Unlocked with Madelyn Blair

In his early twenties, Michael Judd walked four days through a dry riverbed into the jungle of southern Mexico, to a community of Lacandon Maya. What looked like wild jungle was something else. "Everything was coming from this perennial food forest."

I'm Madelyn Blair, and on this Unlocked, Michael and I talk about living with the Earth rather than simply taking from it: twelve years building food forests in Nicaragua, a round straw-bale home heated by one armful of wood a day, and why he's helping plant a million nut trees.

Then we go somewhere you may not expect: natural burial. Michael's father called the last year of his life one of the best of his life. Michael calls it "a door for love."

In all of this, he learned about permaculture and how nature understands and performs efficiently!

An acquaintance called to say his resilience was waning. Could I help? Our conversation turned to the people who stand with us when life gets hard. Then a handwritten note arrived, and one phrase in it took the lesson to the next step. Friendship 101 is having people who have your back. Friendship 201? Listen to find out.

A career is a portfolio, and drawing on her own pivot from management consulting to radio, the host shows how to manage yours through time, energy, heart, and companionship so you can thrive through disruption with grace.

When AI takes over the routine work new hires once learned from, managers have to work harder to find first tasks that teach and reveal, and this G4T shows how.

AI won't push back. Your colleagues will. As more people turn to AI before they turn to each other, what happens to workplace culture?

In this Grounds for Thought, Madelyn Blair and Jamie Notter continue their conversation from Unlocked with an unscripted look at how AI is reshaping expertise, relationships, and resilience at work, and why the answer isn't AI or people, but designing for both. Jamie is co-author of Culture Change Made Easy and the award-winning Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement.

Timestamps:

0:00 AI and workplace culture 1:31 Changing dynamics around expertise

4:49 Intentional design is called for

7:16 Relational intelligence needs intention

8:40 Opportunities need to be designed

10:07 Good social support means people who push back

11:46 Young people need to learn the work12:34 Clear signals for testing and learning

Listen to the full conversation with Jamie Notter: People Don't Resist Change, They Resist Stupid Things [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DaiaL6FasU&t=1s]

In this episode of Unlocked, Madelyn Blair talks with workplace culture expert Jamie Notter about what organizational culture really is and how leaders can change it on purpose. Jamie is the co-author of Culture Change Made Easy and The Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement. He explains why culture is built from words, actions, thoughts, and "stuff," and why every culture change needs a clear why.

You'll hear why silos aren't always bad, why culture changecan show results within the first year, and why taking things away works better than piling on new programs. Jamie also shares how two organizations made different choices during the pandemic, and how differently their employee engagement turned out.

Whether you lead a team or simply want to understand yourworkplace better, this conversation will help you see the culture that's been there all along.

Serious about your work? So are we. Madelyn Blair tells a story that sounds silly and makes the case that joy and awe are anything but frivolous, drawing on research about the mind, the body, and legacy. It ends with a three-day challenge.

Sources

FlexJobs, Work & PTO Pressure Report (2025), survey of 3,063U.S. workers conducted August 18–31, 2025.https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/pto-statistics

Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positiveemotions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 359(1449),1367–1377. Also: University of Michigan news release, "Happiness, joy andother positive emotions."https://news.umich.edu/happiness-joy-and-other-positive-emotions

Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M.,McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers ofinflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatorycytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033.Summary: Greater Good Magazine, "Awe Boosts Health."https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/awe_boosts_health

Danner, D. D., Snowdon, D. A., & Friesen, W. V. (2001). Positiveemotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the Nun Study. Journalof Personality and Social Psychology, 80(5), 804–813.

In the second episode ofGrounds for Thought, Madelyn Blair unpacks Gary Klein's Recognition-PrimedDecision model to show why you're never really deciding alone — experience,observation, confidence, and imagination are already working on your behalf.

I always believed that deep friendships had to begin when we are young. Believing it caused me real frustration and concern when I realized I had no friends from my school years. Did I do something wrong? Then I began to look at the people in my world of today and realized that belief was a lie. I share why it is a lie in this video.

This video traces what actually holds a friendship together over 15, 25, even 30 years — even when the people involved barely see each other. It comes down to three things, and none of them are proximity.

A career is what you do, but the real journey is who you become.

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