Your AI rollout is stalling, and more training isn't going to fix it.

Here's a tool that will: The Values Resistance Audit. Five questions. Takes about ten minutes. Ask yourself these questions about your team before your next AI initiative, and you'll know exactly where the resistance is coming from and what to do about it. I'll walk you through each one in this post.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution for leading teams through mergers, layoffs, or rapid growth. Every organization is different. But after analyzing nearly a million survey responses, we found three values that consistently matter to people working in large American corporations. This article gives you a practical tactic for each one, something you can actually use on Monday morning.

Gallup just dropped their January 2025 update on AI at work, and the headline number isn't the interesting part. Yes, "frequent" AI use keeps climbing. But here's what caught my attention: overall adoption has flatlined.

Nearly 1,400 Greater Toronto residents who say they're extremely likely to buy a home in the next two years told us what matters to them. Then we did something that makes this research genuinely different: we benchmarked their answers against reality.

At CES 2026, the tech industry's message was deafening: AI in everything. Robotics, banking interfaces, employee platforms, health monitors, creator tools. If it plugs in or connects to the internet, it now runs on AI.

If you work anywhere near financial services, you can feel the shift in the air. A massive transfer of wealth is underway, and it’s bringing a massive transfer of expectations with it. The inheritors stepping into financial power are building different lives, different definitions of success, and different relationships with the people who claim to serve them.

Why do two contractors with identical demographics reach for completely different power tool brands? The answer lives in their values. And understanding this changes everything about how we connect with customers.

Destination marketers are being asked to inspire inbound visitors, lift local pride, and brief policymakers who wake up on different sides of the aisle. That is a lot of needles to thread with one piece of thread. The answer, of course, is shared values.

Every creative person knows this feeling: you put your work into the world and wait. Will it be loved, ignored, or torn apart? Creativity is a leap of faith that requires you to show who you are inside, and that leap takes courage.

 I was hurting. For over a year, my back was telling me something wasn’t right. I tried everything: acupuncture, massage, stretching, all the usual suspects. Nothing worked. Until I met a physiotherapist who did something unusual. He looked at the front of me. He pressed around and said, “You don’t have a back problem. You have a front problem.”

Turns out, he was right. After a few minutes working on the aftermath of an old surgery, the pain vanished. Just like that.

When you think about the future of cities, think about What Matters Most to the people who live there. Here’s how.

Organizations everywhere are investing in AI. They’re running demos, buying tools, building sandboxes... and still hitting walls. The problem isn’t the software. It’s the software’s reception. People resist AI not because they’re anti-innovation, but because it doesn’t feel like it was made for them.

One of the trickiest—and most important—decisions you’ll ever make in business is choosing who to work with.

It could be a potential hire for your team. Or—on a much bigger scale—if you're part of a franchise brand, it might be about who gets the next franchise opportunity.

This isn’t a small decision. Whatever the situation, you’re inviting someone into your brand family, for years—maybe decades.

So how do you know who’s the right fit?

When Cracker Barrel unveiled their new logo and a full interior redesign, people lost it. But they aren’t the first to make a mistake that upset their customers. For reasons other than a rebrand, Target and Bud Light come to mind as other recent examples of corporations not reading the room. What do they have in common and how can you avoid it?

Not long ago, I stood in front of a room filled with people from across the nonprofit sector in the United States. They were gathered because they care. About people. About justice. About making this world a little more decent and a whole lot more humane. And they wanted tools—real tools—to do their work better.

Let’s start with a moment that landed somewhere between science and magic.

We asked a room full of pension and benefits professionals to raise their hands if they wear fitness trackers. The hands shot up as someone had just offered free chocolate. Now take a second and picture that crowd. On the outside? A wonderfully diverse tapestry of age, gender, ethnicity, job roles, and personalities. On the inside? They all shared one of the three Power Values we discovered for this group: Personal Growth.

Here’s the truth: most of what we do in business is just different flavors of the same challenge. 

Whether it’s sales, marketing, HR, leadership, customer experience, or any of the other job titles we like to throw around, we’re trying to get people to do something. Buy the thing. Click the link. Apply for the role. Stay with the company. Show up. Get on board. Care. 

Why not build AI tools that understand WHAT MATTERS MOST to us? This post is an open invitation to companies using AI who want to make AI human-centric. We have the data. Values are the Answer. We just need to put them to work. Let’s talk.

Business events have a formula. Registration, exhibit halls, keynote speeches, networking, repeat. Sure, the names change, the banners look different, and the swag bags come and go, but the overall experience? Pretty predictable.

And that’s the problem.

Attendees don’t just want another event. They want an event that speaks directly to them in a way that matters and connects with what they care about. That’s where shared values come in.

Let me tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, I was asked to help solve a talent crisis in the skilled trades. The room was full of business owners who were saying, "We can’t find people. Nobody wants to work with their hands anymore." But when we did the Valuegraphics research on people considering careers in the trades, we found something surprising. What mattered most to this group wasn’t money, or status, or even stability. It was a value we call Service to Others. That one insight changed everything for the people in that room.