Building an AI-Ready Organization (18 Jun 2026)

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:00:00 GMT

Building an AI-Ready Organization

Session Overview: As organizations accelerate their adoption of AI, many are treating it as a technology initiative focused on efficiency gains. In practice, AI is doing something far more consequential: it is placing sustained pressure on leadership systems, surfacing gaps in alignment, clarity, communication, and leadership capability that were previously easier to ignore. Whether AI becomes a catalyst for performance, or a source of confusion, resistance, and stalled momentum depends largely on the strength of these systems.

This session introduces a practical leadership lens for assessing organizational readiness in the context of AI. Participants will learn how to pinpoint where gaps in leadership systems are undermining AI efforts, and where to intervene to improve traction and adoption.

Designed for OD leaders, this session focuses on the leadership systems and organizational dynamics that determine how effectively AI is integrated. Participants will gain the language, perspective, and strategic framing needed to guide their organizations through AI-related transformation with greater clarity, confidence, and impact.

Session Takeaways: Participants will leave with:

A practical lens for assessing AI readiness through leadership systems
A model for understanding where gaps in leadership systems can undermine AI initiatives
A framework for prioritizing where to focus first—without trying to solve everything at once
A clearer understanding of how to position themselves as strategic advisors in AI-related transformation
A list of strategic questions they can ask themselves and their colleagues to take tangible action toward enabling AI readiness.

About the Speaker:

Lauren Cohen

Lauren Cohen is the Founder and CEO of Cohen Leadership Group, a leadership advisory firm that partners with CEOs and executive teams in fast-growing and mid-market organizations to strengthen leadership alignment, accelerate execution, and scale organizations more effectively. She leads a team of leadership advisors who help organizations overcome what she calls Leadership Debt—the hidden friction that emerges when business growth outpaces leadership maturity.

Known for her ability to quickly see the dynamics others miss, she helps leaders translate insight into decisive action and measurable business impact. She was recently named one of the Top 100 St. Louisans You Should Know to Succeed in Business and was recognized as one of the Top 10 Executive Coaches in St. Louis (2025).

Before founding Cohen Leadership Group, Lauren was a business litigation attorney. She brings a pragmatic, business-minded lens to leadership advisory work and has extensive training in executive coaching, leadership development, and team effectiveness. She holds both a B.S. and J.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

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We look forward to seeing you at this in-person only event.

From Player to Architect: Redesigning the Game of Performance (23 Jul 2026)

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:00:00 GMT

What if the problem isn’t the people? What if it’s the game itself?

Session Overview: Most organizations are working hard to improve performance… yet people are more overwhelmed, disengaged, exhausted, and frustrated than ever. We keep updating processes, tools, training, and expectations—but something deeper still isn’t working.

What if the problem isn’t the people? What if it’s the game itself?

In this powerful and perspective-shifting session, Jessica Tietjen explores the invisible “game of performance” shaping how we work, lead, succeed, and survive. A game built through decades of cultural conditioning, workplace systems, incentives, expectations, and definitions of success that most of us never consciously chose—but learned to operate within.

The challenge? Many of the rules driving today’s workplaces were designed for a completely different world. And while the world has changed, most performance systems haven’t. Through a neuroscience-informed and systems-based lens, this session invites leaders to step outside the game long enough to finally see it—how it shapes behavior, limits growth, strains human capacity, and quietly reinforces the very problems organizations are trying to solve. Participants will walk away with a radically different perspective on performance, leadership, and transformation—along with a new way to think about what it really means to evolve from simply playing the game… to becoming someone capable of redesigning it.

Because the future doesn’t need better players. It needs more architects.

Session Takeaways

In this session, participants will explore:

● Why so many performance practices feel exhausting, disconnected, or ineffective—even when everyone is working harder than ever.

● Why many workplace performance challenges are not people problems—but predictable outcomes of the systems people are operating within.

● How the rapidly changing terrain of today’s world has outpaced the performance practices and survival systems designed for a different era.

● How shifting perspective changes what we see about ourselves, our organizations, and the invisible game we’ve been taught to play.

About the Speaker:

Jessica Tietjen

Jessica Tietjen is an organizational and leadership strategist, speaker, and systems thinker focused on helping people and organizations evolve the way performance, leadership, and human development are designed. Through a neuroscience-informed and deeply human approach, she helps leaders move beyond outdated models of work built for survival, compliance, and efficiency—and toward environments that unlock greater creativity, courage, compassion, adaptability, and sustainable performance.

As the founder of Evolving to Exceptional and creator of frameworks including Performance Partnering™, NeuroOnboarding™, and the NeuroUpgrade Framework™, and the Human Operating System, Jessica’s work bridges neuroscience, systems thinking, leadership development, organizational transformation, and human behavior. Her work challenges leaders to stop simply optimizing broken systems and begin redesigning the conditions that shape how people think, feel, learn, relate, and perform.

Her mission is to accelerate the development of architects—leaders with the courage, creativity, and compassion needed to evolve themselves to become capable of reinventing ways of working, rewriting the rules of success, and redesigning systems to positively impact people’s performance in a rapidly changing world.

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We look forward to seeing you at this in-person only event.

St. Louis Organization Development Network upcoming events

Building an AI-Ready Organization (18 Jun 2026)

From Player to Architect: Redesigning the Game of Performance (23 Jul 2026)