People ask me what I actually do all day and “work design consulting” isn’t the most illuminating answer in the world. So, let me show you. Right now I’m in the middle of two engagements that could hardly look more different from the outside — one with a small mission-driven nonprofit, one with a large research institution. One is a tightly scoped sprint on a single workflow; the other is an embedded role touching the entire enterprise. What’s interesting is that underneath the surface differences, they’re the same job.
The “small” one: Fixing the process everyone dreads
A small advocacy organization produces research-heavy publications as a way of influencing the world. Every publication has to move through researchers, legal reviewers, and communications people before it goes out the door and every publication is leaving bruises in its wake. Endless rounds of review, late-stage fights over questions that should have been settled weeks earlier, and a comms team absorbing everything nobody else had finished. Everyone agreed the process was not ideal but nobody could say exactly how it should be fixed.
The diagnosis came first. I spent the opening weeks reading old drafts and comment threads, interviewing the people who live inside the workflow, and mapping where the friction actually was. Three self-reinforcing loops emerged. First, an ownership vacuum where teams own their contributions — the research, the legal risk, the fitness-for-audience — but nobody owns the piece, from conception to release. Second, deferred judgment where the hardest calls — what is this for? who is it for? is it good enough? — were being made at the latest, most expensive moment, implicitly, through rounds of rework instead of explicitly, through hard conversations and decisions. Third, endless review substituting for trust with eight people having “had a look” and nothing for trust to attach to so everyone inspects and re-inspects the whole piece at every editing pass.
Then the experiments. You might think the impulse would be to redesign the whole process from scratch and then “install” it into the org. Instead, we created a slate of small, reversible experiments, each tied to live work, that we had good reason to believe would help interrupt one or more of the loops described above. I drafted the slate of options, a weekly working group refined it, then we put it in front of the staff who participates in the publication process, who then helped us improve and ultimately decide which experiments to run first. The winners: structured kickoffs that settle destination, audience, and roles before drafting begins; live co-review sessions instead of asynchronous comment pile-ons; and a named “product owner” for each publication — not the sole author, not the approver, but the person who stewards the piece end to end and has boosted decision rights to own the overall experience.
Right now, the first experiments are going live on real publications currently in flight. We won’t fix everything in one batch of experiments. That was never the goal. The goal is an organization that has learned it can inspect and change its own ways of working — and keeps doing it after I’m gone.
The “big” one: Helping an institution see its own changes
A large research institution has been through several bruising years — significant downsizing, a major reorganization, a lot of change landing on people all at once. Along with these changes, new leadership created a new central office to help create a more operationally excellent enterprise. This office charged with helping the organization work better is itself brand new, assembled from people who’d never worked together, with no operating rhythm, working agreements, or self-identity of its own. My engagement is roughly half-time, embedded, over six months.
The first stream of work is foundational: helping the team that manages change become a functional team. Structured meeting formats. A first-ever retrospective. A shared vocabulary for talking about which kind of work the team is actually doing on any given effort and a theory of change for how this team shows up in the rest of the organization. A short-term strategy with outcomes that help us organize our time and attention toward meaningful projects. A facilitated monthly rhythm with the executive sponsor. Not glamorous, but important because a team that can’t run and evolve its own operating system has no credibility improving anyone else’s.
The second stream is a tool: a dashboard, being built in-house, that visualizes changes currently in flight. It shows who each change reaches, how disruptive it is, where changes collide, and where parts of the organization are saturated (or are about to be). Think air-traffic control for change. My role is to contribute to the “socio” half of this socio-technical system. Every tool like this bakes in assumptions; that impact can be assessed in advance, that people will submit honestly, that everything worth seeing is legible enough to file. My job is to name these, and other, assumptions out loud, so we go in with clear eyes about what the radar can and cannot show and do.
The third stream is the question behind the tool: once you can see the whole portfolio of change, what do you do differently? The organization has tried heavyweight change methodologies before but the rigor became the product and not much landed that people could point to and celebrate. So the approach I’ve been advocating is deliberately small. I’ve been calling it minimally viable change management: know what’s changing and how big it really is, treat the reaction as information rather than as an obstacle, and respond in ways people can see. Keep change management involvement proportional to likely disruption (let the small stuff run on its own and save intervention for the gnarliest initiatives). Treat every change go-live as the middle of the effort and expect tweaks and evolution to be needed. And, ultimately, do this work in such a way that leaves a positive residue in its wake. By experiencing this work people should become more capable of thinking through and designing change in a way that’s likely to stick without external change management intervention.
The same job at different horizons
One engagement zooms in: start from a single painful workflow and let it expose the deeper patterns — decision rights, handoffs, trust. The other zooms out: start from the entire portfolio of enterprise change and work down toward what any single change needs. One is a bounded sprint with a weekly cadence; the other is an embedded role where half the value is being a candid outside observer with no political stake. Different scales, different altitudes, different tools.
But the convictions underneath are identical:
Ways of working are choices, not weather. Most organizations experience their own operating system as something that happens to them. The lasting value of this work isn’t any single improved process — it’s the dawning collective sense that “how we do things” is provisional, inspectable, and changeable.
Change happens through the people doing the work, not around them. A framework imposed from outside gets ignored. In the small organization, the staff voted on the experiments and co-designed their implementation. In the large one, the change approach insists the initiative leader always owns the change while the change specialists coach and step back. Same principle, different scale.
Small, reversible, and tied to real work beats sweeping and final. The first experiment runs on a real publication. The change approach pilots on a handful of live changes. Launch is the middle, not the end. Expecting to adjust isn’t implementation failure; it’s the plan.
Friction is information. Fifteen opinions on one draft isn’t a trust problem between people; it’s a structure problem. Resistance to a reorg isn’t defiance; it’s signal about load, design flaws, loss, or incoherence. In both engagements, the move is to stop managing reactions and start reading them and using them for the information they are.
And one more, which is not a surprise at all because it marks the last decade of my work: a great deal of this job is writing and conversation. People can’t change a pattern they can’t see. Much of what I actually sell is the ability to help people see patterns for themselves so they can finally decide what they want to do about it.
Both of these engagements are ongoing and both organizations’ details have been deliberately blurred.
If your organization has a process everyone dreads or more change in flight than anyone can see — that’s the work. Reply and tell me about it. My capacity for new projects opens slightly in mid-September.