At Work with The Ready
Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin have helped teams around the world adopt more modern ways of working and on At Work with The Ready they’re sharing the inside scoop with you, too. Whether you’re struggling with a carousel of ineffective meetings, annual strategy sessions that go nowhere, or decision-making churn that never ceases, they’ve seen it all and are here to help. In each episode, they'll break down common workplace challenges and show you the moves—both big and small—to start making real, lasting change. (Formerly “Brave New Work” with Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans)
Episodes
July 14, 2025 • 40 mins
The extended leadership team (those just below the C-suite) often finds itself stuck between translating strategy and triaging dysfunction. They’re tasked with cross-functional execution, but are rarely equipped, empowered, or aligned to pull it off. And in most organizations, this group is caught in a cycle of managing up, managing down, and managing chaos all around—with very little time or clarity left to lead.
This week, Rodne...
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June 30, 2025 • 49 mins
For years, the conversation around remote work has been stuck in binary debates. Home vs. office? Productivity vs. flexibility? Control vs. chaos? But what if we zoomed out and asked a better question: What kind of future is possible if people could actually work from anywhere?
This week, Rodney and Sam sit down with Raj Choudhury (Harvard Business School professor and author of The World Is Your Office) to explore what happens wh...
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June 16, 2025 • 46 mins
In a year marked by tighter budgets, leaner teams, and growing uncertainty, more organizations than ever are choosing to go it alone. DIY transformation feels safer, cheaper, more in control. But that instinct to do more with less is often the very thing that stalls progress. Because without the right structure, support, and space, most internal change efforts don’t just slow down… they spin out.
This week, Rodney and Sam pull a...
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June 2, 2025 • 45 mins
We talk a lot about doing less to get more—but in practice, most organizations end up doing the opposite. When priorities pile up, and nothing gets removed or finished, the result is a familiar kind of chaos: too many projects, too little focus, and an endless loop of adding more in hopes of getting unstuck.
This week, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin unpack one of the most common organizational dynamics they see: the “more-is-more”...
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May 19, 2025 • 42 mins
Despite an explosion of frameworks, toolkits, and “best practices,” the success rate of organizational change hasn’t improved in over a decade. For all the decks, comms plans, and transformation initiatives being sold, most companies still find themselves stuck, repeating the same plays and hoping for different results.
This week, Rodney Evans welcomes back Michael Bungay Stanier—best-selling author, host of the new podcast Chan...
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May 5, 2025 • 29 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam reflect on what they’ve learned over the course of this eight-part miniseries—about the framework, their own Midnight Zones, and what it means to navigate complexity amidst uncertainty. They share how their thinking has evolved since launching ...
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April 21, 2025 • 45 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into one of the most pivotal (and misunderstood) aspects of the framework: stewardship. Depthfinding is built on the idea that organizations are like oceans, not aquariums. That means leaders have to show up in an entirely new way—not as a b...
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April 7, 2025 • 41 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam zoom out. Because here’s the truth: the experience the last few months in the U.S.? It’s not an exception. It’s the environment we’re working in now.
From top-down compliance crackdowns to the resurrection of five-layer approval chains, we’re wa...
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March 24, 2025 • 53 mins
Rebroadcast note: With everything happening in the world right now, we're taking a quick break from our miniseries to reshare this episode about layoffs. Because sometimes large layoffs are necessary, but they shouldn't be the norm and those being let go should still be treated like humans, rather than a line on a spreadsheet. If you listened the first time around, share this episode with someone in your network who might need it (...
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March 10, 2025 • 48 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into the Midnight Zone—the deepest layer of organizational life, where the lived experiences, emotions, and unspoken reactions of individuals shape everything that happens above. While many organizations focus on surface-level solutions, ign...
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February 24, 2025 • 48 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam step into the Twilight Zone—the often-overlooked but deeply influential space where teams navigate the “how” of work—the “how” of collaborating, meeting, deciding, and experimenting. Many organizations put all or most of their focus on visible ou...
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February 10, 2025 • 48 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam dive into the Sunshine Zone—the highly visible work of organizations, from strategy decks and OKRs to mission statements and financial targets. While these elements are easy to track and refine, spending too much time in the Sunshine Zone often le...
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January 27, 2025 • 50 mins
In this miniseries, we’re exploring Depthfinding—an easy-to-grasp framework designed to help leaders and teams solve their gnarliest cross-functional challenges.
This week, Rodney and Sam look at the Sky—the external forces like market shifts, technological disruptions, and political changes that shape your organization. While most companies are comfortable staying heads-down in the day-to-day, failing to look outward creates costl...
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January 13, 2025 • 36 mins
Over the last decade at The Ready, we’ve seen firsthand that the most significant organizational challenges are nearly all cross-functional. But most company structures? Very much not cross-functional. Adding more project managers, looking to external partners for one-and-done silver bullets, or assembling yet another task force just isn’t cutting it as the world changes faster than most organizations can keep up.
Enter Depthfindin...
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December 23, 2024 • 34 mins
2024 felt like a bit of a rollercoaster—and while we’re ready to close the book on this year, we wouldn’t be first-class org designers if we passed up the chance to hold a retrospective. Add in the fact that this is Rodney’s 200th episode and BNW + AWWTR have crossed the one million download milestone, and a little celebration feels like the right thing.
In today’s episode, Rodney and Sam reflect on the show’s 2024 season—includin...
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December 9, 2024 • 39 mins
Rebroadcast note: We're hard at work recording a brand new miniseries for January, so this week we're resharing one this episode from our Future of HR miniseries. As we've worked with companies over the last year to reimagine their HR departments, we've seen this episode's ideas and lessons about evolving the HRBP even more important in practice. So take a listen with some fresh ears, and we'll see in two weeks with a brand new epi...
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November 25, 2024 • 47 mins
It’s mailbag time! And while we know we said this last time, we really mean it that this was probably the hardest group of questions we’ve dealt with on the show yet! Rodney and Sam get out their thinking caps and answer some questions from listeners like you about non-traditional organizational leadership, workplace dynamics around project capacity planning, and more.
Questions tackled:
Are great teams and strategies impossible ...
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November 11, 2024 • 46 mins
There are plenty of organizations that say they want to be “customer-focused”—but in practice? It’s easy to fall back on leader-driven opinions and assumptions about what customers really want. That’s especially true in big companies with entrenched processes and hierarchies that prioritize internal agendas. In those environments, staying aligned with customer needs can be an uphill battle—and organizations instead get stuck buildi...
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October 28, 2024 • 46 mins
If you’ve been on LinkedIn this past month, you’ve likely seen at least one post (or more than you’d care to) about “founder mode.”
Presented as a counter to “manager mode” (meant to represent highly bureaucratic leadership rife with micromanaging and delegation), “founder mode” is all about championing the pioneering, hands-on behaviors of startup founders scaled to organizations of any size. And sure, when these are the only cho...
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October 14, 2024 • 41 mins
Over the last nine years, The Ready has seen firsthand how organizations designed to be people positive (a.k.a. a foundational belief that people are eager to contribute and capable of change) outperform those that aren’t. Turns out when you treat people like adults, it boosts your team’s motivation, adaptability, and contribution.
The only catch? Unlearning nearly everything traditional leadership and management science has taug...
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