A Vision for 2026
Designing Work that...Works
Happy 2026, friends!!
I’ve never been big on choosing a word for the year or even New Year’s resolutions—I am constantly designing new systems and setting new goals—but this feels like an appropriate time to lay out the North Star that currently keeps all the various parts of my life aligned.
Work shouldn’t consume your life to be meaningful, and life shouldn’t come at the cost of your ability to have meaningful impact.
For most of the modern era, we’ve designed work around structures, roles, and systems that made sense in another time, one with stable environments, predictable careers, and narrowly defined jobs. We optimized for efficiency, scale, and control.
That’s not the environment we are in now.
Both our environment and humans themselves are chaotic and messy. Today’s workforce operates in a world defined by constant change, evolving skills and needs, distributed teams collaborating across time and space, and competing demands on time, energy, and attention. Yet so many organizations are trying to succeed using the old models. Work-life balance. Work as a place, not a function. A job that can be qualified by a static description and part of a set career path.
Those things don’t work anymore—but as a complexity scientist who has been studying talent management, people analytics, and strategic workforce planning for the better part of ten years, I’d like to help people figure out what does work.
So let’s figure out how we design work and the systems that support it to actually work for people in complex and changing environments, wherever they are, however they live.
And welcome back to The Talent Code 😁
What “Designing Work That Works” Means
I’m intentional about the word “design.” The problems we’re facing today with talent acquisition, talent retention, skills-based work, emerging technology, and employee experience aren’t ones you can solve by flinging perks or trends at them.
Instead, let’s break down work to the basics and rebuild it.
Headcount ➔ capabilities
Presence ➔ outcomes
Rigid roles ➔ adaptive skills
Burnout driven performance ➔ sustainable energy
One-size-fits-all solutions ➔ personalized systems
The biggest thing I realized while building my own work systems is that my work is not separate from life. There is no work-life balance. It’s all life. And to flourish, I need the flexibility to build my day around whatever bits and pieces of life—work, family, health, personal growth—need the most focus.
When work is designed well, it enables this.
The Focus Areas Guiding My Work
These are things that show up consistently across my writing, teaching, and creative work, and they make solid focus areas to guide how we design work that works.
1. Talent Fundamentals, Reimagined
Clear roles. Skills-based thinking. Strategic workforce planning that reflects reality. This is the foundation: understanding who people are, not just how many you have.
2. Designing Adaptive Work Systems
Work is a function, a system. We need to unpack how workflows, incentives, decision rights, and feedback loops enable (or block) performance in a changing environment.
3. Tools, Tech, and AI as Enablers
Technology is a workflow enabler. Use it to eliminate, simplify, automate, or elevate your work. To do this, I focus on practical tools, platforms, and AI-enabled systems that help people and organizations see talent clearly and work more effectively.
4. Health, Energy, and Sustainability
Performance is biological as well as organizational. Designing work that works means designing for energy, recovery, mental health, and long-term leadership capacity. Your health is not optional, and running people into the ground doesn’t help you sustain wins.
5. Work From Anywhere by Design
Flexibility is a design choice, and it’s not about location. Not at all. It’s about designing your systems so that the work happens no matter where your employees are—which means you have managers who can lead, not babysit.
6. Leadership in the Age of Change
Modern leadership is about clarity, trust, and adaptability. We need to unlearn some bad habits and relearn the fundamentals of leadership to lead effectively in distributed, skills-based, technology-enabled systems.
7. Life by Design
I’ll say it again. It’s all life. Work is just a part of your life that you either do because you love it or you do because it enables you to do other things, hopefully things you love. My work acknowledges family, seasons, ambition, creativity, and recovery as legitimate and essential inputs to how we design work.
How This Vision Comes to Life
This vision connects everything I do (or it’s supposed to—the point of having one is keeping yourself on track, right?). Books, workshops and design labs, speaking, teaching, creative and social content.
So when you see me offering up practical hands-on sessions that help leaders and teams redesign their talent systems, workflows, tech stacks, and strategies, or if you see me keynoting or on social media sharing real-world examples of work in practice, showing what intentional design looks like day to day, that’s where it’s coming from.
At its core, my work is about giving leaders the tools to design better systems, giving organizations the insights, from data and other means, to unlock talent, and giving you as an individual the permission and capability to build work for the life you want to live.
Design work well, and everything else gets easier.
I’m excited for this year, friends, and for building powerful new ways to work with you. Thanks for being here!
