We’ve been on this problem for ten years. And it’s why we built Ren.

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 with the whole concept of how you should 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 for human beings who work together to find the words — to have the conversations that move culture forward, that inspire people, that get people working at their highest level. Together.

And these days, with AI taking on more and more of the production work — the coding, the writing, the spreadsheet building, the analysis — AI is incredible at making us more productive, making us move faster. 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 AI era is challenging us to be: to 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