What if the shift your organization needs isn't a new strategy —
it's a new question?

A liberal arts college was struggling. Enrollment was falling. Several academic programs had become unviable in a shifting landscape. The faculty developed a courageous solution — eliminate the outdated majors, invest in programs students actually needed. The proposal was clear, the data was compelling, and the urgency was real. The board of trustees said no. Not because the data was wrong. But because they couldn't see past their own memories. These majors had defined the institution when they were students. They used those memories to make sense of a present they no longer had access to.

Rather than arguing with the board's conclusions, we changed the process that produced them. We introduced user-centered design thinking at the governance level itself — something almost never done in higher education. Trustees began listening to, sitting with, and genuinely understanding the students and faculty whose lives they were governing. Not briefings. Not presentations. Real listening. The walls between decision-makers and the community they served came down. Shared governance replaced top-down isolation. Questions replaced declarations.

What followed was described by those inside as a radical turnaround. Enrollment grew significantly. Faculty who had been leaving chose to stay. The board transformed from a body that remembered the institution into one that understood it — and in doing so, became genuine partners in its future. The institution didn't just survive. It found a new way to serve.

A national organization had a critical meeting on the calendar — over 600 participants, generative and deliberative in nature, with real decisions that had to be made on a fixed timeline. Then COVID-19 arrived. The in-person meeting was cancelled. The client was in full panic mode, cataloguing everything that Zoom couldn't replicate, every reason why this was insurmountable, every way this was going to fail. They were deep in critique — of the platform, the situation, the constraints. They could not see past what had been lost.

We led the client through a creative design process that stripped the meeting down to its essential functions: education, learning, idea generation, and decision-making. Then we rebuilt each one from scratch, specifically for the medium. We produced multilingual learning videos and built a custom interactive LMS so that every one of the 678 participants arrived at the live event already educated and prepared — something that had never been possible with in-person gatherings. We created a pre-event feedback loop where participants submitted clarifying questions in advance, so leaders arrived ready to answer them the moment the session began. The live event itself was a real Zoom session — not a webcast — for 678 simultaneous participants. We built custom polling, feedback, and voting tools. We broke all participants into small groups of seven for generative work, capturing every idea in a master document accessible to leadership in real time.

The feedback was unlike anything the organization had ever received. Participants and leaders alike called it the most productive and enjoyable meeting they had ever attended — not the best virtual meeting. The best meeting. Full stop. The constraint hadn't diminished the gathering. Curiosity about what the constraint made possible had transformed it into something entirely new.

A senior executive in his mid-fifties was facing a layoff from a major tech company. He sat across from me and began describing the enormity of what was ahead — the age bias in tech hiring, his salary requirements, the speed at which the industry moves, the feeling of being invisible in a market that celebrates youth. I listened. And I won't pretend the weight of it didn't land on me too. I wanted to sit in the heaviness of it with him. But underneath the grief, I heard something else: a man who had spent decades building something rare. He just couldn't see it yet.

I asked him one question: what about you — your age, your experience, your specific path — would be a powerful gift to a company? He paused. Then he began to talk. Stories emerged. Experiences surfaced that he had never thought to name as assets. He had spent his career at the intersection of HR and IT inside a consumer-facing technology company — a combination almost no one had. He understood people and systems in the same breath. We talked about how a resume flattens a person. How it reduces a career of wisdom into a list of roles and dates. I suggested he stop leading with a resume and start leading with a story — a website and personal brand that placed him as the thought leader he actually was, and let prospective employers discover him rather than evaluate him.

He started building. He started sharing. His energy shifted — visibly, palpably — from critique and despair to curiosity and vitality. He's not fixed. The road is still ahead of him. But he shifted his gaze. And that shift in gaze is often what determines everything that comes next. Critique had kept him in the problem. Curiosity opened a door to who he was capable of becoming.