Transformation Testimonials
Phil Miller
President & CEO
Miller Mechanical Specialties
Organizational Transformation
When Phil came to me, he was carrying a familiar CEO burden: becoming the bottleneck. Decisions, ideas, momentum, you name it, all roads led back to him. He wanted to activate the full leadership team and their respective teams without blowing up trust, morale, or quality in the process.
In a single RIDE Sprint, the team shifted how they worked together: celebrating what was working, surfacing what wasn’t working, identifying the highest-leverage problems to tackle first, and designing safe-to-try experiments the whole team could own. Instead of ideas getting shot down or defaulting to him, the system started changing. Ownership is spreading and innovation has room to breathe.
TESTIMONIAL
“Rory is an excellent facilitator, whose one-day workshop was a game changer for our leadership team’s ability to evaluate and experiment with new ways of working. Prior to the workshop new ideas and approaches would get shot down by senior members of the team, undermining innovation and leading to a heavy dependence on the ideas coming from the senior leaders. We were all eager to change and in one day Rory introduced new tools and facilitated as we practiced implementing them via a discussion around what is/isn’t working operationally, what problem areas we should focus on improving first, proposal and evaluation of experiments to run, and defining next steps. He quickly used his sense of humor and humility to establish trust with the team so that he established the psychological safety needed to help people see unproductive behaviors and change their habits. Through the experience we had one of the most productive reflection and planning sessions that we have had in years!”
Rob Papandrea
Senior Leader
The Boeing Company
Organizational Transformation
Rob came into this work carrying a familiar tension: a capable, committed team and a system that quietly made him the bottleneck.
Decisions flowed through him. Clarity depended on him. Progress slowed whenever he stepped away. The pressure to “hold it all together” was real, even with a strong team in place.
Rob needed a way to shift ownership back to the team without losing quality, trust, or momentum without asking people to work harder or longer. The focus wasn’t fixing people. It was redesigning how the team worked so leadership didn’t have to rely on heroics.
TESTIMONIAL
“Rory Sylvia helped my team unlock what every manager hopes for: trust, ownership, and faster delivery—without me in the middle.
Through his facilitation and coaching, we identified key tensions that had been quietly slowing us down. Rory guided us in designing team-led experiments that didn’t just tweak our workflow—they redefined how we work together. One of the biggest breakthroughs? Removing me, the manager, as the bottleneck and enabling the team to take full ownership of how they deliver.
As a result, we’ve accelerated decision-making, improved collaboration, and found a more direct path to delivering value to our customer. Rory’s impact was both immediate and enduring. If your team needs momentum, clarity, and autonomy—Rory knows how to get you there.
Rory offers adaptable yet structured team level workshop to quickly lead a team from discovery to design and implementing better ways of working. He is always experimenting with novel ways to meet teams where they are at regardless of your team or company’s culture journey.”
Jessica
Associate Director of Alumni Engagement
University of Washington, Bothell
Organizational Transformation
Jessica is the Associate Director of Alumni Engagement within the University of Washington Bothell’s Office of Advancement. Jessica needed help navigating a post-COVID board restructure project that involved balancing and integrating the perspectives and needs of multiple stakeholders, and co-creating a path forward.
TESTIMONIAL
“Rory was instrumental in our board restructure project. He approached it with a collaborative mindset, leading feedback sessions that engaged staff and board members’ varied perspectives. His guidance enabled us to gather valuable insights, address concerns, and implement a fresh board structure with collective input. Thanks to his thoughtful facilitation, our board has moved forward successfully with a fresh structure, clarity, and energy.”
Claudia
Director of Creative Learning Solutions
C2 Technologies
Content Creation
Claudia is the Director of Creative Learning Solutions at training and services company, C2 Technologies. She needed help building curriculum for an executive development program within a US federal agency that prepared executives to better navigate a fast-paced and complex environment—in ways that fostered innovation, inclusion, connection, trust, experimentation, and prioritization.
TESTIMONIAL
“Rory is a thought leader. So, I enjoy working with him because I always learn something new. He brings me new ideas and tools to help leaders navigate and be successful in the current and future workplace.
His guidance has redefined how we open our leadership classes through interactive activities that instantly build connection and trust in the cohort. In addition, his integrative decision making process has redefined how my team considers new ideas and proposals, focusing on what's "safe to try." And we have introduced that transformational tool to our clients to help them expand possibilities for innovation.
Most recently, Rory contributed to a program to drive culture change within a federal agency by changing how its executives think.”
Philip
Operations Business Leader
Organizational Transformation
Phil is on the executive leadership team of his startup. When they came together for their weekly staff meetings, it always seemed like nobody was prepared, priorities were unclear, they struggled to make decisions, and work wasn’t moving forward. They needed help figuring out where and how to start changing the ways they were working.
TESTIMONIAL
“Rory helped our small business immensely with 'Ways of Working' and now we're having great meetings. Rory guided us through the habit-forming process related to learning a new way of working, worked through our actual action items with us, and collaborated with compassionate candor and humility at all times.
So that's the 'business' way of saying he's great. To say it another way, Rory is brave enough to speak his truth with care and the goal of helping you grow and get better. Somehow, he manages to give you honest feedback that makes you want to get better. It's a hard thing to do and we tip our collective hats to him for doing it with ease.
In our journey with Rory, we learned how to have better meetings, make better decisions, and even have a little fun along the way. Rory made us feel like peers and suddenly we were learning again and excited to show up and do 'work.' It wasn't a checklist or formal activity for him, he just loves doing this sort of work. We loved having him along and count ourselves the better for his presence.
We'd do it all over again”
Nancy
Supply Chain Director
The Boeing Company
Workshop by Design
Nancy is a supply chain director at the Boeing company. She was planning to get ~20 first line managers together for a 2-day offsite focused on building leadership skills. She wanted to give her managers practice using actionable tools to build positive culture within their teams by reinforcing trust, collaboration, connection, inclusion, reflection, and shared learning.
TESTIMONIAL
“I really loved the retrospective exercise and will definitely be using that with my team!”