NOTHING IS MORE EXCITING — OR SCARY — THAN CHANGE. 

Even powerful, established institutions can falter when the assumptions of their world fall away.

Even a small, scrappy organization can achieve great success if it catches hold of a big change before everyone else.

I’ve built a career helping organizations and their leaders think about this kind of fundamental change. With curiosity and candor, I help them come to terms with what’s happening to their world — whether they’re the ones instigating the change or whether they’re just trying to cope.

In particular, I am an authority in helping people and organizations understand changes in social norms and how they can use them to design a better future.

As an Innovator-in-Residence at the University of Southern California, I helped launch an advanced practical doctoral degree in social innovation and a nursing program focused on social determinants of health. I also tackled dozens of entrenched problems facing organizations as a principal of Insight Labs and GreenHouse: The Center of Social Innovation. These organizations include NASA, Harvard Medical School, Starbucks, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and others you’ve heard of.

WHAT I’M UP TO NOW…

The main problems I am working on now all involve helping nurses fix our broken health care system. With the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, I am working as strategic adviser on efforts to make sure patients receive the level of care they deserve, including the Nurse Staffing Task Force. With Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I advise efforts to connect nursing with problems of health equity, especially structural racism. You can see how some of that work has come to fruition at www.shiftnursing.com.

I am also continuing my long-time intellectual project of translating my work on changing social norms into tools anyone can use. Give some of them a try by subscribing to my newsletter, Social Change Strategy. You can also learn more by checking out See Think Solve: A Simple Way to Tackle Tough Problems, the primer on norms change I wrote with Jeff Leitner. I’ve got a longer book on social change strategy in the works — to learn more, please contact me.

WORKING WITH ME…

Every project I work on is a strategy project. If you’re not looking for a new way to solve the toughest challenges you face, I won’t be a good fit for you.

But if you are, there are three ways I generally engage with clients: coaching, teaching, and editorial. Long-term consulting projects frequently combine several of these skills to help an organization overcome an impasse to progress. Even though some of the principles and tools remain consistent in any of my projects, I consider the actual design of each project a custom fit. So let’s talk about what might work for you.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to work with me, drop me a line at andrew@albnelson.com. If you do the social media thing, you can also find me on LinkedIn and Mastodon.

Click here to read more about how I help health care clients in particular.

Click here to learn how I approach teaching and facilitation projects.