Change is inevitable. Readiness isn't.
Build the capability your organization needs for what’s next.
Your leaders have strategies. New technologies. Transformation plans. Growth goals. AI initiatives. New expectations for how people work.
But sometimes the solutions are moving faster than the organization’s capacity to execute them.
People need new skills.
Teams need to sync up.
Assumptions need to surface.
Systems need to change.
Leaders need better intelligence from the people closest to the work.
And everyone needs enough shared context to understand where the organization is going—and why.
Before you ask people to change, create readiness.
PopUpThinkTank is piloting a new way for L&D, OE/OD, Talent, Culture, and Change practitioners inside complex organizations to do exactly that.
Over six months, we'll equip you with a repeatable capability for helping leaders move real work forward—and help you become the person they call when what's next requires more than another training, meeting, survey, or communication plan.
Applications are now open for a small group of 2026–27 pilot partners.
For practitioners inside organizations with 2,000+ employees. Executive sponsorship required.
The future is getting ahead of us.
Most organizations aren't short on ideas or plans.
They're swimming in them.
New frameworks. New technology. New operating models. Strategic priorities. Culture initiatives. Leadership expectations. Transformation roadmaps.
And behind every one is an expectation that people will somehow change.
Understand it.
Believe in it.
Learn something new.
Coordinate differently.
Let go of something old.
Make decisions with incomplete information.
And execute.
Meanwhile, the people responsible for helping make that happen are working inside organizations already experiencing cognitive overload, competing priorities, collaboration fatigue, information without context, and accelerating complexity.
The result is a widening gap between:
Where the organization wants to go
and
its capacity to get there.
We call it the Readiness Gap.
Left alone, it becomes Readiness Debt—the accumulated cost of strategies, solutions, and expectations moving faster than the people and systems required to make them real.
L&D can't content its way out of this.
Training matters.
So do communications. Surveys. Meetings. Coaching. Change plans. Toolkits. Leadership development.
But content alone isn't the answer.
Because the challenge isn't always:
“What do our people need to know?”
Sometimes it's:
Do we understand the problem the same way?
What are the people closest to the work seeing that leadership isn't?
What assumptions are we carrying?
Where is the energy—and where is the friction?
Do our systems support what we're asking people to do?
Who needs to connect with whom?
What aren't we talking about yet?
And sometimes:
We don't know exactly where we're going yet. How do we get better at moving together anyway?
These aren't content or even training problems.
They're readiness problems.
What if your role could move upstream?
Too often, L&D, Talent, OE/OD, Culture, and Change practitioners enter the conversation after someone else has diagnosed the problem.
“We need training.”
“We need engagement.”
“We need a kickoff.”
“Can you help us roll this out?”
“We need people aligned.”
Your job becomes fulfilling the request.
But what if you had the credibility—and the capability—to respond differently?
“I understand what you're trying to accomplish. Before we prescribe the solution, let's get closer to what this actually needs.”
And then you had a practical way to do it.
Not a six-month consulting engagement.
Not another series of 1:1s and sync meetings.
Not a 60-question survey followed by a presentation three months later.
A way to get a meaningful cross-section of the system into the work together.
30–50 people. 90 minutes. One core challenge.
PopUpThinkTank is a facilitated experience designed to help groups encounter important work together.
A leader brings a real challenge, question, idea, teaching, skill, initiative, or emerging reality. Then we create the conditions for people to enter it.
💬 Frame the Question
A leader or sponsor, guided by a facilitator, names what's known—and what's not. Clarity without closure.
🪞 Quiet Reflection
People catch their own thinking before colliding it with everyone else's. A low-stakes, high-value pause.
⚡ Quick Burst Exchanges
Short, rotating conversations surface lived experience, context, patterns, tensions, connections, and possibilities—fast. The room starts thinking and learning together.
🌐 Sensemaking in Real Time
Ideas accumulate. Connections form. Patterns emerge. People aren't merely receiving information about the work. They're entering the work.
The ideas aren't the only point.
There's an assumption that brainstorming exists to produce ideas. And yes—we generate plenty of them. But something else is happening at the same time.
Participation.
Ownership.
Engagement.
People encounter the problem themselves.
They compare notes.
They hear perspectives they wouldn't encounter in their normal workflow.
They develop shared language.
They see the constraints leaders are facing.
Leaders hear the lived reality of the people closest to the work.
Assumptions surface.
Connections form.
People begin to understand not merely what is changing, but what the change is trying to solve.
That's where ownership can begin.
Because leaders can't announce ownership into existence.
They have to create the conditions in which ownership can emerge.
We call it Ideation-as-Engagement.
Organizational Readiness has three dimensions.
01 — Get our people ready.
Skills. Growth. Leadership. Understanding. Confidence. Relationships. Context.
What do people need in order to meet what's coming?
02 — Get our system ready.
Technology. Incentives. Processes. Structures. Tools. Workflows. Environments.
What in the system is enabling—or fighting—the future we're trying to create?
03 — Get better at change itself.
Ambiguity. Adaptability. Sensemaking. Coordination. Execution.
How do we increase our capacity to move when we don't yet know exactly what we're moving toward?
The most consequential work increasingly lives between all three.
That's where we believe the next generation of L&D, OE/OD, Talent, Culture, and Change practitioners can become indispensable.
Become the person leaders call before the next big thing.
This isn't primarily about becoming a better meeting facilitator. It's about building a reputation. We want leaders across your organization to start thinking:
“Bring them in.”
When a project needs to launch.
When a strategy needs to become real.
When teams need to sync up.
When leadership needs better intelligence.
When people need to learn.
When assumptions need to surface.
When a transformation feels stuck.
When something isn't connecting.
When the organization needs to understand before it can act.
Your role shifts.
From a function people consume → to a capability leaders deploy.
One capability. Across the work.
PopUpThinkTank can become part of how you help your organization:
🚀 Launch
Bring people into a new initiative, strategy, technology, project, or transformation before asking them to execute it.
🔎 Discover
Surface lived experience, test assumptions, gather intelligence, and hear perspectives that conventional surveys and small-group conversations can miss.
🤝 Sync + Align
Build shared context across functions, levels, teams, or stakeholders without weeks of organizational telephone.
🌱 Learn + Grow
Put teaching inside an experience where people can immediately reflect, connect it to their work, exchange perspectives, and generate application.
🔄 Reflect + Adapt
Pause during or after consequential work to identify what's changing, what's working, what's creating friction, and what deserves to happen next.
Discovery. Learning. Launch. Alignment. Adaptation.
Plenty of learning and development happens along the way.
But it happens inside the work.
And AI makes this more important, not less.
AI can generate more information, analysis, recommendations, plans, presentations, and content than an organization could possibly consume.
So information isn't necessarily the scarce resource anymore.
Shared human context is.
—> Comparing notes.
—> Reading reactions.
—> Recognizing patterns.
—> Surfacing tensions.
—> Exercising judgment.
—> Building trust.
—> Making meaning together.
—> Developing wisdom about a situation that no individual—or agent—possesses alone.
The future doesn't simply need humans in the loop.
It needs groups of humans with shared context in the loop.
PopUpThinkTank creates structured space for that to happen without requiring days off-site or weeks of meetings.
The 6-Month Organizational Readiness Pilot
We're exploring a new question ourselves:
What happens when the PopUpThinkTank capability lives inside the organization?
Until now, we've primarily trained independent coaches and consultants to facilitate PopUpThinkTank experiences.
In 2026–27, we're opening a small pilot for practitioners who work inside complex organizations.
This is intentionally not a traditional training program.
You won't spend six months sitting through classes about facilitation.
You'll build the capability by using it on real work.
-
Discover + Design
MONTH 1
Together, we'll explore your organization's current priorities, your role, your sponsor's goals, and where readiness gaps may be slowing important work.
We'll develop a point of view around one central question:
Where could this capability help move your organization's real priorities over the next six months?
You'll begin training, preparation, and readiness work—but always connected to actual opportunities inside your organization.
-
Experience the Capability
MONTH 2
We'll help you launch internally.
A PopUpThinkTank facilitator from our team will lead an initial session around a real challenge or priority inside your organization.
Your leaders and colleagues don't have to imagine what the capability could be.
They experience it.
And the first session helps surface the questions, challenges, and opportunities that could become future sessions.
-
Let It Work
MONTHS 3–6
Now you begin facilitating.
Learning & development. Leadership growth. Discovery. Project kickoffs. Technology rollouts. Alignment. Change initiatives. Strategic questions.
Whatever matters to your organization.
Our goal is for you to facilitate 5+ real PopUpThinkTank sessions during the pilot, building your confidence, reputation, internal demand, and evidence about where the capability creates value.
And you won't be doing it alone.
Everything you need to make execution easier.
🧰 Tools + Templates
Repeatable resources for framing challenges, preparing sponsors, designing sessions, facilitating the experience, and following through afterward.
The structure does much of the heavy lifting so you can focus on the people and the work.
🌐 Practitioner Community
Trade stories. Swap notes. See how other facilitators are applying the method. Learn from what works—and what doesn't.
Whether 1:1 with Tim or Maria or learning from our independent facilitator community, you’re always connected.
🎯 Execution Coaching
Have a tricky sponsor conversation?
Not sure how to frame the challenge?
A session isn't coming together?
Get practical coaching when you need it.
📊 Data + Technology
Capture what emerges from sessions and turn hundreds of contributions into useful patterns, signals, and synthesized insight.
—> Built for you: forms, decks, insights, and session readouts.
What starts showing up?
A PopUpThinkTank can produce ideas. But we're looking for something larger.
🎯 Actionable Signals
What's moving? Where is the energy? What deserves to be prototyped, tested, explored, or acted on next?
🤝 Collective Intelligence
Who needs to gather next? Around what? With whose sponsorship?
🚦 Signals to Slow or Stop
Where does momentum have meaning—and where is activity merely motion?
🧭 Meta-Learning
People get better at reflecting, connecting, sensing, and adapting while they're doing the work.
What this means—> Each session is both content and container. The work moves. And the organization practices a different way of moving it.
What if 10% better compounded?
One slightly better meeting won't transform your culture.
Neither will one good brainstorm.
That's not the hypothesis. The hypothesis is:
What happens when the way you convene around consequential work gets 10–20% better—again and again?
10% more shared context.
10% stronger connection.
10% more useful intelligence.
10% more ownership.
10% earlier visibility into friction.
10% more energy for the work ahead.
Now repeat that across five sessions.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
Across discovery, launches, learning, strategy, alignment, transformation, and reflection.
Those gains don't merely add.
They can compound.
Relationships get stronger. Shared language travels. Leaders become accustomed to listening earlier. People become accustomed to participating in consequential questions. Your organization gets better at convening itself. A cultural head of steam begins to build.
That's what we want to build with you.
We've seen what happens when people get in the room.
PopUpThinkTank has been used across hundreds of sessions, including work with organizations such as Gap Inc., Mortenson, and Lifespark, as well as venture-backed startups and emerging organizations.
Across the work, we've seen participants turn collective thinking into clearer language, actionable feedback, strategic partnerships, new opportunities, next steps—and renewed energy for the work itself.
One founder described getting “much clearer, valuable insights” and putting participants' language directly into the company's pitch deck.
Another said the experience produced direct, actionable feedback alongside a significant “boost of energy.”
Another described what changed simply:
“Having everyone in the room changes everything.”
The PopUpThinkTank format isn't the experiment.
Putting the capability directly into the hands of practitioners inside complex organizations is.
And we're looking for a few people who want to help us find out what happens next.
“Amazing. I've found my community.” — Tandiwe Vaughn, Global L&D Designer, Veeam Software
“A boundary-stretching structure with rich, inspiring conversations.” — Claire Williams, Founder, In Depth Coaching
“Intentional, guided connection without pressure—an effective way to create real change.” — Candi White, Founder, Live Brave Collective
“Execution-ready insights for immediate strategic engagement.” — Dan Hildebrandt, Director, Strategic HR
“Excellent experience.” — John Egleston, Product Owner, InterVarsity
Some organizations will want to wait.
Until the model is established.
Until someone else proves it.
Until there's a case study from a company exactly like theirs.
That's reasonable.
This pilot isn't for them yet.
For 2026–27, we're looking for a small number of practitioners and sponsors willing to experiment with us.
The internal model is new.
So we're putting disproportionate attention around the people willing to help us develop it.
You'll get close support.
You'll influence what we build.
You'll learn alongside other early practitioners.
And you'll become one of the first people trained and equipped to bring this capability inside an organization.
Go early without betting the farm.
Six months.
Real work.
Real sessions.
Real evidence.
Then decide whether this deserves to become an ongoing capability.
We're looking for people who want to go first.
Who should apply?
This pilot may be a fit if:
—> You work in L&D, OE/OD, Talent, Culture, People, Leadership Development, or Change Enablement inside an organization with 2,000+ employees.
—> Your work routinely intersects with leaders whose priorities affect 30+ people.
—> Your organization faces meaningful internal complexity.
—> You have—or can secure—an executive sponsor for the pilot.
—> You have six months to put the capability into real work.
—> You want to facilitate 5+ sessions, not simply complete a certification or training.
—> You want new skills, credibility, and a capability that can travel with you throughout your career.
—> You're willing to experiment before every detail has been perfected.
Industries with distributed teams, cross-functional complexity, rapid change, or significant transformation may be especially well suited—including retail, technology, professional services, construction, healthcare, and financial services.
Change how you change.
The ambition isn't to turn every meeting into a PopUpThinkTank.
And it isn't to make L&D responsible for every transformation.
It's to give people already responsible for learning, talent, culture, organizational effectiveness, and change another capability to reach for when the old tools aren't enough.
A way to bring more of the system into the work.
A way to create shared context faster.
A way to help leaders listen before they prescribe.
A way to encounter the future before it arrives.
A way to make change something people participate in—not merely something that happens to them.
And maybe, session by session, a way to help your organization become a little more ready for whatever comes next.
Change is inevitable.
Readiness isn't.
APPLY FOR THE 6-MONTH PILOT —>
We'll explore your role, your sponsor's priorities, and the real work coming over the next six months. If there's a fit, we'll develop the pilot point of view together.
PopUpThinkTank creates readiness for what's next.