Most problems at work start as a conversation nobody had.
Ren is the AI for people, not tasks. We spent ten years teaching people how to have those conversations. Ren helps them actually have them, in Slack and Teams, while the moment is still small.
10 years
teaching the Accountability Dial™
100,000+
people leaders trained on it
1,000
managers each at Amazon, Okta, and Panasonic
1,800
leaders Fidelity's coaching practice teaches it to
“Nobody ever gives me feedback.”
I was sitting in on a meeting with a VP yesterday. Back-to-back meetings, actually. In the first one, I noticed he was getting more and more frustrated by the questions people were asking. Then we went into the next meeting and his frustration boiled over. He didn’t realize what was happening, but I could see the faces, the eye rolls. It was a video call. He was having a massive negative impact on the people around him, and he had no idea.
So I texted him right after: “Hey, your frustration is boiling over into this meeting. I don’t know if you realize it.” He’s a senior guy. He got it right away. “Oh shit, thank you so much for calling me out. I really appreciate that. Nobody ever gives me feedback.”
You’ve heard that before.
There are a million conversations like that in every organization, every day. Good people, smart people, technically proficient, and they’re causing damage. It doesn’t matter if you’re a senior executive, a frontline employee, or a mid-level manager. We go through our days so transactionally now, firing through the inbox, crossing off the list, that we miss the human casualty of every conversation we don’t know how to have.
People get defensive. They shut down. And it goes directly to the bottom line: lost productivity, inefficiency, regrettable churn. The kind of thing that’s hard to measure. Except all you have to do is sit in a meeting with five humans and watch one person communicate poorly, and you can see the dollar signs walking out the door.
That’s why we built Ren.
A platform that can intervene in those small moments. Not a theory. Not an executive training. Not a workshop about who you’re supposed to be. Actual help in the moment: Here’s the situation. Here’s what’s going on. Here are the people. What do I do? What do I say?
Ren is built on The Accountability Dial™, our proprietary methodology for how to start, manage, and complete meaningful conversations about human development, growth, and performance at work. It’s a language we’ve been teaching for ten years as a consulting company, in manager trainings. That’s fine, but you know how those go. You leave the training and forget everything you learned, because it’s really hard to apply in the moment.
So that’s what Ren is. A platform that helps people who work together find the words for the conversations that move culture forward, that inspire people, that get people working at their highest level. Together.
And these days, with new tools taking on more and more of the production work (the coding, the writing, the spreadsheet building, the analysis), we’re getting more productive and moving faster than ever. But the human skills we were already lagging on are the ones we need to accelerate. As individual humans looking at our own careers. And as a species.
That’s what this moment is challenging us to do: level up as human beings and focus on the skills we’ve neglected. Critical thinking. Curiosity. Empathy. Holding context. Building relationships.
Whether you manage 25 people today or nobody, those are the skills the future is asking for.
That’s what Ren is all about.
Jonathan
The method works. The timing never did.
01
Training doesn’t survive Tuesday.
People leave the workshop nodding. Then the moment comes and the framework is three weeks behind them. The idea was never the problem. Using it in the moment was.
02
Skipped conversations are expensive.
People get defensive, shut down, and eventually leave. It never shows up on a dashboard. It shows up in every meeting, if you watch the faces.
03
Human skills matter more now, not less.
As software takes on more of the routine work, what’s left is judgment, context, and relationships. That’s exactly where most teams are weakest.
The people building Ren.
A small team of engineers, product, and growth people, working alongside the person who created the Accountability Dial™.
People who’ve done this work from the CEO, talent, and HR chair.
Garry Ridge
Former Chairman & CEO, WD-40 Company
25+ years leading WD-40. Architect of the Tribal Culture playbook, the same kind of culture work that lives at the heart of Good Authority.
Maximos Lih
Founder, Emboldened · ex-GV (Google Ventures)
Seven years as Talent Partner at GV, working with hundreds of startups on team and leadership. Now coaches founders directly.
Debbie Durso-Bumpus
Founder, Boldly Human Consulting
Senior HR and talent leader (Holcim, Cubist, Vedior). Specializes in leadership development, culture, and L&D for growing organizations.
Vanessa Van Edwards
Founder, Science of People · Bestselling author
Behavioral investigator and bestselling author (Cues, Captivate). Founder of Science of People, a lab studying the science of communication, charisma, and the human skills that drive influence at work.
What we believe about how people work together.
Help with the hard conversations at work, right where work happens.
Ren works in Slack and Teams, with a web app for the bigger picture. In the channels you add it to (never private messages), it helps people spot the feedback and the boundary-setting conversations that keep getting skipped, and helps them find the words. Less frustration and crossed wires. More clarity and momentum.
Within 90 days, leaders get a clear picture of where their teams tend to put off hard calls, and Ren keeps prompting, kindly and consistently, until those conversations happen.
“Better conversations, in the middle of the workday.”
To take how people work together as seriously as the work itself.
We have precise tools for managing projects, code, and money, and almost none for how people treat each other while they do the work. That is where plans turn into results: in the questions people ask, the expectations they make clear, and the small misunderstandings that get fixed before they grow.
Good HR teams have taught this for decades. Ren helps managers and teammates handle more of it themselves, day to day, so HR gets time back for the work only HR can do. And the job is changing. As software takes on more of the routine work, leading people is less about checking on tasks and more about setting people up to do their best work. Most organizations aren’t set up for that yet.
New tools make the human side of work bigger, not smaller.
As software takes on more of the routine work, people spend more of their day on the parts only people can do: reviewing, deciding, using judgment, owning the outcome. Teams are getting smaller and flatter, and they form and re-form around projects in weeks, not years.
That doesn’t make relationships matter less. It makes them matter more. When teams move faster, every misunderstanding, every bit of friction, and every conversation someone avoids costs more.
Most people aren’t avoiding hard conversations on purpose. They just don’t notice the conversation is needed. Ren helps them see it. And accountability isn’t confrontation. Done right, it’s a relief.
Choose in. Reflect on. Ripple out.
How we work as a team, and what Ren helps everyone in the company practice. The order matters: own the moment first, sit with the impact second, carry it forward third. Skip a step and the next one doesn’t hold.
Choose in
Own the moment.
Act. Be bold. Don’t wait for permission. Speak up.
Reflect on
Sit with the impact.
Take stock of the result and how you affected others. Learn. Fix what you broke.
Ripple out
Carry it forward.
Bring what you learn back into the rest of your life: your home, your community, the world.
Faster teams. Better decisions. Work worth doing.
Ren can’t create a good culture for you. What it does is bring the quiet problems into the open, where they’re hard to ignore. When the friction clears, teams stop going in circles and start moving. Important work gets done. People learn. Results build on each other.
Built for organizations that know good human judgment, used well and used quickly, is the one thing software can’t replace.
Work keeps getting faster. Ren helps you slow down for the moments between people.
Bring a real situation from work and see what Ren would say.