Crystal Schaffer
Founder
Senior advisor, executive coach, and chief idea and experience alchemist
Erika Toomey
Executive-level business consultant, leadership coach, and learning experience facilitator
Kenko Ueyama
AI innovation pioneer, designer, and business leader
Tiffany Quivers
Educator, speaker, program designer, and change catalyst
Elisabeth Mathieu
Program management mastermind and L&D specialist
Mari Strait
Leadership and performance coach, team and culture facilitator, and leadership solutions innovator
Vincent Letizia
Storytelling, entertainment,and experience guru
Brett Schaffer
IT specialist and tool stack strategist
Things that make us go hmmm…
Big trends are loud once they’re obvious. Useful clues often show up sooner in small signs, subtle shifts, and quiet outliers. Things that make us go hmmm... is our open notebook of weak signals and emerging trends that aren’t mainstream yet but could tug the workplace in new directions. We scan widely across AI and learning, leadership development, and the future of work, then share a few regularly that genuinely make us pause—highlighting the research and framing the questions to ask now to prepare for what’s next.
Confidently wrong: Why calibrated skepticism is the next new skill for the AI age
Unpacking the AI and human “hallucination” debate.
Your year, auto-summarized
December is recap season: reviews, results decks, assessments, and annual summaries. What’s changing isn’t the ritual. It’s the first draft.
What’s in your wallet? Credentials that travel.
Digital “skills wallets” that store verifiable credentials are moving from idea to real pilots
AI adoption @ work: Are we stuck in a widening chasm?
Ramp’s AI Index shows business adoption of AI ticked back up in July and August 2025 after a mid-year wobble, but the rate of growth is still shy of early year highs.
Meet me in the middle
Hey there, high-wire acrobat of the corporate circus. You're putting out today's fires, scanning for tomorrow's worries, and trying to squeeze "reinvent the business" between back-to-back calls. If you are a middle manager, mid-career, between a rock and a hard place, or in the middle of anything else, you know what we mean. We see you. We are you. And we know the middle can feel like a lonely zip code.
That is why our semi-regular podcast series exists. Think of it as a standing coffee break with people who get the chaos: business leaders, consultants, researchers, AI innovators, and learning leaders who've racked up a few mileage points in change management and workplace coaching. We'll swap stories, unpack lessons learned, and share ideas you can apply in the real world.