Sam Spurlin (organizational designer)

Sam Spurlin is a consultant and writer who works on organizational design and the "future of work."^[1][2] He describes himself as a work designer based in the New York area.^[3]

Early career

In a 2022 retrospective on his career, Spurlin wrote that he had left a brief career as a public-school teacher to go to graduate school, then dropped out of a PhD program to move across the country and join The Ready.^[4] He says his graduate training was in positive psychology and program evaluation.^[3]

The Ready

Spurlin says he spent about ten years at The Ready, a consultancy focused on the future of work. There he led transformation work at global companies and coached senior leaders.^[1] He was the firm's first employee. In 2022 he wrote that he had marked seven years there and had spent most of that time as a "Transformer", the firm's term for a consultant working day to day with clients.^[4] He traces the job back to a Medium essay he published in 2015, "Creating an Organizational Design Consulting Firm for the 21st Century", which he says reached the firm's co-founder Aaron Dignan.^[5][6] He left The Ready in late 2025.^[6]

He has written many other essays on self-management and organizational design for The Ready's Medium publication, including "Designing the Intentional Organization" (2018), about the role of entropy in organization design,^[7] and "An Org Designer in the Land of the DAOs".^[8] He has also written for Work Design Magazine.^[9] His personal website collects about 375 blog posts written since 2009, on attention, personal development, organizational design and "living deliberately".^[10]

Podcasts

Spurlin co-hosts At Work with The Ready with Rodney Evans, which he says he has done since early 2024.^[11] Apple Podcasts describes the show as the hosts "sharing the inside scoop" on helping teams adopt modern ways of working. It started in 2019 as Brave New Work, hosted by Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans. In September 2026 Apple Podcasts still listed Spurlin as co-host, with 290 episodes and a 5.0 rating from 184 reviews.^[2]

Earlier, while in graduate school, he co-hosted The File Drawer with a fellow PhD student. The show discussed their experiences as students and organizational-psychology professionals.^[11] Apple Podcasts lists it under Eric Middleton and Sam Spurlin, with 61 episodes.^[12] His other archived side projects include a podcast called Fields of Work and Odd Man Rush, a Medium publication in which he recapped Detroit Red Wings games.^[11]

Deliberate Works

After leaving The Ready, Spurlin founded Deliberate Works, an organizational design and transformation practice.^[1] Its website describes it as a one-person firm. It offers six-to-eight-week "experimentation sprints", executive advisory work and fractional (part-time, embedded) work-design leadership.^[13][3] Spurlin has taught a course called The Three Body Problem at Critical Business School, and he writes a newsletter, The Deliberate.^[3] A January 2026 Medium essay, "Changing How You Change", argues that organizations should build their own internal organization-design teams rather than rely on outside consultants.^[6]