The Undercurrents of Change

Our guest is Dave Gray, an artist and entrepreneur based in Portland, Oregon. He's the author of Gamestorming, The Connected Company, and Liminal Thinking. He runs School of the Possible, a community where people make room in their lives for creative work. We talk about why everyone is creative and why most schooling trains it out of us, how to spend more of your time creating than consuming, and the down-to-earth steps that build real job security: living within your means, saving for the day your job goes away, and seeing that one boss means only one customer. It's a conversation about building a working life you actually know the value of and can inhabit the way a bartender inhabits a bar.

Our guest is Sira Laurel, founder of North of Normal, a neuro-leadership coach and organizational consultant with 15 years of experience as a people and culture leader inside organizations. She holds an MBA and a Master's in Organizational Development. We talk about the science behind Highly Sensitive People, and why Sira sees them not as an edge case to manage but as a prototype for what modern leadership actually needs. We get into why some people take in far more information than others, and why that's a strategic asset rather than a liability, and we discuss the Dual Concern Model, the real difference between leaders who choose between caring for themselves and caring for others, and the rare ones who manage both. It's a conversation about fragility and adaptability, and why the organizations that last are the ones willing to listen to their own canaries in the coal mine before the system breaks.

Our guest is Mark Eddleston, a writer based in Bristol, UK, and the author of The Pigeon Test: Why Change Fails. His work explores organizational change and the limits of traditional consulting and transformation models. We talk about the real difference between linear problems and complex ones, the tension between systems thinking and complexity theory, and what change-makers can actually do once the old playbooks stop working. It's a conversation about what it takes to think more honestly about how to drive change inside organizations.

Our guest is Shonna Waters, an organizational psychologist with over 25 years of experience studying the intersection of work, people, and technology. She previously served as VP of Well-Being Research at BetterUp, and has spent her career understanding how individuals and organizations adapt to change. We talk about what happens when technology outpaces our ability to make sense of it, the universal need triad of security, growth, and significance, and why about a third of workers demand that work meet all three. We also get into why the middle ground is disappearing, with fewer cautious voices and more extreme positions, and what it takes for leaders to hold onto trust and credibility when they're navigating the same uncertainty as everyone else.

Our guest this episode is Jerry Michalski, a former tech industry analyst who worked with Esther Dyson and was writing about neural networks back in 1988. Today he focuses on trust and institutional design through his consultancy, Rethink The Future, where he asks a simple but provocative question: why do we design everything as if people are bad actors? We talk about what it means to design from trust rather than for it, why Wikipedia's open model works when so many locked-down systems don't, why microfinance works, and what happens when institutions assume the worst about people instead of the best. It's a conversation about fragility and possibility, and why this moment of crisis might be the opening trust-first thinkers have been waiting for.

Our guest is Cristina Andersson, entrepreneur, consultant, and thought leader across a wide range of fields, from sustainability to diplomacy to quantum computing. She advises on AI and robotics policy at the Finnish and EU level. We talk about where technology could genuinely help, especially in healthcare, and where it puts us at risk, particularly around losing control of our own data to big tech. Cristina helps us sort out what's actually new about this wave of AI and robotics versus what echoes past technological shifts, and what it means to keep things human as the pace picks up.

Undercurrents of Change is a podcast about the signals beneath the surface of change. In each episode, Marc Bolick and Arne van Oosterom explore the deeper shifts shaping business, leadership, and innovation, beyond the headlines and the hype. Through conversations with entrepreneurs, builders, and thinkers, we look at what people are actually experiencing as they navigate uncertainty and transformation in their work. In this first episode, we speak with Miikka Leinonen, entrepreneur, business owner, and co-author of AI Pathway. Mika works closely with leadership teams trying to turn AI ambition into real organizational change. Together we explore how AI is reshaping the world of consultancy, why many leadership teams still struggle to act despite the urgency, and the deeper question many professionals are quietly asking themselves today: what is my real value in a world where AI can do so much of the work? It's an honest conversation about experimentation, uncertainty, and the human side of technological change.