Craig Honick

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT CRAIG HONICK

In the 1990s, in the wake of the Rodney King crisis and the Christopher Commission report, I initiated and led an ethnographic study of change at the Los Angeles Police Department department as it attempted to shift from a \"command and control\" to a \"community policing\" ethos. The study grew into a UCLA-USC-NIJ change management effort. I spent long days in squad cars across the city\'s varied neighborhoods, documenting the lived culture of the department and helping leadership understand how line officers would respond to the reforms being asked of them. The work taught me what real organizational transformation requires: not new policies imposed from above, but a serious effort to surface the values, beliefs, and daily reality of the people who would have to live the change. That experience shaped my work since. In the mid 1990s, I was among the first wave of commercial internet pioneers, founding a startup that addressed digital file authentication—an early effort to solve trust and provenance on the open web. The work I have built since, across 25+ years of applied ethnography for organizations ranging from corporations to purpose-driven NGOs, is grounded in a single conviction: moments of change are fundamentally about meaning-making, and the organizations that navigate them well take their people\'s lived understanding seriously. Guiding Narrative® is the method I have refined to do that work—surfacing the inner narratives that guide how leaders, employees, and customers make sense of what is happening, so organizations can act with clarity and authority in moments of transition. AI is the most consequential shift work has faced in a generation. Most organizations are responding with tools, training, and policy—and watching pilots fail, employees adopt AI in shadow, and their best people leave. Recent research is converging on a single conclusion: the unsolved problem is not technology. It\'s meaning. Employees are making private sense of AI in ways disconnected from any organizational narrative, because there isn\'t one. The same Guiding Narrative® method that has helped organizations navigate brand, cultural, and operational change for decades now helps them surface what AI already means inside their walls—to leaders, to employees, in their lived experience—and articulate the meaning they want to build into their future. I work with CEOs, transformation leaders, and senior executives whose organizations face the productivity, retention, and culture stakes of AI adoption—and who recognize that those stakes are about meaning, not mechanics.