We exist so that people can feel heard, capable, and confident at work while their companies change around them.
Most change programs fail quietly. They fail in the conversation that nobody had, in the email that arrived without context, and in the manager who knew something was wrong on Tuesday morning and had no playbook for what to do about it.
This is not a problem of technology or strategy. It is a problem of distance. The people who design change programs rarely sit in the same room as the people living through them, and the managers in the middle, the ones who carry delivery accountability without the authority to set strategy, are left to close that distance on their own.
SteadMark closes it for them. Every workday, it turns the communication a team is already producing into one clear read on how the change is landing, then names the one person who needs a conversation before the day begins.
What we are here to do.
We exist so that people can feel heard, capable, and confident at work while their companies change around them.
We help the people who lead organizational change carry it out without wearing down the people living through it, by turning everyday workplace communication into a clear, daily read on how the change is landing.
Within ten years, no major organizational change is launched without a daily read on how its people are doing, the way no product launch ships without analytics today.
No product launch ships without analytics. No organizational change should either.
Five values. One direction.
These govern every feature, every email, and every model output. They are not aspirational. They are operational constraints. If a recommendation violates any of them, it does not ship.
Every feature, email, and model output is judged by whether it treats the person being described as a person. If a recommendation would embarrass the person it is about when read aloud to them, it does not ship.
We name our data sources, methods, and boundaries in plain language, to customers, to the employees whose conversations we read, and to ourselves. We do not use soft words to make the product sound less powerful than it is, or technical words to make it sound less invasive than it is.
A recommendation without evidence of understanding is a guess. We do not tell a manager what to say until we can show them what we noticed and why it matters.
We design for both. When their interests pull apart, we side with the people who did not buy the product, and we tell the buyer that is what we are doing.
Big-bang change programs fail people, and so do big-bang product launches. We ship in small pieces, measure how they land, and stay willing to roll back. This is also how SteadMark prescribes change to its customers, so the value models the product.
Built by someone who spent years reading rooms.
Jim Sullivan spent many years as a paramedic in Palm Springs and San Diego, working Coachella weekends. He learned to walk into a room, read it in seconds, and act on what he saw. The skill came from repetition. From recognizing the same patterns again and again until the read was automatic.
He could tell within thirty seconds whether someone was scared and hiding it, in pain and minimizing it, or genuinely stable. He acted on that read. The conversation that followed was different because of it.
Earlier in his career, as an undergraduate researcher at Northeastern University’s IASlab with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and at UCSD’s Dr. Winkielman Affect and Cognition Lab, he studied the behavioral science that became the foundation for this work. Emotion construction. Affect and cognition. The patterns had names. The reads had frameworks long before he walked into his first room.
What does a manager do with a team in a resistance pattern when they have 90 seconds before the next standup?
The question SteadMark answers is the one that stayed with him. PMP-certified, working in infrastructure and utilities project delivery, then in an MBA program at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, he kept seeing the same failure mode. The manager who could see something was wrong. The manager who had no playbook for Tuesday morning.
SteadMark is that playbook, delivered as a 7:30 AM email, grounded in forty years of behavioral science, and applied to the specific person who needed a conversation today.
Forty years of behavioral science. One recommendation engine.
SteadMark is not a new framework. It applies two established bodies of research to one practical problem: what should a manager say to this specific person today?
Self-Determination Theory
Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, developed since 1985, identifies three fundamental human needs that drive motivation: Competence, Autonomy, and Relatedness. When any of the three is threatened, resistance follows.
SteadMark classifies every resistance pattern against these three needs. The recommendation targets the specific need that is under pressure for this person, in this change, right now.
Kotter’s change framework
John Kotter’s research on change failure, published in Leading Change in 1995, established that roughly 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail to meet their objectives. The cause, in almost every case, is people.
SteadMark applies a Kotter overlay to the SDT classification. The stage of the change program shapes what kind of intervention will land. A recommendation in week two of an initiative is different from the same resistance pattern in week fourteen.
Neither framework was designed for a daily email. Applying them at that cadence, to a specific person, through an automated classification layer, is what SteadMark does.
If this is the product you needed, we want to hear from you.
SteadMark is in design partner development. We are working with a small group of OCM practitioners, change managers, and the line managers they support to build the product that will actually work in production.
If you are navigating a major change program right now and the morning email described on this page would change how you start your day, that is the conversation we want to have.
15-minute design partner conversation. Contact jim@steadmark.app directly.