When I stepped away from my 10-year career at The Ready back in November, I knew only one thing for sure: I needed to talk to as many people as possible.
My hypothesis was that whatever my next thing was going to be, the nucleus of it lived somewhere in this network of people. I hoped it was a cool internal role doing a version of what I was already doing at The Ready, but when potential consulting projects start falling out of these conversations it felt silly not to pursue them.
So, that’s what I did. And that’s what I’m doing. Meaning, Deliberate Works and Deliberate Works Studio, are now up and running.
The simplest, and not entirely wrong, answer is that Deliberate Works is a lot like The Ready, except only me. The more nuanced answer is that I’m injecting a particular Sam-ness to this work, like fusing my long-running interest in personal development and philosophy with effective organizational change work, that didn’t always show up at The Ready. Basically, if you’re a leader whose instinct is to read more novels than business books and/or believes there’s more to good work than making a lot of money, I think you’ll like what I’m building.
To that end, I’m also going to make a real go at offering resources, community, and experiences for individual practitioners/leaders, too. That’s the “Studio” side of the biz. It’s not as developed as the consulting side, yet, but it’ll be worth keeping an eye on in the coming months.
I’ve been joking that my best service offering so far seems to be “Sam as a Service.” Essentially, you pay me to care about what you care about. You tap into my obsession about making better organizations and for those of you who know me and know how I work, you know good things come from that.
Other than that, I’ve been running short 6-8 week design sprints related to aspects of an org’s operating system (currently deep into a “we gotta fix our meetings” sprint with a very cool org), being the progressive voice in a somewhat traditional transformation office in a large corporation, and coaching a handful of execs through a variety of gnarly organizational challenges.
Over on LinkedIn I wrote a quick article diving into why I’m calling this thing Deliberate Works.
From the article:
So when the two words combine, they’re doing three things at once, and I mean all of them:
Deliberate works (as in, “We are working in a deliberate way.”) The things we build together are filled with care and craft. Not generated, not templated, not repurposed from the last engagement. Considered. Made.
Deliberate works (as in, “The works of a lifetime are hanging on the wall of the museum.”) The emphasis is on what we’re actually creating. Organizations worth calling works. Not quarter-to-quarter optimization, but something more like a cathedral: built slowly, built to last, built with the understanding that the people inside it will spend a significant portion of their lives there. That ambition deserves more than a fancy deck.
Deliberate works (as in, “You know what tends to work? Being deliberate.”) Being intentional about how you operate, how you change, how you develop — it works. It’s better than the alternative. That’s not a values statement, it’s an empirical one. The organizations and leaders who cultivate this capacity are genuinely harder to displace. The rest keep cycling through the same crises on a slightly longer timeline and new buzzwords.
Check out the rest of the article and leave a comment or a reaction over on the big blue site.
This newsletter is now the primary outlet for talking about the work I’m doing at Deliberate Works. Honestly, I’m not sure it even changes anything about how I’ve been running this newsletter (except writing more consistently than I have been). The topics and voice should remain the same. Deliberate Works is simply the market-facing version of what I’ve always cared about — how to create better organizations through individual and collective effort.
Thank you to everyone who sent me a note of encouragement over the past few months. Those kind words did more good than you probably think.
Onward!
Sam Spurlin | Founder, Deliberate Works
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