If you follow me on LinkedIn, you might have noticed I disappeared.
Several months of silence. No posts. No comments. No hot takes. That wasn't a slump, and it wasn't burnout. It was deliberate. Here's what I was actually doing.
I went back to school
In late 2024, I went to AI school.
Not because I'm chasing a trend. Trends don't interest me much. I've watched plenty of them come and go in 30 years, and most of them deserved to go.
I went because of something I could feel coming. After three decades of change management at Nike, Intel, UHG, and a long list of other companies, you develop a sense for when the ground is about to shift under your own profession and the time is now. FINALLY!
The uncomfortable part
AI is changing change management. Not soon. Right now.
And most of us are using it badly.
Here's how it usually goes. We open ChatGPT, type "write me a comms plan," and we get back something that sounds fine but lacks specific robustness. Generic. Safe. Instantly forgettable. So we shrug and decide AI isn't ready for serious change work yet.
The tool isn't the problem. The problem is that a blank AI doesn't know what we know. It has never sat in the room when a tech implementation landed badly. It has never watched a shadow narrative spread through an organization faster than the official message ever could. It's brilliant, and it's blank.
What we carry is the opposite of blank. That's the whole point.
So I made an unexpected decision
I stopped consulting. I packed up and moved to Tasmania, Australia. Yes, the island. Yes, on purpose.
And I spent numerous months building the thing I wish I'd had for the last thirty years.
What I built
It's called Change Essentials AI.
Twelve specialist Claude Skills, each one built on 30 years of scar tissue. Not prompts. Not templates. Not a clever wrapper around a chatbot that still leaves you doing all the thinking. These are encoded with real change management judgment and expertise, the kind you only earn by getting it wrong a few times and learning what works under pressure.
The work I used to do for one client at a time, now ready to work alongside you.
Who this is for
If you're a CM practitioner, an internal change leader, a comms leader, or a transformation pro, this is for you.
Over the coming days and weeks, I'll show you exactly what I built. The what, the how, and the where you can put it to work in your own practice.
For now, the quiet is over. Stick around, visit this page frequently. There's a lot more coming. This may be a bit of a crash course in AI for Change Management over the coming weeks. I find it exceptionally exciting, but I am a self-proclaimed CM & AI nerd. Come join me!