James Egbert

About James

For more than four decades, I have worked inside organizations where people, performance, leadership, and change mattered—from the United States Air Force to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Across that work—and through continuing experience in business, faith, and community leadership—I became increasingly interested in a question that sits underneath many of the ways we normally talk about change:

• What happens to the human being while change is happening?

Plans can be developed. Organizations can be redesigned. Decisions can be announced. New technologies can be introduced.

But life does not wait on change.

People continue living, interpreting, responding, relating, deciding, hoping, and becoming while all of it is underway.

That is the territory I now call Living Human Change.

Today, my work brings together writing, speaking, facilitation, and strategic advisory.

I work with people and organizations around consequential questions—particularly where change cannot be understood only as a plan to implement or a problem to solve.

• Sometimes that means writing.
• Sometimes speaking.
• Sometimes facilitating a room so people can think together differently.
• Sometimes it means sitting alongside a leader or organization as an advisor.

The form changes. The underlying concern remains:

• How do we participate thoughtfully and with dignity in change while life is still happening?

Writing and Living Human Change

I am the author of the developing Hope²Change series, exploring hope, participation, human becoming, and Living Human Change.

That writing has contributed to a larger inquiry into Living Human Change—not another step-by-step model for managing people through change, but an effort to understand change as it is actually lived.

The work continues to develop through writing, conversation, practice, and experience.

After nearly five decades of meaningful work within large and complex organizations, James is turning his attention increasingly toward what lies beneath organizational performance itself: 

• The place of hope and human dignity in how people live, work, lead, and become within change.

James brings that inquiry together with a lifetime of experience through four expressions of his work:

Speaking — Talks and conversations about Living Human Change, hope, leadership, human becoming, and participation within change.

Facilitation — Protected spaces for people to think together around consequential questions, including the developing Collective Intelligence Lock Point practice.

Advisory — Thoughtful engagement with leaders and organizations navigating change, organizational questions, and human implications that may not yield to a conventional solution.

Writing — Books, essays, and developing work exploring Living Human Change and the cosmology and practice of hope.

My work draws on more than four decades of experience across military, federal, corporate, faith, and community settings, including:

• 43 years of public service 
• United States Air Force — aerospace technologies, recruiting, organizational improvement, and leadership 
• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — human capital strategy, organizational development, workforce strategy, engagement, and organizational performance 
• Experience in corporate, faith, and community leadership 
• Executive development through Singularity University 
• Advanced practitioner experience in Theory U and Social Presencing Theater
• M.A. Human Sciences · B.A. Psychology · A.A.S. Aerospace Technologies 

I do not approach this work as someone standing outside change explaining it to everyone else.

I am living it too.

None of us gets to stand outside the field.