Why does important change take more energy than it should?

A body of thought cannot be written into existence alone. The ideas need rooms to be wrong in.

I am starting a monthly gathering in Lincoln for senior leaders of established organizations who are trying to move something meaningful without burning out their people or breaking the systems they depend on. It is called The Change Energy Series. The first Tuesday of every month, six to eight operators sit at one table at Mostly Harmless, and we have an honest conversation about why important change takes more energy than it should.

This is for the Cxx. CEOs. CFOs. COOs. Presidents. Owner-operators. People who can act on whatever comes out of the conversation.

What this is

Painters talking about where to find cheap paint thinner.

That is the closest description I have for it. Practitioners sharing the unglamorous, useful things they have learned from running real organizations through real change, in a room small enough that no one performs.

Not a panel. Not a pitch. Not a vendor table. No name tags.

The format

The first Tuesday of every month, in Lincoln:

• 7:30 to 8:00 — Coffee downstairs.
• 8:15 — Guided conversation upstairs at Mostly Harmless.
• 9:00 — Done.
• 9:30 — Optional linger for anyone who wants to keep going.

Six to eight people in the room.

The conversation starts from a question that one of the operators in the room is actually wrestling with. The shape tends to look like this:

• Change takes more energy than it should. Why?
• Workarounds have become our operating system. How?
• The same few people are always the bottleneck. Why?
• My organization has outgrown its platform. How?
• We have data. It gives us almost no advantage. Why?

I will hold the conversation lightly. I will not lecture. I will not pitch. I will not be a coach.

What you get to take home

Each session produces Notes from the Operator’s Table: a small set of sharp observations from what surfaced in the room, anonymized, distributed only to the people who were there. Future invitations get extended in part based on what comes up. Repeated patterns become Field Notes on this site, and occasionally become things we test inside real engagements at Don’t Panic Labs.

If something said in the room makes it into public writing, it is anonymized to the point that nobody can be identified, and nothing said about a specific person, partner, or competitor leaves the room. That is the deal.

Why this room and not another

The c-suite seat is one of the loneliest seats in the organization. The work of converting intention into actual movement is harder there than anywhere else, and most of the rooms available to senior leaders are the wrong rooms for the conversation.

You cannot be fully candid with your reports. You cannot be fully candid with your peers inside your own org. You usually cannot be candid with industry peers, because competitive risk gets in the way. The leadership-coaching and peer-group circuit has its place, but most of it is polished, programmed, and well-meant in a way that does not get to the part of the problem you actually need to talk about.

This is not Vistage. This is not EO. This is not a paid mastermind. There is no curriculum. There is no follow-up sales call. There is no slide deck.

If we cannot have a real conversation, the experiment fails and I will stop running it.

How to come

Find me on LinkedIn and we will figure out which month makes sense. The room is small, so invitations are deliberate. I will tell you the date. You will tell me whether you can be there. And we will see what comes out of it.