I just wrapped up week 5 of building The Inside Shift, and it was time to share it broadly with friends and colleagues. As the feedback rolled in, so did an invitation, one that stirred up pride, self-doubt, and vulnerability all at once. But mostly, it felt amazing. Deeply so.
The Platform Comes to Life
Before I share the invitation, I’ll recap all the creation that happened this week. It was a real deep dive into bringing the web platform to life, from finessing and writing content and smoothing out interactions, to optimizing for mobile responsiveness and inviting in peer and colleague feedback. I feel so much more comfortable in Elementor now and have overcome some more confusing hurdles within its interface. I am not nearly an expert, but with the help of Google and Claude AI, we made important fixes on some pages that affected the overall user experience.
Thought Leadership Content
The page titled Inside Perspectives contains 3 original pieces of writing: an essay, an article, and a whitepaper. The essay is titled The Inside Shift: Change from the Inside Out, which is a personal perspective on driving change from the lowest leverage point. The article is called Clarity is an Act of Care and discusses why clarity in communication is a moral obligation through the lens of 3 distinct scenarios. The whitepaper, Designed to Fracture, is the foundational research paper that sparked this platform. This is all mostly formatted and finished, leaving more proofreading, editing, and source linking in the essay.
The Framework
The platform’s Framework page was also expanded to include the details of the framework itself. The page contains a section on how to understand the framework, thoughts on our margin of agency and where to find it, and the framework’s 5 core steps. What’s left here is for me to decide if what I have here is enough, or if I want to expand it to include an interactive tool and example practitioner scenarios. This next week I’ll be making that final decision.
About the Creator
The creator is me, so I included a page that has a short introduction about who I am as a creator and why I chose to build this platform. I felt it was important to show that there’s a real human with real-life experience behind this work. Someone who really is on the inside.
Future Casting
One of the pieces I promised for this platform was 3 future casting concepts, designed as one-page pitches — a TED Talk on paradigm shifts and small decisions, a monthly newsletter pairing my reflections with a guest practitioner’s, and an annual publication tracking the year’s margin of agency. All three are written and live on their own page now, if you want the full pitches.
The Invitation & Looking Ahead
As I mentioned, I shared the platform for initial feedback, and one of the reviewers was my brilliant cousin, who is a principal at an interior architecture agency in Cleveland. Not only did she express her love for what I created, but she also invited me to present and share the platform with her colleagues in their monthly Cultural and Performing Arts forum.
They invite fellow practitioners from the community, and she believed they’d love to see what I built and hear the story behind it. Even though that sounds terrifying, that’s also exactly why I built this. I enthusiastically agreed and it feels a bit like a pinch-me moment. Cannot wait to see what else flows my way.
I have 2 final weeks ahead of me where I’ll be wrapping up what I see as phase 1 of The Inside Shift. Below you can sift through this week’s deliverables and check out my weekly collage. Next week will be even more fine-tuning and gathering of feedback. I could not be prouder of what I have been able to dream up and build so far. Stay tuned to finish this dream with me.
AI tools supported proofreading and editing for this post.