A business name is a bet. You’re betting the two or three words you’ve chosen will do a lot of work — that they’ll convey something true about what you do, why you do it, and who you are. There’s bonus points available for making it memorable, easy to spell, and giving it a nice mouth feel, too. And, sometimes, a business name means nothing at first but transcends that arbitrariness over time (hello, “Starbucks” and “Amazon” and “Apple”).
I’m going the meaningful route with “Deliberate Works.” Both words matter. And the way they sit together carries more than one meaning — intentionally.
Deliberate
Deliberate has been a word I’ve been obsessing over for a long time. Long before I started this company, I had a newsletter called The Deliberate. The premise was simple: I believe our ability to be intentional — about how we spend our time, what we pay attention to, how we develop ourselves, what we choose to optimize for — is systematically under threat. The modern world is extraordinarily good at turning us into passive recipients of whatever happens to us next. Most people, and most organizations, operate in a kind of perpetual reaction mode. Deliberate is the antidote to that.
But deliberate isn’t just a word for individuals. It’s maybe even more important for organizations. Most organizational change is reactive — triggered by a crisis, a reorg, a new exec with a mandate. The work I care about is the opposite: organizations that have chosen, intentionally and in advance, to examine how they work and make it better. That requires a kind of deliberateness that is genuinely rare and worth celebrating.
Works
Works is doing double duty, too.
The obvious read is that this is a consulting company and companies do work. Sure, fine. But the more important read is the object of all this deliberateness: work itself. Work — the activity that occupies more of most people’s waking hours than anything else — is the thing I’ve been trying to make better for my entire career. Not productivity in the hacks-and-shortcuts sense. Not engagement scores. The actual experience of work: whether it’s meaningful, whether it draws on people’s real capabilities, whether it’s organized in a way that makes sense, whether the people doing it feel like agents or cogs.
I studied positive psychology in graduate school because I wanted a career that dealt with making work better. Everything since — the start (and abandonment) of the PhD work, the years at The Ready, the writing, the consulting, the speaking, the podcasting — has been in service of that same basic interest.
Deliberate Works
So when the two words combine, they’re doing three things at once, and I mean all of them:
- Deliberate works (as in, “We are working in a deliberate way.”) The things we build together are filled with care and craft. Not generated, not templated, not repurposed from the last engagement. Considered. Made.
- Deliberate works (as in, “The works of a lifetime are hanging on the wall of the museum.”) The emphasis is on what we’re actually creating. Organizations worth calling works. Not quarter-to-quarter optimization, but something more like a cathedral: built slowly, built to last, built with the understanding that the people inside it will spend a significant portion of their lives there. That ambition deserves more than a fancy deck.
- Deliberate works (as in, “You know what tends to work? Being deliberate.”) Being intentional about how you operate, how you change, how you develop — it works. It’s better than the alternative. That’s not a values statement, it’s an empirical one. The organizations and leaders who cultivate this capacity are genuinely harder to displace. The rest keep cycling through the same crises on a slightly longer timeline and new buzzwords.
The organizations I want to work with have usually already tried the reactive version of help. They’ve done the reorgs. They’ve hired transformation consultants, launched the initiative, built the deck. And then watched the energy dissipate and the old patterns reassert themselves. The frustrating thing isn’t that the intervention was wrong, exactly — it’s that the organization never developed the ability to keep doing the work on its own. Every few years, the cycle restarts. New leader, new initiative, new deck, same underlying constraint.
What I’m building at Deliberate Works is a different kind of engagement: one where the point isn’t to deliver a better answer but to develop a better capacity. The ability to sense what’s not working, design targeted experiments, iterate, and embed what you learn. The ability to change how you work is itself a skill. Organizations that have it are genuinely rare and the organizations that develop it become increasingly hard to displace.
Deliberate Works Studio
There’s a nascent Studio side to this endeavor as well — resources, community, and experiences for individual practitioners and leaders — because organizational change and personal development aren’t as separable as the consulting world pretends. It’ll be for leaders and practitioners who find reading novels as invigorating as a nerdy strategy paper and are as curious about how they make decisions as they are about how their organization does. They sense that something is off long before they can name it, and they’re willing to sit with that discomfort long enough to actually understand it. If you’re the kind of leader whose instinct is to find the structural or philosophical root of a problem before reaching for the intervention, I’m building Deliberate Works Studio for you. I want to create the thing I wish existed when I was just starting out on this path of non-traditional organizational development, design, and change work.
The name isn’t a promise that I have all the answers. It’s simply a statement of orientation and hopefully a magnet to those who have the same disposition and frustration with business-as-usual as I do.
That felt like a name worth betting on.