Why ThinqShift exists.

Fifteen years ago, after twenty years working in business transformation across a lot of countries, a question started nagging at me: of all the money being spent on transformation (sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars), how much of it actually worked?

I went and asked. Through LinkedIn, I tracked down twenty former clients who agreed to be interviewed, and I asked them one question: did you actually realize the benefits you set out to achieve? Five said yes. Fifteen said no. A 25% success rate, and when I later looked at the published research, it wasn't far off: HBR at the time estimated that as many as 87% of business transformations fail. Different studies since have landed in similar territory. The upside is big enough, and the idea seductive enough, that organizations keep playing a game they mostly lose.

But the five that succeeded had something in common with each other, and it's the thing that became everything that followed: in every one of them, the mindset and behavior of key leaders had actually shifted to match the direction the organization was heading, not the direction it came from. The other fifteen had the best strategy, the best systems, the best technology money could buy, and none of it mattered without that mindset shift underneath it.

Two other things were true at the same time. The world was getting more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, while almost everything we used to develop managers and executives assumed the opposite: a stable, predictable, knowable world. And separately, something more mundane but just as corrosive: the best individual performers kept getting promoted into managing people, with no one ever teaching them that leading a team is a genuinely different skill from being great at the work itself. Multiply that across enough companies and you get a slow, structural decline in the quality of leadership: not because anyone was failing on purpose, but because the whole system was optimized for a world that had already stopped existing.

That's what ThinqShift was built to fix: developing a new kind of leader and rising star, one who thrives in volatility instead of being undone by it. We believed, fifteen years ago, that an AI-driven shift in the global order was coming, and that the people who could adapt their own thinking fastest would be the ones who came out ahead of it.

The method itself came from an unlikely place: a year spent working with a neuroscientist doing cognitive behavioral therapy, the patterns used to help people overcome fear and phobia and rewire deeply ingrained responses. We took those patterns and applied them to leadership: what does it actually take, cognitively, to let go of a habit of success and build a new one? That became the seed of Fabulous Leadership, and ThinqShift was built to put it into practice: ReWire as the one-on-one work of shifting a senior leader's mindset, Academy as the in-person experiences for organizations and individuals at a given inflection point, and Orchestrate as the method for shifting an organization's behavior to match wherever it's pivoting to next, which, increasingly, happens every 6 to 24 months, not every 3 to 6 years.

Fifteen years and thousands of leaders later, many of our own alumni, ThinqShift Alums, started asking for a way to bring Fabulous Leadership to more people inside their own organizations, communities, and causes. That's where Thinqee came from: not a separate idea, but the same conviction, scaled by AI, so ThinqShifters and ThinqShift Alums alike could pay it forward to the next generation of young professionals and students who'll go on to shape how business gets done.