Move the Room: How to Read the Room Before It Reads You
Every room shapes what can be heard, what can be held, and how much you matter. Learn to read it—before it reads you.
Before you question yourself, ask: have I read the room?
We share a habit so common we rarely question it: treating a room’s reaction to us as the truth about us.
But a room isn’t just a place—it’s the invisible set of conditions within any group that shapes what can be said, what gets heard, and how truth moves. In some rooms, truth can be spoken and effort is recognized. In others, what’s said and what matters have quietly parted ways. In the most broken rooms, the truth is plain to see—and reaches no one.
Move the Room gives you the language to tell the difference, and to protect your judgment no matter which room you’re in.
What you’ll find in these pages.
Move the Room presents eleven principles for understanding a room before you move in it. The early chapters show you how to identify the type of room — functioning, compromised, or broken — and explore why capable people often doubt themselves instead of questioning their environment. The later chapters guide you on what actions to take: how to apply your judgment, when to pause, and how to separate what is yours from what belongs to the room.
It closes with practical tools — a room diagnostic, a meeting prep sheet, and reflection prompts — to return to before a hard conversation or after tough feedback.
What kind of room are you in?
A few quick reads can help you recognize the pattern beneath the signals. Answer for what happens repeatedly—not what the room says it values.
There are no right answers. This is a reflective tool, not a clinical or professional assessment.
Read the pattern—not the promise.
Choose the answer that best reflects what happens repeatedly in the room you have in mind.
See your full room result.
Enter your email to reveal the result on screen and receive launch updates for Move the Room. Your result type is saved with your signup so future notes can be more relevant.
Whatever the room, the discipline is the same: slow down before you turn a room’s signal into a verdict about yourself.
Move the Room is coming in 2026. You’ll be the first to know when it’s here.
Why I wrote Move the Room.
I know how disorienting it is when the room’s response doesn’t just invite reflection, but unsettles what you know, what you saw, or what you have to offer. I’ve seen capable people quietly reshape themselves around judgments they absorbed before understanding their origins. I’ve done it myself.
At its core, Move the Room is an organizational memoir. I draw on moments from across my career to explore a larger question about organizational culture: What happens to our judgment not when the room is simply functioning, but when it is compromised or even broken? The book sits at the intersection—not just of memoir, organizational culture, and leadership—but of trust, hierarchy, informal power, feedback, belonging, and the way truth moves through organizations. It examines how easily we mistake organizational conditions for personal failings.
This isn’t a story about one employer, one manager, or one difficult season. It’s about the rooms we inhabit and what they teach us to believe about ourselves. The experiences are personal, but the questions are organizational: What kind of environment is this? How is judgment being formed here? What does this room reward—not just encourage, but distort or refuse to hear? And how much authority should I grant its response?
I wrote this book to offer readers language for those questions—not so that every room can be fixed, but so that we can see the room more clearly, discern what its signals deserve, and separate what belongs to us from what belongs to the environment around us.
Because sometimes the most important move is not changing the room.
It is understanding what the room has been changing in you.
What I’m noticing, questioning, and thinking through.
Field Notes is my newsletter—a place for ideas about leadership, judgment, culture, work, the book, and whatever else feels worth examining.
It is where you’ll hear from me between the larger milestones.
Move the Room is here.
Get Field Notes: ideas on leadership, judgment, and the rooms we work in.