The Resilience Lab

What shapes the person who studies human potential?

Kristen Holmes’s journey begins far from a research lab, in the stands watching Pat Summitt coach. It moves through the demands of elite athletics, the responsibility of leading a team, and a growing curiosity about the connection between our minds, our bodies, and how we perform.

In this 13-minute conversation from a roundtable at River Rose Ranch, Kristen takes us inside that journey. We discover the influences that stayed with her, why coaching captured her imagination, and how those experiences laid the foundation for her work at WHOOP.

This is the opening chapter of a three-part Resilience Lab series:

• Part One — The person: Get to know Kristen and the experiences that shaped her.
• Part Two — The research: Explore her work on sleep, performance, and recovery.
• Part Three — The practice: Join Rex Miller for a solo deep dive into his resilience habits and lessons from 25 years of learning and application.

Subscribe to follow the full series, from the story to the science to everyday practice.

Explore Kristen’s new book, Aligned: The Data-Driven Guide to Performance, Recovery, and Human Potential.

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What if the most sustainable hospital was also better for the people inside it?

I recorded this conversation with architect Fabian Kremkus last October, shortly before The Resilience Lab went on pause.

Coming back to it now, I was struck by how current it still feels.

The pressures facing the built environment haven’t gone away. If anything, the questions have become more urgent: How do we reduce energy use and carbon without sacrificing performance? How do we control cost while improving human experience? And how do we design places that help people recover—not simply work harder?

Fabian takes us inside the thinking behind the University of California at Irvine’s new medical center, including its all-electric central plant, dramatically lower energy-use target, and design choices that bring daylight, nature, and caregiver recovery into the heart of the hospital experience.

But the deeper story is about how innovation actually happens.

Fabian and his team didn’t simply optimize the brief they were given. They challenged it, took meaningful risks, and brought architects, engineers, contractors, and the client together around a better possibility.

And perhaps the most memorable idea isn’t technological at all: small “lavender rooms” give caregivers a quiet place to step away, look toward nature, and recover from the emotional demands of their work.

This conversation is about more than healthcare design.

It’s about questioning assumptions, pursuing an ideal, and creating systems—buildings, organizations, and lives—that are resilient enough to sustain the people inside them.

That’s why I wanted to bring this conversation out of the archives now.

If you care about sustainable design, healthcare, leadership, or how better questions lead to better outcomes, listen in.

And if the conversation gives you something worth thinking about, subscribe to The Resilience Lab and share this episode with someone who should be part of the conversation.

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What if we’ve made work too efficient?

I recorded this conversation with Brett Hottop last October at Worktech, on the Meta campus in Menlo Park.

At the time, Brett was experimenting with a question that felt provocative:

What if some of the friction we’re trying to remove from work is actually what helps us think, connect, and create?

I held onto this conversation when The Resilience Lab went on pause.

And coming back to it now, I was struck by how much more relevant it feels.

We’ve spent another year accelerating.

More AI. More automation. More pressure to move faster. More tools promising to save us time.

Which makes Brett’s question even more important:

Are we becoming more productive, or just moving faster?

At Work Shape Labs, Brett has been testing how people really behave when they work together.

And some of the results are counterintuitive.

Teams told to immediately brainstorm together produce more ideas.

But teams that first slow down, think individually, work in pairs, and then come together often produce deeper and more original ideas.

Brett also experiments with something he calls intentional friction.

Instead of grabbing a cup of coffee and rushing into the first meeting, people grind the beans, make a pour-over, and spend fifteen minutes simply being together.

Inefficient? Absolutely.

But in those fifteen minutes, something else happens.

People talk. They connect. They notice things. Sometimes they solve a problem before the workday officially begins.

That raises a bigger question:

In our pursuit of efficiency, what have we accidentally designed out of work?

Creativity? Connection? Reflection? Maybe even joy?

I’m bringing this conversation out now because Brett is entering a new chapter, and because the way he thinks about human behavior, work, and experience may matter even more in an AI-accelerated world.

This isn’t really a conversation about office design.

It’s about human performance, and designing work around how people actually function.

Listen to the latest episode of The Resilience Lab.

If it makes you rethink how your team works, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next.

And please share it with one person who is trying to create a better way of working.

Sometimes the next breakthrough doesn’t come from speeding up.

It comes from knowing when to slow down.

#FutureOfWork #WorkplaceStrategy #Leadership #HumanPerformance #Resilience

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What if empty office buildings are not a crisis, but an opportunity?

I recorded this conversation with urbanist and Field States founder Matthew Claudel at Worktech last October, shortly before The Resilience Lab went on pause.

At the time, much of the workplace conversation was still stuck on one question:

How do we get people back to the office?

While the podcast was quiet, that question began giving way to a harder one.

What happens to the buildings, and the downtowns built around them, when the old patterns of work don’t fully return?

That’s why I wanted to pull this conversation from the archives.

Matthew was already looking beyond return-to-office and asking what comes next.

Drawing on his MIT research, architecture, urbanism, and thinkers like Rem Koolhaas and Marshall McLuhan, he challenges us to see vacant buildings not simply as stranded assets, but as raw material for the next version of our cities.

What should our cities become now?

We explore converting underused offices into advanced manufacturing, education, childcare, and other new uses. We talk about why proximity still matters for collaboration, why traditional zoning may be holding back experimentation, and how cities can pilot their way toward a different future.

This is a conversation about more than real estate.

It’s about adaptive reuse in the broadest sense—not just adapting buildings, but adapting our assumptions about what those buildings are for.

Resilience isn’t restoring the city we had.

It’s discovering new value in what we already built, and having the imagination to create what comes next.

If you care about the future of work, cities, architecture, or how disruption can become raw material for reinvention, this conversation is for you.

Subscribe to The Resilience Lab, and share this episode with someone who should be part of the conversation about what our cities become next.

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Yes, it's been a while. I'll explain at the end.

First, the conversation.

Last October I sat down on a patio at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, mid-conference, no studio, with David Dewane. David is an architect out of Chicago, best known as the mind behind the Eudaimonia Machine, the theoretical building designed entirely around deep work that Cal Newport made famous.

He has since gone and built one. It's called The Ferris, it sits at Monroe and State in the Loop, and it's a members club and workspace for founders building with AI, a eudaimonia machine with a business model attached.

Which makes this conversation land differently nearly a year later.

David's opening claim: the workforce isn't burned out. It's languishing, the clinical middle ground where you're not sick and you're not thriving, just surviving the day. He said that last October. Gallup's 2026 report landed this spring with global engagement at 20%, the second straight annual decline, and managers falling from 27% to 22%.

His second claim is the one I can't shake. The scarcest resource in a modern workplace isn't talent or capital. It's attention. Set that next to a year in which most of us are supervising a fleet of AI agents, and the bottleneck in knowledge work has quietly moved from doing the task to having enough uninterrupted mind to direct it.

In this episode:

• Why we should stop focusing on designing the artifact of space and instead design for learning, warm relationships, awe, purpose, and play, and treat those five as the actual construction materials
• The difference between a building that functions and a building that performs, and why Harry Potter's potions dungeon is a serious design argument
• The ex-Airbnb data scientist who declared attention the scarcest resource at his new startup, plus the absurdly low-tech room rule they invented to protect it
• The single biggest drag on one firm's employee experience: slow computers. Nobody had ever measured it. Wait for where those computers came from.
• The firm that signed a lease on a gorgeous new space before anyone asked whether the building allowed dogs. The dogs were the culture. No survey caught it.
• "The future of work never happened," a former Netflix workplace lead on why we went back and learned almost nothing

Now the explanation. The Resilience Lab has been offline since February, not because I ran out of people worth talking to, but because the format stopped fitting the conversations and I wanted a better home for them. That work isn't finished. But I have a shelf of recordings too good to leave in a folder, and I'd rather put them out than keep polishing the container.

So here's my ask. Tell me what would make this show worth your time, and where you'd actually want to watch or listen. It will shape what comes next.

Find David on LinkedIn, he checks it about five times a day, his words, and find The Ferris at ferrischicago.com. If you're near Monroe and State, go see it and tell me what you think. I'm doing exactly that when I'm in Chicago for CoreNet in October.

Recorded October 9, 2025 at WORKTECH25 San Francisco, hosted at Meta's MPK21 campus in Menlo Park. Yes, that's a patio. Two people wander in near the end; we left it in.

Stay curious, build resilience, and lead with hope.

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In this episode of The Resilience Lab, recorded live at the Workspaces Conference in Napa, Rex Miller sits down with Sara Escobar and Corrine Murray, co-authors of the new book Work Then Place: a bold reframing of how organizations should think about work, leadership, and the workplace.

With decades of experience spanning Hulu, Netflix, Riot Games, CBRE, WeWork, and American Express, Sara and Corrine bring rare, hard-earned insight into why so many workplace strategies fail…and what actually works.

This conversation goes beyond office design and hybrid policy debates to tackle the real issues holding organizations back:

• Why defining work must come before designing place
• How fear and outdated management models undermine performance
• Why behavior change, not buildings, is the hardest and most essential challenge
• What leaders and managers need to do differently to create resilient, high-performing teams
• How to operationalize purpose, measure real work, and adapt in constant change

If you’re a leader, manager, workplace strategist, HR professional, or anyone navigating the future of work, this episode offers practical insight, grounded frameworks, and a clear call to rethink how work actually gets done.

This isn’t about perks, ping-pong tables, or mandates.


It’s about making work suck less…on purpose.

Subscribe to The Resilience Lab for conversations on resilience, leadership, workplace strategy, and the human side of performance, and share this episode with someone who’s wrestling with how work is changing.

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By the 1990s, Patrick MacLeamy had seen enough.

Projects were slipping. RFIs were exploding. Clients were frustrated. And as Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) entered the industry, it exposed a hard truth: the problem wasn’t talent, it was the system.

In Part 2 of this conversation, Patrick MacLeamy explains why he refused to accept “that’s construction” as an answer—and how one uncomfortable question led him into a small, unlikely collaboration that helped lay the foundation for modern project delivery.

This episode traces the origin of:

* Open standards and object-based coordination

* The early thinking behind BIM and interoperability

* A leadership mindset focused on fixing systems, not blaming people

But this isn’t history for history’s sake.

Thirty years later, the same forces, complexity, fragmentation, and outdated assumptions, are pressing on our industry again. This episode is for anyone working in architecture, construction, or workplace strategy who feels we’re stuck and wonders what it takes to change course.

If you’ve ever looked at the way we work and thought, this isn’t good enough, this conversation is for you.

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Before Patrick MacLeamy led HOK, or drew the sketch that reshaped how the world delivers buildings, he was a kid growing up inside an oil refinery, learning resilience the hard way. This is the untold origin story of a pioneer who didn’t wait for permission to change the industry.

In this episode, you’ll follow Patrick’s hero’s journey, from refinery fences to the drafting boards at Illinois, through the scrappy early years of HOK, the near-death crises, the mentors, the mistakes, and the moments that nearly broke him but ultimately made him.

Patrick faced the same problems we all face: doubt, setbacks, resistance, broken systems, and he chose to push forward anyway. His story explains seminal moments in our industry's history and gives you a blueprint for shaping its future.

If you’ve ever felt the tug to challenge the status quo, to do work that matters, or to become the kind of leader who leaves things better than they found them, this episode is that invitation.

Press play. Your call to adventure starts here.

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In our last solo episode, we met Debra—the talented but disruptive teammate who quietly eroded trust and derailed her team. If you missed that story, go back and listen first—it sets the stage for today’s conversation.

In this episode of The Resilience Lab, Rex Miller shares how managers and teams can prevent the next Debra situation by creating clarity around the behaviors they celebrate, tolerate, and cannot allow. Through real stories—from a school furniture distributor to a European team plagued by a “shit stirrer”—you’ll learn a simple but powerful framework called the Boat Model.

By the end, you’ll know how to reset your team’s rules of engagement, shift accountability from one manager to the whole group, and protect the trust that keeps your team moving forward.

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What does it take to change a system that feels stuck? Trevor Hartley says you don’t start at the bottom—you start from the top of the mountain, looking down. That’s the power of foresight: leading from the future back into the present.

In this conversation, Trevor shares unforgettable images—from “robbing the grave” of untapped potential, to confronting the “cat fur” of fear that paralyzes our ability to play, imagine, and learn. His project Re:Story Together is a living experiment in South Africa, but his insights speak to anyone who wants to replace despair with hope and unlock hidden genius in the next generation.

If you’ve ever wondered how to bring change to a place that feels soul-killing, Trevor’s story will remind you: resilience isn’t just about bouncing back—it’s about reframing destiny.

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