How would decisions get ma

PMI’s new Standard for Artificial Intelligence in Portfolio, Program and Project Management (June 2026) has me thinking about a particular risk of generative AI: Gen AI can turn epistemological uncertainty into apparent (and misleading) linguistic certainty. Give a Gen AI model incomplete context and it may still produce a polished charter, plan, analysis, or recommendation. The output can look far more resolved than the underlying information actually is. Instead of a blank

One idea from a recent Adam Grant NYT opinion piece (2026) has been rattling around in my head: "The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It's to adapt themselves to the world's needs." The debate around remote and hybrid work often becomes a debate about preferences: What leaders prefer. What employees prefer. The more interesting question is whether we're following evidence. The article cites research spanning more than 450 companies and 3 mill

One of the most interesting challenges emerging in the AI era is this: Production capacity has accelerated exponentially, while human cognition has not. AI-enabled organizations can now generate strategic plans, learning assets, communications, analyses, documentation, prototypes, and presentations at extraordinary speed. That capability is real, valuable, and increasingly necessary. But I think the next phase of AI maturity will require us to focus less on “How fast can we p

We’ve talked before about the need to rethink how corporate organizations leverage learning and development. Too often, L&D is still treated as a content delivery function measured by course completions, attendance, or consumption metrics. But in reality, L&D sits inside a much larger change ecosystem and should operate as a strategic lever for organizational transformation. Our rapidly changing environment demands more from learning strategists and practitioners than simply

I’ve dabbled in adult figure skating for a few years, so I feel a connection to skaters like Alysa Liu who step away and then return for entirely new reasons. Watching her gold-winning free skate brought tears to my eyes. Yes, it was technically excellent. But what struck me most was something deeper: it felt like pure artistic joy. People do what they do for many reasons. But the easiest way for energy, effort, and creativity to flow is when the intention underneath it is jo

I learned from Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping that order-taking in L&D sounds like this: “We need a training.” “Great. What’s the topic? When do you want it?” Not a lot of upstream thought, and it affects everything downstream, including if the problem is adequately addressed or the change lands. Strategic L&D asks different questions: “What problem are we trying to solve?” 'What do people need to do differently on the job?” “How will we know if our solution worked?” Order-taki

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make in learning and development is starting with content instead of outcomes. A request comes in for a workshop, a course, or a certification, and the machine starts moving. But no one stops to ask the most important question: what business problem are we actually trying to solve? That’s why I pursued formal certification in the Kirkpatrick Model of Learning Evaluation. At its best, Kirkpatrick isn’t an after-the-fact measurement too