The Layer Beneath
Most attempts at change don't stick.
Not in companies, not in careers, not in life. You try something new, it feels real for a while, and then a few months later, you're back where you started. Sometimes worse, having optimized your way deeper into something that doesn't fit.
The reason isn't usually willpower or information. It's that meaningful change has a specific structure, and most attempts miss at least one of the conditions required for it to hold.
The Layer Beneath is a project working through that structure across stories, product narratives, and real life. Written from inside the uncertainty rather than from the other side of having figured it out.
Short essays on how change works.
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Start Here
The Framework: Six conditions that tend to be true when meaningful change actually works.
The Narrative Lens: Where the framework came from. How strategic narrative practice maps onto personal change — and what it leaves out.
The Essays: The body of work, organized by series. The closest thing to reading the project as a book.
What You'll Find Here
Most writing about change is either prescriptive ("here's how to do it") or descriptive ("here's what happened to me"). The writing here is structural rather than prescriptive. It asks what tends to be true when change actually works, and why certain attempts fail at specific, predictable conditions.
The same patterns show up in the films that stay with you long after you've forgotten the plot, the product pitches that land versus the ones that don't, and the life changes that actually stick versus the ones that collapse back into the old world.
The diagnostic skill underneath all of it — finding what's structurally true beneath what's being performed — is the same move that makes a product narrative land and helps a real change hold. The lens transfers.
About Me
I've spent fifteen years helping companies find the real story underneath what they're building, at LiveRamp, at Checkr, and now as an independent consultant.
The diagnostic move that worked in product narratives turned out to transfer. Watching my father disappear slowly into dementia, raising two young children, navigating what AI means for the work I've spent my career building — these are the conditions I'm writing from, not the other side of having figured them out.
