Maybe it's already moving through your organization and something about it feels off. Maybe it's still on the horizon, a new system, a restructure, a growth threshold, a leadership transition, and you want to understand it before it arrives. Either way, the instinct to slow down and look closely is the right one. Most leaders skip that part.
Change management often gets reduced to communications and training: announce the change, run the sessions, check the box. Those are tools, and I use them. But treating them as the whole job is how change becomes something done to people instead of with them.
Here's what I've come to understand after 25 years inside organizations while change rolled through them: change is constant. It doesn't arrive as a project and leave when the project closes. The solutions you design and the changes that carry them are interwoven, and at the heart of both are the people who make everything happen. Manage the change and you're managing the people and the systems they work within. There's no version of this work where those separate.
And in the organizations I choose to work with, the purpose underneath it all is usually the same: making lives better, fuller, more deeply connected. The new system or the new structure is the occasion. That's the work.
I'm a PROSCI Certified Change Practitioner and I ground my practice in Kotter's work, including his more recent research on change in complexity. My approach also draws on newer thinking about people-centered and adaptive change, and on practices of embodiment and deep listening that don't fit neatly into any framework. I won't lecture you on theory. The frameworks are scaffolding, and what we build inside them is specific to your organization.
What I will do is listen first, trace what the change is really connected to (a new tool is also a workflow change, which is also a change in who talks to whom), and build the strategy with you rather than hand you one. People weren't resisting in most of the failed changes I've witnessed. They were responding sensibly to a change nobody had taken the time to understand before launching it.
With a conversation. You tell me what's shifting, I listen for where the friction lives, and together we figure out the right way to deepen the picture. There's no fixed sequence. Different changes call for different doors in:
A structured diagnostic that surfaces where your organization stands across six domains and what it can carry right now.
Working directly with the leader carrying the change, often built around CliftonStrengths, so you lead it as yourself.
Getting the people closest to the change in a room to surface how it's really landing, what they're seeing that leadership isn't, and what they need.
Any of these can stand alone. Often they weave together as the work reveals what's really going on.
Some changes don't resolve in a workshop or a three-month engagement. A strategic shift rolling out over two or three quarters. A leadership team forming and finding its feet through its first year. A transition that needs someone holding the whole picture while the day-to-day keeps moving.
Retained advisory is a six-to-twelve-month partnership: a regular rhythm of working sessions with the leadership team, coaching for key leaders, and periodic check-ins with the broader organization. The scope is built around what you're navigating, not a fixed package. It works best when you want a consistent perspective from someone who knows your organization well enough to push back when it matters, not just agree with the room.
There's also a lighter way to work together, one that isn't tied to a single change at all. Board and strategic advisory is standing counsel: usually a conversation every month or two, on a retainer, where I hold the strategic picture alongside you and we look at what's coming before it arrives. No embedded engagement, no line in the day-to-day, just a seasoned outside read on the big moves, available as conditions shift.
Two ways I advise, then: inside a change, as an embedded retained partner who carries it from start to finish, or above it, as a standing advisor for leaders who want board-level counsel a few times a year. Both run on a retainer scoped to the rhythm. Which one fits depends on whether you're moving through a specific change now, or want a steady hand on the strategy over the long run.
Scoped to engagement. The starting point is the same as everything else here: a conversation.
Thirty minutes. You tell me what's shifting and where you are in it. I'll tell you honestly what I see, including whether you need me at all.
Let's Talk