for change leaders and consultants

You're trying to build a transformative tomorrow but keep ending up with a tweaked today.

Creativity is something you design for, not something you demand.

At Truer Words, we teach you and your teams the skill of default literacy so they can design transformations that are actually transformative.

Default literacy is learning to read the behaviors your everyday work systems make more likely, and to talk about them without blame in words your whole team shares.

Once people can see the defaults their systems create and have a common language to evaluate systems, they can make sure their default behaviors match the desired future behaviors.

Bring Default Literacy To Your Team Join the book waitlist

The blue sky problem

If you told your people the sky's the limit and they barely made it off the ground...

their imagination didn't set that limit. Their systems did.

Senior leaders ask for blue sky thinking. What comes back is a tweaked version of what we already do, but faster or with better technology.

When leaders see this, the usual response is to tell people to use their imagination, or to double down on giving them permission to "think big." The problem is people have difficulty seeing the defaults in their system.

Talking about systems through the lens of defaults makes it easier to redesign to achieve the future behaviors leaders are envisioning. It moves the question from "what are people doing wrong?" to "what do our system designs make easy, obvious, and safe?"

Default literacy is a skill.
A named skill makes it safer and more obvious to say out loud what isn't working in a system.

Default literacy

Do your defaults match your desires?

Defaults are the behaviors made comparatively easy, obvious, or safe by our systems.

Easy

Removes effort. The option that costs the least work, money, or physical demand.

Obvious

Removes deciding. The option already in front of you, so no choice is required.

Safe

Removes social risk. No one will question, label, or penalize the choice.

Systems are the source of defaults. Systems include:

Tools and structures: what people work with and inside, such as software, spaces, roles, and reporting lines.
Processes: the formal steps work moves through, such as how a request gets approved or a project gets handed off.
Policies: the written rules about what is allowed, required, or rewarded.
Ways of working: the tacit knowledge and unwritten or informal habits a team keeps, such as how meetings run and how disagreement gets handled.
Metrics: what gets counted and how it's scored, such as targets, ratings, and dashboards.
Language: the words a workplace uses to describe work and people.

Once people can identify the defaults, it's much easier to determine if they match the behaviors the future needs.

a common illustration

Desired Future: A company wants more innovation and collaboration.

Today's Performance Management System:

Goals

Individual and set once a year. Total number of goals is limited.

Evaluation

One manager rates the work.

Ratings

Ratings compare people with each other, high performance ratings are limited in availability

Pay

Increases are determined by the annual rating.

Helping a colleague or trying something that might fail takes time no goal counts and can cost you your pay raise, so the easy, obvious, and safe move is to focus on your own goals, prioritize work for the manager who evaluates you, choose work you get the credit for, and only do extra effort if you have extra time.

Seen this way, the question for your transformation design work changes.

Which behaviors does the future need, AND do your systems make them easy, obvious, and safe?

Default Literacy changes your perspective so you can design more intentionally to match your desires.

Alignment is a design responsibility, not a character test.

Working with Nicole

Bring a workshop to your kickoff.

With Nicole

The default literacy workshop

Nicole runs the full workshop before your sessions begin, or joins sessions that have stopped producing new ideas.

Talk about your kickoff

What stays with your team afterward is a shared language for talking about defaults and a skillset that makes defining defaults part of the expected work.

About

Nicole Eisdorfer, PhD

Seventeen years in HR across leadership development, employee experience, and technology implementation.

PhD in organizational development and leadership, an MBA, and a bachelor's in organizational behavior and communications.

More about Nicole

The Default Directive, due Fall 2026.

Get a note when it's ready.

Join the book waitlist

Contact

Start a conversation.

Tell me about your kickoff, your team, or the transformation that keeps defaulting back to current state. I read every message.