What We’ve Built Since Moving to Substack: The November Resilience Series and Everything Else
In November, we focused on resilience—the kind you actually need, not the kind your company trains you for. Three connected posts that moved from diagnosing your vulnerabilities to building genuine optionality. But that was just one month.
Here’s what’s been happening since we moved to Substack in October.
The Transformation You Might Have Missed
When we migrated from another platform, I didn’t just move the archive over. I’ve been systematically rebuilding it. Re-writing posts from as far back as May. Adding frameworks, templates, implementation guides, and assessment tools to articles that used to be just commentary.
The newsletter isn’t just think pieces anymore. It’s infrastructure.
Every post now comes with something you can actually use: a diagnostic tool, a step-by-step process, a template you can adapt, a framework you can apply to your specific situation. This isn’t about reading and nodding along. It’s about reading and then doing something different on Monday.
Here’s what that’s looked like in practice.
October: Building the Foundation
We started with the fundamentals of AI and personal development:
Can AI Make HR More Human? How HR is (and isn’t) making the best of AI in 2025. Not the hype, not the fear—the actual current state of what’s working and what isn’t.
How to Use AI for Personal Development The practical guide to using AI tools for actual skill development, not just productivity hacks.
How to Create a Personal Development Plan Using ChatGPT After 15 years of writing PDPs manually, here’s how to use AI to make the process better. Includes the actual prompts and process.
So I Just Got to Play with Google’s New Vibe Coding Tool Real experimentation with emerging AI coding tools, what worked, what didn’t, what it means for people who don’t code.
Paid Value: Paid subscribers got the complete frameworks, prompts, and implementation guides for each of these. Not just “here’s what AI can do” but “here’s exactly how to do it.”
November: The Resilience Series
Then we got strategic. Three connected posts building a complete system for career resilience.
1. Why Your Company Wants You Mentally Tough for a Job That Might Not Exist (Nov 6)
The Opening Argument: Organizational resilience training is designed to help you absorb their decisions, not make your own. It shifts responsibility without shifting power.
The Framework: Dependency Mapping across four categories:
Tools and platforms you rely on
Processes and workflows that define your role
People and relationships that protect your function
Assumptions you’re making about stability
For Paid Subscribers: The complete dependency mapping exercise with examples across different roles, plus the strategic framework for building backup plans that actually reduce exposure.
2. The AI Resilience Audit: Which Parts of Your Job Are Actually Defensible? (Nov 11)
The Diagnostic: Most people don’t know which of their capabilities are at risk until they’re already being replaced. This post introduced the three-axis assessment framework:
Automation Difficulty (Low / Medium / High)
Value Extraction (Low / Medium / High)
Strategic Importance (Low / Medium / High)
The Outcome: Plot your capabilities across these dimensions and you get four outcomes: DEFEND, DEVELOP, DIVERSIFY, or DOCUMENT.
For Paid Subscribers: The full assessment methodology with real examples (including the career coaching breakdown), action guidance for each quadrant, and access to the adaptive assessment tool.
3. Building Your Escape Velocity: A Personal Resilience Strategy That Actually Works (Nov 19)
The Synthesis: How to combine dependency mapping with capability assessment to build genuine optionality. Not just diagnosis—strategy.
The Three Strategic Moves:
Reduce High-Risk Dependencies on Low-Defense Capabilities
Convert Dependencies Into Portable Capabilities
Build Your Minimum Viable Optionality
For Paid Subscribers: The complete LMS Administrator case study showing exactly how this works in practice, detailed guidance for each of the three moves, and the 30-day implementation roadmap that turns assessment into action.
Also in November:
This Week: Make One Capability Visible (Nov 13)
How to Build Crappy Chatbots: A Field Guide to Missing the Point (Nov 16)
This Week: How to Use AI to Make Behavioral Change Actually Stick (Nov 20)
The resilience series wasn’t three isolated posts. It was a deliberate progression: diagnose your exposure, assess your defensibility, build your strategy. Each post built on the previous one. Each came with tools you could actually use.
What Paid Subscribers Get
This isn’t a subscription to more content. It’s access to a toolkit:
Frameworks and Assessments:
The Dependency Mapping exercise with category-specific guidance.
The Three-Axis Capability Assessment.
The Intersection Analysis that shows where your highest risks actually are.
The adaptive assessment tool that does the analysis for you.
Implementation Guides:
30-day roadmap for building genuine optionality.
Week-by-week action plans with specific moves.
Real case studies showing how people applied these frameworks.
Strategic guidance for each capability quadrant.
AI Tools and Prompts:
Complete ChatGPT framework for creating personal development plans.
Prompts for using AI in coaching and behavioral change tracking.
Practical guides for AI tools in L&D and professional development.
Real experimentation results from emerging tools.
Templates and Processes:
Dependency mapping templates.
Capability assessment worksheets.
Evidence portfolio frameworks.
Stakeholder visibility strategies.
Everything comes with examples. Everything is immediately usable. Nothing is theoretical.
How to Get Every Resource for Free
Most companies have learning budgets. This qualifies as professional development. Speak to your manager or HR about getting this resource expensed.
I’ve made it easy. Here’s the guide with the email template you can send to whoever approves these things.
$75 a year.
The alternative is a single one-hour coaching session, a professional development course that teaches you to “embrace change,” or a LinkedIn Learning subscription that you’ll never actually use.
This is different. It’s strategic, it’s practical, and it’s designed for people who want to make deliberate career decisions instead of just reacting to organizational ones.
What’s Coming in December
We’re closing out 2025 with reflection before we build forward. A look back at what this year actually meant, personally, professionally, for those of us navigating change while everyone else was just talking about it.
This has been a year of forced transitions, strategic pivots, and learning what resilience actually looks like when the organizational safety nets disappear. Not theory, lived experience. Mine, yours, all of ours.
December is about making sense of what happened, what we learned, and what it means for how we move into 2026.
Then we look forward. What’s actually coming in the year ahead, not predictions, but informed assessment of where AI, work, and professional development are heading. What The Human Stack is building for readers who want to stay ahead of those changes instead of just reacting to them.
Less noise. More signal. More tools you can actually use.
Happy Thanksgiving
Love this focus on actionable infrastructure; it's almost like you've coded a new operating system for personal development, making all those Monday tasks feel less like bugs.