The Evidence

It Kept Showing Up

I noticed these patterns before I ever called myself a consultant, in my own work, watching the same dynamics play out under different names in different rooms.

Then I was suddenly exposed to many client organizations at once, and the coincidence stopped looking like coincidence. The same conditions kept surfacing in exit interviews, in engagement survey results, in how leaders actually behaved under pressure, across organizations that had nothing in common except the pattern itself.

After several years of navigating that, watching it hold up client after client, I went looking for confirmation outside my own observation. Court records from employment litigation. Insurance claims data. Anonymous reviews written after someone had already decided to leave. Years of conference agendas built around what practitioners were worried about that year. Decades of organizational psychology research asking why certain conditions produce certain outcomes, and by what mechanism.

None of those sources talk to each other. A litigation record doesn't know what an exit interview says. An insurance actuary isn't reading Glassdoor. And when I laid them side by side against what I'd already seen firsthand, the same conditions kept surfacing, not because I was looking for confirmation, but because the pattern was already there before I went looking a second time.

What an organization says is wrong and what's actually wrong are almost never the same thing. That gap is the reason most fixes don't hold. It's also the thing I saw first in my own work, then watched repeat across every external source I checked.