What Is Actually on My Desk

My desk moves.

The people who have worked with me longest know the version that isn't furniture at all. A mountain view. Water. Somewhere the noise drops off far enough that I can hear my own thinking. That's not where the analysis happens — analysis happens anywhere, on a plane, in a hotel lobby, in the twenty minutes before a command staff briefing. Those places in nature are where the clarity happens. Where a problem I've been circling for two weeks finally sorts itself into the right order, and I can see which piece has to move first.

The people who have visited my office know the other version. Books stacked deep, spines out, half of them with something jammed in as a bookmark. Papers in piles that look like disorder and are not. Somewhere under there, a surface.

What sits on that surface has no business being in a single stack.

An implementation plan for a real-time crime center, marked up in three colors. A worksheet I have rewritten twice because the first version asked a question nobody could answer honestly at 6 a.m. Notes from a call with a captain who is juggling budget, people, and change amid a shrinking resource world. A research article on decision fatigue among leaders dealing with AI challenges. And a page of my own handwriting that says, in capital letters, WHOSE PERMISSION ARE YOU WAITING FOR.

Walk past that pile and you would reasonably ask what those things are doing together.

To me - they're the same problem.

The file we keep splitting in two

Most organizations treat technology change and leadership development as separate budgets, separate calendars, and separate conversations. The technology work goes to IT and the vendor. The leadership work goes to a training day in the spring, if there's money left.

I've watched that split produce the same outcome in agency after agency across 36 states. The platform gets installed. The dashboards get built. The go-live date passes. And six months later the room is quieter than anyone expected, because nobody addressed the part that doesn't come in the box — the supervisor who wasn't sure what her new authority actually covered, the sergeant who never got told what problem this was supposed to solve, the chief who approved a system he was never given time to understand.

That isn't a technology failure. It's a leadership failure wearing a technology costume.

The reverse is just as true, and I see it constantly on the coaching side. A leader does deep, real work on clarity, boundaries, and what they want their next chapter to be — and then walks back into a system that hasn't changed one degree. Insight without structure evaporates. Structure without insight stalls.

You cannot transform an organization without developing the person running it. You cannot develop a leader while ignoring the system they're trying to move. That's not a philosophy I arrived at from reading. It's what the work kept teaching me, in the order I was willing to learn it.

One question, three places to look

When something is stuck — a deployment, a team, a career — I ask the same question before I ask anything else:

Is this a leadership challenge, a technology challenge, or a people-skills challenge?

It sounds simple. It's the most useful thing I know. Most stuck situations get misdiagnosed because we reach for the category we're most comfortable fixing. Technical leaders reach for technology. Relationship-oriented leaders reach for the people. Leaders under pressure reach for authority. And the actual problem sits untouched in a category nobody wanted to open.

Naming the right category doesn't solve the problem. It does something better. It tells you which door to walk through first, which is the thing most people are actually missing.

So I gave the stack a home

Everything in that pile — the implementation notes, the research, the worksheet drafts, the questions from masterminds I can't stop thinking about — goes to one place now. The office stack is where it accumulates. The mountain is where it gets sorted. What comes out of that sorting goes here.

I called it Leading through Change, because that's honest about how it gets made. Every one to two weeks, whatever is driving the conversations I'm having that month.

Here's what you'll find there, and the range is deliberate.

Essays on public safety technology and organizational change. Digital transformation is the process of changing procedures, culture, and experience through technology — not the act of purchasing technology. An RTCC full of license plate readers, cameras, and drones is potential, not progress. This is where the DTAC framework lives, along with the honest accounting of why the same technology stack builds a high-performing center in one city and an expensive empty room in the next.

Writing about the leadership transition itself. Most leaders are promoted into roles their organizations never prepared them for. That's not a character flaw — it's a systemic failure, and it's fixable. These pieces are about the murky middle of a transition: the stretch after you've accepted the new role or left the old one, and before anything feels solid. Identity, boundaries that actually hold, difficult conversations, and the particular loneliness of being the person everyone else is watching for signals.

The Leading in Balance podcast. Fifteen to twenty minutes, weekly, for leaders whose role, organization, or entire sense of what's next is changing. Each episode connects a real story to the research behind why you feel anxious, frustrated, or stuck — habit formation, decision science, reframing, the mechanics of momentum — and ends with something you can actually do.

Worksheets and reflection activities. This is the part I'm most stubborn about. Insight that stays in your head is entertainment. Most posts and every episode come with a structured activity — a diagnostic, a set of prompts, a reframe exercise you can run alone or with your command staff.

The one I use most often looks like this:

BELIEF: We don't have any money, so it doesn't matter. REFRAME: We may not have money today, but a well-developed plan can identify funding and maneuver budget meetings better.

BELIEF: Why should we change? It doesn't matter what we do anyway. REFRAME: We've done it the same way for decades and it hasn't worked. We should try something new to see how change could benefit us.

Two columns. Write the belief down as though it were a fact, because that's how it's operating. Then write what's also true. You'd be surprised how many "beliefs" don't survive being written on a page in your own handwriting.

Why the range is the point

I get asked occasionally whether the stack should be two publications — one for the agency work, one for the leader work.

They actually were -- and it was messy. So, no -- splitting them would recreate the exact mistake I spend my working life helping organizations undo.

The chief reading about RTCC governance is the same person who can't sleep before the council meeting. The executive working through what she wants her next decade to look like is going to walk that clarity back into a system with its own gravity. Keeping those things in one place isn't untidy. It's accurate for our challenges in leadership today.

What to do with this

If you're carrying something stuck right now, run the diagnostic before you do anything else. Leadership, technology, or people. Write down which one it is, and be honest about whether you picked the category or the category picked you.

Then come sit at my desk, wherever it happens to be that week. Subscribing is free, everything is short enough to read between meetings, and you'll get the worksheets as they're published.

One more thing about the mountain, since it's relevant to you and not just to me. The clarity I get out there isn't mystical. It's the predictable result of removing input long enough for the thinking to finish. Most leaders I work with haven't had an uninterrupted hour in months and have concluded they're bad at deciding. They're not bad at deciding. They've never been given the conditions to decide in. If any of this lands, that may be the first thing to change — and it costs nothing but a calendar block and the nerve to defend it.

I'd like to know what you find. Which of the three categories did your situation land in — and was it the one you expected? Leave it in the comments or send it to me directly.

Proven. Not Promised.

— Dr. Jess