If you’ve come across our content like the Humanizing Work Show, our weekly newsletter, or the library section of the site, you’ve probably seen a lot of our ideas. But you may be wondering, “What do clients actually hire Humanizing Work to do?”
Most often, they bring us into an initiative that’s too important to run on hope. We work alongside leaders and teams as they plan, estimate, and deliver complex, high-stakes work using our CAPED approach (Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, and Delivery).
We see many of the same challenges at every organization we work with. After all, we’re all humans collaborating to solve complex, meaningful problems. But you’re experiencing your own unique combination of those challenges. So in our initial calls, we take the time to understand your goals, challenges, and constraints before jumping in with any particular solution.
Whatever shape the engagement takes, we want it to feel like a real partnership, where you bring your expertise about your org, we bring our expertise about what works broadly, and we combine those to help you and your people think, deliver, and lead more effectively.
What Clients Hire Us to Do
Every engagement is shaped to your context, but most take one of three forms. Many start with one and evolve into another:
1. Kickstart a high-stakes initiative
We facilitate CAPED’s Strategic and Active Planning phases on a live initiative: Complexity Mapping to align every level of the organization on the real risks and assumptions, Feature Mining to find the first slices that deliver value and learning fast, and risk-aware forecasting so your commitments survive contact with reality. You get momentum on the initiative itself and a working demonstration of the approach.
2. Adopt CAPED across a team or organization
When an organization wants to change how it plans and delivers, we combine training and coaching. Training builds the shared language and skills, often starting with the CAPED Practitioner workshop and going deeper in pivotal roles through our certification courses for product owners, team leaders, and facilitators. Coaching makes it stick: between and after courses, we work alongside your people as they apply what they’ve learned to live initiatives, so the new way of working takes hold on real work rather than in the abstract.
3. Ongoing advising
For leaders running complex initiatives and portfolios, we provide ongoing coaching and facilitation: joining planning sessions at key moments, reviewing plans, backlogs, and forecasts, helping you make the judgment calls the frameworks can’t make for you, and preparing you for the important conversations along the way. Recommendations from an outside expert also tend to carry an authority that helps changes take hold.
Across all three, the goal is never to make you dependent on outside expertise. It’s to improve the current initiative while building your organization’s capability to handle the next one.
What Leaders Do Differently in Complex Work
Complex initiatives put leaders in an uncomfortable spot: you have to make commitments before the work is fully knowable, and how you respond to uncertainty shapes how everyone else works. So leadership is part of nearly every engagement. Leaders we work with learn to make credible commitments under uncertainty, make it safe for teams to tackle the riskiest work first instead of saving it for the end, and create the conditions where teams can do their best work.
Inside engagements, we support this with executive coaching, Leadership Circle 360s, our Leadership Team Launch for turning a group of senior leaders into a real leadership team, and our Management Series for the managers who shape the day-to-day system of work.
Recent Engagements
Some examples of recent client work:
- Supporting a medical device company to balance agility and predictability in regulated product development using CAPED
- Guiding a finance department through a high-risk automation and AI initiative, using Complexity Mapping and Feature Mining to align every level of the org and find early slices of value instead of betting a year on a big-bang project
- Helping a combined hardware/software company form a healthy, highly effective cross-functional leadership team with a customized version of our Leadership Team Launch
- Facilitating sessions to design and test org structures that maximize value flow through product, platform, and service teams
- Training every Product Owner in a business unit to build shared understanding and practical skills (CCPO)
- Working with a leadership team to clarify responsibilities across product roles like PM, PO, and BA: who owns what and how they collaborate
- Providing Leadership Circle 360 evaluations and coaching for directors and managers at a large public utility to level up leadership across the org
- Facilitating an executive offsite to align on long-term strategy and next steps
- Helping product and engineering teams break down complex initiatives into valuable, deliverable slices through our Vertical Slicing workshop
What It’s Like to Work with Us
When you work with us, our goal isn’t just a short term fix for the current problem. It’s to make you better equipped for every problem that comes next.
By the end of an engagement, you’ll have clearer insight, a new set of skills, and a team that’s more energized and effective. You’ll make progress on what matters and build the capability to do it again.
A recent client put it this way: “When we brought you in, I thought we’d just get some new processes and things would get a little more efficient. What I got from the training was a whole new way to relate to the work and the people doing it. It’s completely changed how I see my job and how effective I am at doing it.”
What Our Clients Say
“Our leadership team’s development work with Humanizing Work was purposeful and actionable. It gave our team a clearer understanding of how to lead our organization to thrive in complexity. The knowledge, experience, and models shared weren’t presented just for philosophical contemplation of leadership concepts or responsibilities. Rather, they helped us make sense of different aspects of our work as leaders and gave us a structured way to act upon it. Instead of expending energy and resources seeking alignment as a leadership team, we’re now effectively investing our time and efforts in working towards a shared purpose and vision..”
“I attended one of Peter’s public courses and wanted my team to get exposed to the concepts he taught. I wanted to innovate and bring the agile concepts from software to consumer packaged goods and I had a great sense early on that they could help me with that. So I brought Humanizing Work in to help train my team and speed up our innovation pipeline. I kept bringing them back because they helped us change how we lead, collaborate, and think about work. They have a tremendous range of expertise that helps them find just the thing you need next. What they taught us not only allowed us to achieve extraordinary results, but also changed how we are as people and leaders. Thank you Humanizing Work team, for your generosity in what you share and always being there to help and challenge me!”
“I feel like I got a week’s worth of work done in this last hour of coaching with you.”
"The biggest way that Richard and Peter supported this innovation was by helping us cultivate a mindset of iterative learning and adaptation… [They] helped us unlock the true power of cross-functional teams. We not only focus on change that affects what we work on; we also focus on change that affects how we work together."
"As someone who also coaches leaders at many levels, I was mightily impressed with how this program combined truly practical, immediately applicable skills with deep framework and theoretical underpinnings. The flow and coherence of the time spent together make learning easy.
"More than that: they are inclusive and always learning, including from those of us in the class. And they incorporated our real-world experiences in novel ways.
"And most importantly: they are genuine. In their desire to teach, and learn, and support our growth."
Building capability through courses and certifications instead? Explore our Training & Certification catalog.
Want to Talk?
If any of this sounds like the kind of help you need, or if you’re wrestling with a challenge and just want to talk through it with us, we’d love to hear about it. Our initial calls with new clients often feel much more like a free coaching session than a sales call.