I’m Sam Spurlin, a work designer based in the New York area.
For a decade I worked at The Ready, the organizational design firm, helping executive teams at some of the world’s largest companies change how their organizations actually operate—not the values on the wall, but the mechanics underneath: how decisions get made, how information moves, how authority is shaped, how meetings spend everyone’s attention. I led transformation work inside global enterprises and coached senior leaders through the structural and strategic questions that don’t fit in anyone’s job description.
Before and beneath all of that is graduate training in positive psychology and systems thinking—which is why my work starts from a different premise than most operations consulting. The point of a better-designed organization isn’t just throughput. It’s that most of a working life gets spent inside these systems, and the difference between a deliberate one and an accidental one is the difference between work that generates energy and work that grinds it away.
I founded Deliberate Works to practice this craft at its highest resolution: directly, personally, without the machinery of a big firm. One practitioner, a small number of clients, and a single conviction carried over from everything I saw inside the world’s most ambitious organizations—the ability to change how you work is itself a skill, and it belongs inside your organization. My job is to build it there, then leave it there.
Along the way I’ve taught working professionals at Critical Business School (a course called The Three Body Problem, on agency at the scale of the self, the organization, and society), spoken to audiences from CIPD gatherings to internal leadership summits, and written The Deliberate, a newsletter on the craft of operating well inside complex systems.
New York area · Works worldwide · sam@deliberateworks.com