Work in Progress

The Lab

This is where I think out loud. Not polished deliverables — more like a sketchpad. Research I'm digging into, ideas I'm turning over, projects I'm tinkering with. Some of it will turn into something. Some of it probably won't.

If something here sparks a conversation, my inbox is open.

Right Now

What I'm into this month

Reading

The Fearless Organization

Amy Edmondson on psychological safety. Connecting it to why ADKAR's "Desire" stage breaks down in high-accountability cultures.

Thinking About

Does urgency backfire?

Kotter says create urgency. But I keep seeing urgency trigger threat responses instead of motivation. Working through when it helps and when it doesn't.

At the Telescope

Messier 42 season

Orion Nebula is up. Running a 90-minute public stream this month — turns out explaining stellar nurseries to a live audience isn't that different from explaining a new ERP system.

University of Louisville

Research Interests

Active inquiry

Human Performance in Technology-Driven Change

My work at UofL sits at the intersection of organizational leadership, adult learning theory, and what actually happens to people when their tools change underneath them. The short version: organizations keep treating workforce readiness like a checkbox, and it keeps costing them.

"What organizational and individual factors predict sustained behavioral adoption following enterprise technology implementation — and how do those factors differ between federal and private-sector contexts?"

I'm particularly interested in the gap between training completion and actual proficiency. You can get 100% of your workforce through a course and still have a failed go-live. The question I keep returning to is: what does "ready" actually mean, and how do you measure it before it's too late?

Field experience is doing most of the heavy lifting here. Fifteen years of watching well-funded rollouts stumble at the human layer has given me a lot of material to work with.

Adult Learning Theory Organizational Change Technology Adoption Human Performance VUCA Environments Federal Workforce

Currently Reading

Edmondson — The Fearless Organization Psychological safety as a precondition for the "Desire" stage of ADKAR
Kegan & Lahey — Immunity to Change Why people resist change even when they genuinely want it
Brinkerhoff — The Success Case Method A lean approach to measuring training transfer in the field

Questions I'm Sitting With

Can readiness be reliably predicted before a rollout, or is it only visible in hindsight?

Is the 70-20-10 model still the right lens, or has remote work broken the "20"?

What would a genuinely VUCA-proof onboarding program look like?

Program

Organizational Leadership and Learning
University of Louisville →

Ideas & Writing

Dispatches

Short pieces on change, learning, and the human side of technology. Written when something is worth writing down.

Coming soon drafting

The Urgency Trap: When Kotter's Step One Backfires

Creating urgency is supposed to unstick people. But in high-stakes environments, urgency can trigger threat responses that shut down exactly the openness you need. Here's what I'm noticing in the field.

Coming soon →
Tinkering

Projects & Experiments

Things I'm building, testing, or just messing around with. No promises on any of these.

Active

Deep Sky Live — Twitch Astronomy

Live telescope streams on Twitch — walking a real-time audience through deep sky objects, the science behind them, and how to find them. It started as a hobby. It's become a masterclass in explaining complex systems to people who didn't ask to be experts.

Twitch Partner → twitch.tv/malforthewin

In development

Pre-Launch Readiness Scorecard

A structured tool for project teams to self-assess workforce readiness at 90, 60, and 30 days before go-live. Pulls from ADKAR, Kotter, and 15 years of watching what breaks. Still early — currently being tested with a few willing clients.

Want to pilot it? Get in touch.

Ongoing

Ripley's Training Log

Ripley is in service dog training. Turns out training a dog and training a workforce have more in common than you'd think — both require consistency, positive reinforcement, and a clear picture of what "ready" looks like. I'm documenting the process partly for fun, partly because the parallels are genuinely useful.

Updates occasionally on LinkedIn.

Early stage

Thesis: TBD

The research question is forming. The literature review is underway. The thesis topic lives somewhere in the neighborhood of readiness measurement, technology adoption, and what the field doesn't know yet. More here when there's more to say.

Check back in a semester or two.