Organizational wisdom · Data and AI transformation
Aimed right. Actually delivered. Run by your people.
A transformation delivers when the people carrying it own the change, and when what they know is captured before the work changes. Those are the two parts I take on, after 20 years leading teams through change.
15 minutes. A conversation about where you are. Or see the ways in.
New territory
There is no playbook for this yet.
You are running a transformation with a real investment and real people attached. A data or AI program. A restructure. A new operating model. And you do not have a chief data officer to hand it to, because you cannot justify the hire.
The technology has a roadmap. The human side has your instincts, because nobody has written that part down yet. Everyone is figuring this out at the same time, including the companies selling you the tools.
Before you need an answer, you need the question worth the investment.
You come away with two things: a clear call on which work AI can take on and where it can help your people do theirs, and a knowledge base your AI can reference, with the reasons and context behind it.
Lead with possibility. I start with what your organization could do once the transformation works, then work back to what has to be true first.
Established companies and funded startups, roughly 200 to 2,000 people. Big enough that the decisions carry real weight. Small enough that there is nobody in-house who has made them before.
What I usually find
The problem is underneath the strategy.
It is almost always one of these. Someone in your company already knows about every one of them. The work is making it safe to say.
- Every team is busy and the roadmap is full. You cannot say with confidence that the work in flight produces what you promised.
- The dependency that blocked you last month was knowable in week two. Nobody was looking across.
- You have asked for risks. You get status.
- You have paid for this analysis before. It is in a deck somewhere. Nothing changed.
- The analysis supports the decision. The decision was made first.
- Your best people spend their week on rework and meetings about the work.
- You find out something is broken when it is already a blocker.
Test one this week
Ask three people who own delivery, separately, what this initiative is for.
If the answers do not match, you have found the first problem, and it cost you three conversations.
What separates the 12%
The return is decided where your people are.
Your AI only knows what is in your systems. The context and wisdom it needs live in your people. AI can draft the analysis and the plan. Orchestrating one takes 12 leaders, one roadmap, and every function moving in the same direction, and that is the part the technology never reaches. It is the part I work on.
The CEOs and the data leaders say the same thing about why.
What the CEOs report
56%
report neither higher revenue nor lower costs from AI
12%
report both higher revenue and lower costs
PwC 29th Global CEO Survey2026 · 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries · figures cover the prior 12 months
What the data leaders report
92%
say the primary barrier is people and organization change
8%
say technology
2025 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark SurveyBean and Davenport, with DataIQ · 125 organizations
Senior data and AI leaders at Fortune 1000 and global organizations. Those companies have a chief data officer running the change. A company of 200 to 2,000 people has the same barrier and nobody whose job it is.
Start here · free
The Read.
Ten questions, 5 minutes, anonymous. The same ones I ask in the first hour: what you are solving for, why those use cases, and whether the data is guiding the decision or ratifying one already made. You get one of six patterns named, and the first question to ask. It costs you 5 minutes against an initiative you have already funded.
5 minutes · anonymous
Working together
Where the work actually happens.
Two ways to work together. A project with a fixed scope and an end, or an ongoing engagement that runs month to month after a minimum.
Project-based
Fixed scope, fixed price, with an end
Leadership alignment · half or full day
The Room
Your leadership team, agreed on what you are solving for and who owns each part of the work.
A working session that gets your leadership team clear together: what you are solving for, what you promised, which use cases matter, and where you are quietly disagreeing about all three.
- The question. What has to be true before this works, and who owns it when it belongs to nobody
- Who is in the room. Your leadership team, up to 12 people
- Before the day. Empathy interviews, so the day is built around your team and I arrive knowing where the disagreement sits
- On the day. Decision rights, what is not being said, and the shared language that keeps the plan intact
- What you leave with. One version of the answer, held by everyone who has to deliver it, and a named owner for anything that currently belongs to nobody
- The format. Half day or full day, on site or remote
Twelve leaders quietly disagreeing about the goal costs you every week, in every meeting where the disagreement stays underneath the table. Half a day for $7,500 or a full day for $10,000, against months of an aligned-sounding team pulling in three directions. You are already paying for the misalignment. This is paying once, to end it.
The core engagement
Change management · four weeks
The Blueprint
The plan is funded. The question is whether your organization can absorb it.
$25,000–$35,000
$25,000 · 1 or 2 functions, 8 interviews · $35,000 · 4 or more, the full 12
Scope your BlueprintA sponsor tells you the promise. A practitioner tells you whether the promise is reachable. Most of the interviews go to the second group, and each one answers the same three questions: what would have to be true from your seat, what would you have to stop doing, and what do you think this is really about. You leave with six documents your team can run from.
- The readiness map. Where the organization can absorb this and where it cannot, by function
- The sequence. Which initiatives, in what order, and what each one depends on
- The ownership map. Who decides, who delivers, and where that is currently unassigned. It names your champion network too: who they are, what each one can decide on her own, and what she escalates. A champion without decision rights is a volunteer, and volunteers cannot carry a two-year change.
- The change plan by role, including the stop column: what each role starts doing, and what they stop
- The identity risks. Which roles find their account of their own value threatened, with the decision principles leadership states before the rollout
- The adoption measures. How you will know in 90 days whether people are using it
Every change plan lists what people will start doing. Almost none lists what they stop, which is why training completes and adoption does not. The initiative this examines is usually budgeted at 10 to 50 times its cost. If it is aimed at something the organization cannot absorb, the diagnostic did not cost you $35,000. It saved you the initiative.
Ongoing
Month to month, after a minimum
Ownership · one day a week
Fractional head of data and AI
Senior ownership of your data and AI work until you hire the permanent leader.
For organizations with a data or AI investment underway and nobody senior to own it yet. I direct the build and never do it.
- One day a week, one client at a time
- Ownership, not counsel. I hold the roadmap and the decision rights. Counsel without ownership is The Sounding Board.
- Vendors and the people doing the build report through me, and I report to your leadership
- One-to-one time with the initiative owner on the decisions only the owner can make
- Each quarter, adoption reported alongside delivery: who is using what we built, and what is stopping the rest
- Ends when you hire your permanent leader, and I help you make that hire
A permanent head of data costs $250,000 and up, plus the search, plus the months the seat sits empty while the investment you already committed to keeps running without an owner. This is $144,000 a year for the ownership, starting the week you sign. It ends when the permanent hire starts, which is the outcome you are paying for.
Where the work leads
Advisory · four seats
The Sounding Board
Senior judgment on call for the two years adoption takes.
The person you call before the decision, rather than after it. A senior data leader who spent 11 years as the right hand to CIOs, CDAOs, and CMOs. Some months that is the decision in front of you. Some months it is how you lead through something nobody here has led before.
- One to two hours a week of live time, plus rapid response by email and voice between
- Counsel, not ownership. I work the decision with you and your team runs it. Ownership of the work itself is the fractional engagement.
- Decision support while the call is still open
- Where every other engagement leads. A fractional engagement that ends in a permanent hire often ends here.
- Three-month minimum, then month to month. The thinking compounds, and three months is what that takes.
- Seats are reviewed quarterly. A seat that goes quiet is released so someone waiting can take it.
One to two hours a week with someone who has made these calls costs $5,000 a month. A fractional senior data leader runs $15,000 to $25,000. A full-time hire you cannot justify runs more. The only thing more expensive than any of them is one wrong call made alone, and those are the calls that arrive without warning.
Nonprofit, or working on something that does not fit these? Read the FAQs.
Meet Lara
I sat in the seat that sees every function.
Eleven years in enterprise data and analytics, at Twilio and at Rackspace, with teams across four continents. Data and IT are the one place in a company that sees the entire cross-section. Marketing sees marketing. Operations sees operations. Data sees all of it, because eventually every decision becomes a row in a table.
From that seat I have led hundreds of integrated planning efforts: the initiative down to the task, and across every function it touched.
I did it as the right hand to CIOs, CDAOs, and CMOs, in the room where the call gets made.
I left the politics and the posturing, the rooms where the same decision comes back for the fourth time and the wrong problems get the attention, to work with companies that actually want the change to stick.
20+ years leading teams through change · 11 inside enterprise data at Twilio & Rackspace · Right hand to CIOs, CDAOs, CMOs · Teams across four continents · McKinsey Academy Hispanic & Latino Executive Leadership Certification · ICF Trained Coach
The approach
How the work goes.
Three steps. Skip the first and the other two get expensive.
Most engagements answer the question you asked. This one starts by checking whether it is the right question. What you are actually solving for. What you promised your stakeholders. Which use cases earn their place and why. And whether the data is guiding the decision, or ratifying one that was already made. I find it through empathy interviews: one-on-one conversations where people tell you what never gets said in meetings.
Solve it inside one function and you get a solution for one function. The plan has to run in two directions: integrated, from the initiative down to the task, and cross-functional, out through every function it touches. Dependencies mapped before they are blockers. Risks named while they are still cheap. Solutions that help every team, rather than fixing one at another's expense.
A plan nobody adopts is a document. A model nobody uses is a report collecting dust. Adoption is the work: the workflows, the training, who owns what, and moving your team on to the work only they can do. It scales, your team uses it, and it keeps running after I leave.
Proof
One source of truth for 7,000 people, still running 10 years later.
I learned this at enterprise scale and bring it to companies your size. Most of this work is confidential, so I describe the shape rather than the client. References available, privately, on request.
700
person agile transformation
3x
throughput
70%
less lag and error
I led the integrated planning across a 700-person agile transformation, and finding the dependencies and risks while they were still cheap tripled throughput and cut lag and errors by more than 70%. Then a system took over assigning and tracking the work, and the development managers, business analysts and product managers moved onto strategic priorities, cross-functional relationships, and developing their own teams. That was agile. It is the same migration AI is now asking of you.
I aligned a 7,000-person company around one shared source of truth, with real adoption, and led it as the internal consultant with no outside firm. Ten years later it still runs, because the people made it theirs. The measure of every engagement since has been the same: it runs without me.
The model worked. It scored churn risk accurately, and it was interesting information collecting dust on a shelf. I built what turns a score into an action: the workflows, the enablement, the training. Who looks at it, when, and what they do about it. The regions started acting on the outputs weekly. Then it went into performance plans and quotas, which is the point where a model stops being a report and becomes how the company works.
The strategy was sound and the team was capable. The same three decisions came back to the table every month and nobody made them, because the disagreement underneath had never been said out loud. The work surfaced it, named who owned which call, and the decisions got made. Two of them went the way nobody expected.
Practice areas
What I bring to the work.
Every engagement is scoped to what you actually need, and most end up pulling from more than one, because the people, the plan, and the data rarely stay in their lanes.
Data and AI strategy
Which work AI can take on, where it can help your people do theirs, and the order to do it in, based on how things actually get done.In: The Room, The Blueprint, The Human Layer, Fractional
Change management
The people side of the rollout: who it affects, what changes for each team, and what they need before they will use the new way. Planned from the start, and kept going until the new way is how the work gets done.In: The Blueprint, The Human Layer, Fractional, The Sounding Board
Organizational knowledge
Getting what your people know out of their heads and into a knowledge base your AI and your next hire can reference, with the reasons and context behind it, and an owner for each part.In: The Human Layer, Fractional, and a piece of every engagement
Fractional leadership
A senior owner for your data and AI work when the seat is empty: the roadmap, who decides what, the vendors and the build.In: Fractional head of data and AI, and hands-on in The Human Layer
Team facilitation and development
Working sessions that get leaders agreed on the problem and who owns it, and teams ready to run the work after I am gone.In: The Room, The Human Layer team session, the monthly check-in
Advisory
Senior judgment on call for the calls that are yours to make, checked against what your people know.In: The Sounding Board
Questions
Before you decide.
Established companies and funded startups, roughly 200 to 2,000 people. Big enough that the decisions carry real weight. Small enough that there is nobody in-house who has made them before.
Yes. Registered 501(c)(3) organizations under $25 million in operating budget receive 25% off The Room and The Blueprint. Same scope, same work, reduced rate. The fractional seat is not discounted. A nonprofit that needs it takes half a day a week at $6,000 rather than a reduced full day. Ask me on the Clarity Call.
Most interesting problems do not. Tell me what you are looking at and we will scope it together. The odd ones are usually my favorite.
Most of this work is confidential, so I describe the shape rather than the client. References are available privately, on request.
A ten-week executive program
The Human Layer.
A working group of 6 to 8 senior leaders, each running something nobody in their company has run before. Ten weeks on the work that decides whether it delivers: asking the right questions, building the plan that connects, and putting it into practice so your team runs it without me. You bring the transformation you are actually running.
Named for where the return is decided. It leaves you able to do the work yourself, with a handful of people you can call when it gets hard.
Founding cohort · Seats close February 15
$7,500
Founding seat · $12,000 standard
Ten weeks, March through May. Seats are limited to 8, filled by conversation, and founding seats close February 15. Director level and above.
Start on your own
Start with a read.
Anonymous, and entirely on screen. The Read takes 5 minutes, tells you which of six patterns your company is actually in, and sends you the full read by email.
Free · 5 minutes
The Read
Six patterns: the Wrong Problem, the Inherited Promise, the Ratified Decision, the Disconnected Plan, the Crowded Roadmap, and the Quiet No. It takes 10 questions and 5 minutes, and you get one pattern named.
Make the strategy real.
A short, free conversation about what you are trying to deliver, and what it would take.
Free, 15 minutes.
Free 15-minute Clarity Call.
Book your free Clarity Call