Foundational context
The shared ground: what intelligent technology is actually changing about work and human value, and the human science behind how people think, decide, conform, resist, trust, and change.
The more powerful our technology becomes, the more expensive weak human thinking becomes.
As technology becomes astonishingly capable, the quality of the human thinking behind consequential decisions matters more, not less.
Organizations are redesigning work, authority, expertise, and talent. Many of the assumptions behind those decisions were formed for a different technological world. Intelligent technology does more than challenge those assumptions. It gives organizations far more power to act on them.
In the Intensive, people with different perspectives use human science and structured disagreement to challenge those assumptions before they become expensive decisions.
You leave better able to find hidden assumptions, tell evidence from interpretation, challenge ideas without derailing the conversation and help a group think differently about a hard problem.
Philadelphia · 5 days · Tuition $9,500
Five connected days of context, practical tools and applied practice.
The goal is not to transfer a body of knowledge. It is to change how a room thinks about what it assumes it already knows.
The shared ground: what intelligent technology is actually changing about work and human value, and the human science behind how people think, decide, conform, resist, trust, and change.
How to make the thinking in a room better without becoming the person who only argues. Spot the assumptions. Challenge the framing. Separate evidence from inference. Test the opposite case. Follow the second-order effects.
You use the tools on real organizational questions with no answer key. You take positions, get challenged, revisit them, and apply the thinking to an unresolved problem from your own organization.
Should companies still have managers?
If a system makes the better decision, when should a human still decide?
What work should remain human, and who carries the consequences when it does not?
We begin with the human beings inside every new system. Psychology and behavioral science help us understand how attention, trust, belonging, and threat shape adoption, resistance, performance, and change. Many apparent technology problems become easier to understand when we examine the human response underneath them.
You'll strengthenA more precise eye for the ancient human forces that organize adoption, resistance, performance, collaboration, and change.
Traditional change models assume that an organization moves from one stable state to another. Today, one change often begins before the last one has finished. We examine what leadership requires when change is continuous, and how organizations can adapt without exhausting people or losing a shared sense of purpose.
You'll strengthenA working sense of how to make people and organizations adaptive without exhausting them or eroding the meaning that keeps them coherent.
We examine familiar ideas such as jobs, roles, performance, tenure, credentials, and careers rather than assuming they must remain as they are. What do these categories still measure well? What do they miss? How should organizations recognize human value when capability is no longer neatly tied to title or years of experience?
You'll strengthenBetter ways to recognize, develop, and use human capability that conventional workforce models may miss.
Many organizations move authority upward and information downward. We question whether that still makes sense when useful knowledge may sit with frontline employees, specialists or intelligent systems. We explore how decision rights could follow relevant expertise and proximity to the problem rather than title alone.
You'll strengthenA practical way to think about decision rights based on where relevant knowledge and judgment actually sit.
The week closes with financial and practical reality. We examine the strongest ideas from the previous four days through the lenses of value, investment, tradeoffs, and consequences. The goal is to connect unconventional thinking to decisions an organization can responsibly make.
You'll strengthenA clearer connection between unconventional thinking and the financial and strategic decisions required to make it useful.
A stronger understanding of how people think, decide, adapt, and resist change
Practical tools for finding hidden assumptions and testing whether they are supported by evidence
A clearer way to separate observation, interpretation, and inference
More confidence challenging an idea without shutting down the conversation
New ways to think about talent, authority, decision-making and organizational value
A network of people who will continue to challenge and expand your thinking
Different levels of experience, authority, and proximity to the work, composed around the question.
The aim is not to gather the most senior people. It is to bring together the perspectives a difficult question actually needs.
For those newest to the work, and to the workforce.
Because you are new to the workforce, you can still notice assumptions that others may have stopped seeing. You bring fresh questions about why work is organized the way it is.
For early-career professionals building real fluency.
You understand how work really gets done, but you are still close enough to the beginning of your career to question what others accept. You help test big ideas against everyday reality.
For managers who live where strategy meets reality.
You work between strategy and execution. You can see how an idea changes as it moves from senior leaders to the people who must make it work, and you help the room understand both perspectives.
For senior operators carrying strategic responsibility.
You bring experience, organizational context and the authority to act. You help the room understand what an organization can absorb, where change may stall and what it would take to move an idea forward.
For those who built the thing from nothing.
You know why the organization was built the way it was, including its early bets and tradeoffs. You bring first-principles thinking and help the room distinguish intentional choices from habits that no longer serve the organization.
Authority × Proximity
Experience × Adaptability
Institutional memory × Fresh perception
Strategic intent × Operational reality
Established expertise × Emerging intelligence
The faculty are not a speaker roster. They are the people who make the room work — each one bringing a discipline and a question the week needs.
GenThink Labs
Brings the throughline: how organizational psychology surfaces the assumptions underneath a transformation.
Nearly two decades leading large-scale technology and workforce transformation for Fortune 50, 100, and 500 leadership, grounded in industrial-organizational psychology. Author of frameworks including Return on Human Investment, Permanent Beta, and the Bookends model, and creator of the Human Amplification Economics discipline. The kind of practitioner who has been in the room when the change went well and when it did not, and who can tell the difference.
DNA Behavior
Brings the behavioral economics lens: how people actually decide under pressure.
A pioneer in applied behavioral economics and finance, and architect of a widely used system for understanding how people think, decide, and behave under pressure. The work has shaped how thousands of leaders understand the decisions underneath their transformations — and why the rational business case so rarely predicts what actually happens.
Organizational Consulting
Brings the operator's view: what it takes to make change hold inside a real organization.
A retired senior HR executive and founder of an organizational consulting practice. Has sat in the seat that owns the workforce strategy, run it through several waves of restructuring, and learned what holds and what collapses. Brings the truth of making change real after the meeting ends.
Author
Brings the psychology of identity: what happens to people when their expertise stops being scarce.
A psychologist and bestselling author whose work on the hidden forces that shape human behavior, decision-making, and organizational life has become a touchstone for thinking about why smart people and institutions act the way they do. The books have changed how leaders talk about identity, resistance, and what it means to be good at something that is no longer rare.
The practical details, what we look for and how to ask for a seat.
We are not filling seats by credential. We are choosing the minds that will make the week work, for each other and for the question.
We choose each cohort for what every person adds to the room, not for title or prestige. Applications are read by people. No one is expected to arrive with the answers, and the strongest applications usually carry a thoughtful question.
We look for people who:
Participants come from different companies, industries, and levels of experience. That mix helps people see beyond the assumptions and language of their own organization.
Apply independently or with support from your employer.
Apply for the Cohort →A version of the lab built around one organization's consequential question, with people from different levels of the business thinking about it together.
For leaders who want to bring the work inside their organization.
Explore a Company Lab →A limited number of sponsored college fellowships are reserved for students whose perspective would add something important to the cohort.
The pathway for people who want to make the room smarter.