What if the path in front of you isn’t the only one?
Jamie Latiano Jacobs helps leaders and organizations challenge inherited assumptions, imagine better possibilities, and make the courageous choices those possibilities require.
The Courageous Choice
How do we lead when the future is not yet clear?
A courageous choice is a decision the evidence cannot make for you. Fear is usually present; what matters is the willingness to act while it is still uncertain, and to create possibilities that did not exist before the choice was made. It works the same way for a company’s next move and for your own.
Jamie had her own awakening about the role fear played in her life and helps leaders unlock this to drive leadership effectiveness, self alignment, and bold decisions.
- Know the difference between needing more information and needing to decide.
- Separate fear from risk — what can be quantified, reduced or tested before committing.
- Move without certainty, with a recovery plan that makes it survivable.
- Lead visibly without pretending to be certain.
- Create the conditions for other people’s courage: honesty, feedback and dissent that survive being spoken.
The Path to Preferment™
What if the next chapter is not about stepping away—but designing differently?
Preferment™ is about agency: how you contribute, how you earn, who you work with, what problems you solve, and how you spend your time. It treats the next phase of a professional career as an opportunity to maximize impact and fulfillment rather than wind down. Retirement asks when you will stop working. Preferment™ asks what you would choose if you could design what comes next.
Jamie explores the possibilities and considerations of a leader’s next step through her own journey and coaching thousands of others on theirs.
- Replace “when will I stop working?” with “what would I choose if I could design what comes next?”
- Weigh options across joy, impact, economics and freedom rather than optimizing one.
- Explore considerations of fractional, consulting, coaching, and other potential next steps.
- Understand the data around the expanding freelance economy and what that means for experienced talent.
- Name one thing to test, learn or prepare before making a change.
Capability Design Thinking
What becomes possible when we stop designing tomorrow around yesterday?
Capability Design Thinking is an outcome-first approach to imagining and designing how work can be accomplished using the full universe of capabilities now available — human talent, AI, technology, external expertise, partners and organizational systems. Most organizations now have the technology. Far fewer have redesigned the work around it.
Jamie helps expand the thinking in regard to talent strategies and helps companies see the new ways they can bring their business strategies to life.
- Understand the shifts in the workforce, and the opportunities they open for how companies get work done.
- Recognize the new class of talent: fractional, project, external and AI capability alongside full-time employees.
- Design work around outcomes rather than jobs, with a new mindset about how work gets done.
- Connect the redesign to business results, so the change survives the next planning cycle.
The Discretionary Effort Advantage
What earns the effort no organization can require?
Discretionary effort is the work no organization can require: the extra thinking, the difficult truth, the initiative nobody assigned. People give it when the work is coherent, the decisions make sense and their contribution is visible. Trust in leaders is at an all-time low, and rarely because leaders set out to break it — the system quietly undermines them.
As the author of Designing Exceptional Organizational Cultures, Jamie helps leaders understand how to intentionally evolve their culture amidst the changing environment of today.
- Read culture and operating systems as one driver of business performance.
- Find where the system is undermining trust in leadership, without anyone intending it.
- Recognize what earns discretionary effort, and what erodes it.
- Hold the gains with bounded experiments that inspire performance and human experience.
Keynote
45–60 min, customized to the audience’s question
Workshop
Half or full day, design-led and hands-on
Fireside / panel
Moderated conversation or on-stage interview
Executive session
Closed-room work with boards and leadership teams
“Jamie has the ability to shift a room. She challenges people to see beyond the obvious, creates space for honest conversation, and leaves teams thinking differently about what is possible and what they are willing to do next.”
“Jamie understands that culture is not separate from execution—it shapes it. She helps leaders see how behaviors, decisions and systems are either accelerating performance or getting in the way, and what needs to change to move the organization forward.”
Talent trends and what organizations can do to attract and retain top talent, set against AI, transformation, and what it takes to become a Frontier Organization.
“Your talk was fantastic. Thank you for speaking and for your time after the session!”
Also DisruptHR San Diego, Work Rebooted, SHRM events, the EXHR Conference, the San Diego Business Summit, National Human Resources Association, USC, executive leadership forums and private corporate audiences.
No date yet? Start anyway.
Tell Jamie the audience and what they are wrestling with, and she will come back with the shape a session could take.