A collective 45 years of doing this inside the biggest companies on the planet.
We started together at Southwest Airlines, then went our separate ways and spent the next twenty years working on change from opposite ends. Danna, a cultural anthropologist, working bottom-up and outside-in, starting with customers and frontline teams. Dale, a sociologist, working top-down and inside-out, starting with leadership.
Now we've joined forces, and we meet in the middle, where change actually happens. Here's some of the work from those years.
Early COVID. Customers froze, and everyone assumed they had judged flying too risky. Listening inside and outside at once, with safety teams, scientists, and customers, found the real problem: nobody could read the safety signals at all. So we named one standard and made it visible.
The Southwest Promise, built in two weeks. Southwest held its #1 consumer trust ranking through the crisis.
A senior EMEA marketing leader had a strategy he couldn't say out loud, with October planning coming. Alignment sessions and writers' rooms until he found what he actually believed.
Adopted across Alphabet leadership teams. "This gave me my confidence back. I'm now seen as a partner at the table."
Thrive scores near the company floor and burnout running wide. Instead of a restructure, Dale listened across the org and built a volunteer Culture Crew with goals raised from the ground up.
From among Microsoft's lowest scores to #1 across Microsoft Cloud.
An 18-person board, a fully competitive election, and 35% of members outside North America with almost no seat at the table. Danna interviewed across Asia, the Middle East, and Canada, reaching people the organization had never asked.
The board cut from 18 seats to 12, adopted skills-based selection, and reserved seats for international members.
The principals
Twenty years helping global brands understand people, culture, and the forces that shape behavior, across companies like Disney, Google, PlayStation, PayPal, Meta, Society of Actuaries, Roblox, Starbucks, and TikTok. Much of that time was spent in Silicon Valley, building the narratives that win corporate investment, strengthening internal communications, and working across functional disciplines. Her work includes insight films, service design, experience strategy, and workshop facilitation. She prefers to co-create with a team over running call-and-response research.
Twenty-five years building executive voice and organizational culture inside Microsoft, Google, SAP, Southwest Airlines, and Ticketmaster. Listening tours across five Microsoft organizations, culture programs that carried one org's Thrive scores from the company floor to #1 across Microsoft Cloud, and leaders coached from first keynote to NASDAQ debut. He wrote Birthright: Recall and Wine Snobs Are Boring.