Optionality is ending its run
But the conversation about the Future of Work is far from over.
Why we started Optionality, and what we did
Nearly three years ago, we determined that work was broken. And we wanted to host a conversation about what might come next.
What started in the wake of the COVID lockdown and its utter disruption of work evolved into questioning the default script itself. The belief in better models for how we work and live.
Three years ago, when we said work was broken, it felt provocative. Today, it feels like conventional wisdom. The conversation about what will fix, or at least replace, the ways we used to work is not over. If anything, it’s more urgent as AI reshapes the workplace and workforce. Our journey exploring better ways of working isn’t over. But this chapter of it is.
What about the content?
We documented in real time how experienced professionals were navigating change. Not as a single leap, but as an ongoing negotiation between ambition and sustainability, identity and evolution, stability and possibility.
Through hundreds of essays, interviews, live conversations, and small group collaborations, we created a record of honest, often unpolished conversations about work in transition. We weren’t trying to create one-size-fits-all answers, but rather a new framework, new language, and permission to imagine unlimited potential pathways. In a world that sometimes favors certainty, we wanted Optionality to make space for questions.
We will no longer be sending new dispatches, but Optionality’s body of work will continue to serve anyone exploring this landscape with us because the questions still matter. We will discontinue Optionality’s social media channels and Mighty Network community, but the Substack and YouTube channel will remain available as an archive and record of a trusted space where we held a particular kind of conversation, at a particular moment in time.
What’s next?
Elisa will continue her work as a strategic advisor and facilitator, helping organizations create, build, and evolve with intention. This includes the non-profits on whose boards she sits. She is also devoting time to her twin obsessions, politics and pop culture. If Optionality proves anything, it’s that we all contain multitudes, and now is the time to let those multitudes shine!
Jory is focused on the intersection of AI transformation, workforce strategy, and narrative. She’s exploring how we design more human-centered systems of work in a time of rapid change on her Substack The Architecture of Work, and her LinkedIn publication, This Woman’s Work. She will continue to advise organizations through her advisory Candor Partners, and develop more AI Transformation courses on LinkedIn and Maven.
You’ll continue to see us writing, speaking, and building in these areas—individually, and perhaps, together again.
Finally: Thank you.
To our community members and our collaborators…all of whom contributed to this work.
And to our earliest supporters, advisors, and premium members: You were our sounding board, our co-thinkers, and the reason we kept going. Exchanging ideas, wisdom, and sometimes commiseration with you all shaped this more than you probably can appreciate.
And we hope to continue that exchange—as we all pursue the many options before us in this new world of work.
