I wrote The Coaching Habit to help people change how they lead.
That book was about changing a person, and the people they lead. Change Signal is about changing an organisation, which is where good people and good intentions go to die. Change has changed. Change management hasn’t. That’s the game, and the game’s afoot.
I was frustrated.
I started in innovation, doing product development at a small agency. It didn’t take long to get deeply frustrated. Our great new ideas kept dying slow, suffocating deaths inside client organisations. Sound familiar?
That frustration turned me into a change consultant. Culture changes, digital transformations, restructures. Thirty years of it. I’ve accumulated the usual stories and scars: the good, the bad, and the baffling.
Change Signal is what I wish I’d had when I started, and I’ve been missing for thirty years.
The short version.
The book
Over a million copies, twenty languages, and the best-selling book on coaching this century. It’s about the seven questions that change how you lead.
The rest of the shelf
How to Work With (Almost) Anyone. How to Begin. The Advice Trap. Do More Great Work. Different problems, same obsession: helping people do their best in the organizations they work within.
Now
The platform for possibility. Where individuals find practical tools to thrive — including Bring Out Their Best, a live four-week course on showing up well when the stakes are high.
Some things shouldn’t change
Married to Marcella for 32 years.
Australian by birth, Toronto by choice.
Rhodes Scholar. Canada's first Coach of the Year. Thinkers50 Coaching Legend, 2024. Brené Brown's podcast. 2026 MasterClass faculty.
I only mention these so you know I might be worth your time.
Change management hasn't kept up with change.
The irony isn’t lost on me. Most of what’s out there is outdated and dull, or delivered by expensive consultants with crappy models and shot-in-the-dark practices that don’t hold up in the real world. This is the alternative.
01
Start with better questions
The discipline is full of confident answers to questions nobody checked. I’d rather start with the question.
02
Take them to people who know
That’s the podcast: 108 episodes with researchers, operators and change leaders who have moved something real, and know what works.
03
Share what survives contact
That’s the newsletter: fifty-seven lessons, tempered through what felt like endless drafts. Everything that didn’t hold up got cut.
Once a week.
Short, sharp, relentlessly blunt.
Start with lesson one
A new truth or a counterintuitive move, every Wednesday. Free, and one-gulp consumable.