Frontier's agency clients don't just need better tools and training. They need help bringing their people with them.
The agencies we audit aren't navigating a defined transition with a known endpoint. They're trying to rebuild around a technology that keeps changing, while the shape of their own future stays uncertain.
Across four Frontier audits (Four Kitchens, Wild Hive, Langrand, and Red Flash), the same human dynamics keep surfacing: uneven readiness, stressed leadership, resistant senior staff creating drag. These aren't problems the existing Frontier offering is designed to address.
Mark and Lauren have already begun pitching this loosely. This document is about the how. What the service would actually look like, how it would integrate with Frontier, what's still open for the exec team to weigh in on.
A pattern is surfacing across every Frontier audit.
We've now run audits with Four Kitchens, Wild Hive, Langrand, and Red Flash. Four different agencies, four different industries, four different stages of AI adoption. The technical opportunities surfaced look different in each one. But the human dynamics rhyme across all four: resistance, leadership conversations being avoided, the absence of a shared way of working. None of that is in the existing Frontier offering, which means whether adoption actually happens in these firms depends on something we don't currently sell.
Five dynamics surface in every audit
Reading across the audit transcripts, five dynamics show up in every conversation. They surfaced because they kept emerging, not because we arrived with a framework and applied one. None of them is something the Frontier Audit, Foundations, or Custom work is currently designed to address.
What the audits keep revealing
Uneven internal readiness. Some people are leaning forward, others are dug in. The gap creates active friction, not just slower adoption.
The weight on leadership. In every firm, the leader is carrying something alone. The unspoken performance issue. The bottleneck no one can name. The scope conversation only they can push. An external voice doesn't replace that responsibility, but it can share the weight of carrying it.
A specific resistant senior creating drag. In every firm, there's a named person whose pattern is preventing the organization from moving.
Destination unclear, communication suffering. Leaders honestly don't know what the firm looks like on the other side of this transformation. Without a structured way to communicate at multiple time horizons, that honesty lands on teams as either anxiety-inducing vagueness or false certainty.
No codified "way of working." Tools and policies exist; the connective tissue between them doesn't. The team can't adopt what isn't yet defined.
What each agency's version of the pattern looks like
Each of the dynamics shows up at Four Kitchens, Wild Hive, Langrand, and Red Flash. But each firm has its own center of gravity, the dynamic that's most actively shaping their experience right now.
| Center of gravity | What's playing out | What they need | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Four Kitchens | The honest reckoning | Internal tension; senior engineer resisting; leadership self-aware and ready to act | Help executing on a diagnosis they already have |
| Wild Hive | A transition without scaffolding | Allison stepping back without systems; unaddressed senior strategist; team anxiety | An operating model and an external voice for hard conversations |
| Langrand | Compounding transitions | Multiple concurrent transitions; CEO bottleneck; uneven AI adoption | A clear new operating mode and leadership communication discipline |
| Red Flash | Process-rich, change-cautious | 15+ years of process; Jeff and Tricia carrying RFP work; Melissa nearing retirement | Careful evolution that respects compliance and gets tacit knowledge out of senior heads |
These aren't tool-adoption problems. They're the human dynamics that get exposed when an organization tries to change faster than its people, processes, and leadership conversations can keep up.
Generic change management doesn't fit this kind of change.
The established frameworks (Prosci, ADKAR, Kotter) were built for transitions with a defined endpoint. AI-native transformation doesn't have one. Newfangled has spent three years navigating exactly this kind of moving-destination change, with the painful parts included. That experience, plus the audit work already happening, is what positions us to do this credibly.
Disciplined, leadership-led transformation
What agencies actually need is structured guidance for building change readiness and resilience. The ability to keep adapting as the technology, the team, and the work itself keep shifting.
Our approach is top-down by design. Change of this magnitude can't be crowdsourced. It requires leadership to set direction with clarity, communicate it deliberately, and bring people along through sophisticated comms. Generic reassurance and a single all-hands won't do the work.
"I really do see a major transformation for Wild Hive coming. I don't know what it's going to look like on the other side. I just don't."
Allison Beadle, Wild Hive
A three-phase engagement with a flexible delivery model
The service should be structured enough to sell and deliver repeatably, yet flexible enough to meet organizations where they actually are. The phases, the methodology, and the deliverables stay consistent across engagements. What scales is depth, duration, and intensity, based on what each client's situation requires.
Narrative & Policy Architecture
Begins with structured leader sessions to surface what they actually believe and what they're avoiding. These conversations continue throughout the engagement.
Then: leader-endorsed team interviews, 1:1 or group, scoped to firm size. Followed by synthesis and co-authoring of the AI Transition Narrative and Operating Way document.
Structured Engagement & Mapping
Runs alongside early Foundations implementation. Includes department-level facilitated conversations, role evolution maps, trailblazer activation, and conversation enablement work with leadership.
This is where the organization starts visibly moving, and where the hard, specific conversations leadership has been avoiding actually happen.
Change Stewardship
Ongoing, paired with the Frontier Retainer. Includes monthly leadership check-ins, quarterly re-assessments, cultural health monitoring, and policy living-document maintenance.
This is where the work shifts from managing a change event to building a change-capable culture. The destination keeps moving; the organization gets better at moving with it.
Underneath Phase 1's synthesis work is a four-dimension framework that maps each team member across their posture toward AI, where they derive professional pride, their level of self-direction, and how their role survives the new operating model.
I apply it in synthesis; the leader reviews it; the team never sees it. For larger firms, the framework operates with tiered coverage (deeper reads on the people whose mapping has the highest stakes, lighter reads elsewhere) and the confidence level is made explicit.
The framework drives Phase 2's structured engagement: who gets activated, who needs development, where the hard conversations are, where role redesign or sunsetting may be necessary.
Five concrete artifacts the client takes away
A change management engagement risks feeling intangible. The way to defeat that is to anchor it in artifacts that endure. Things the client can hold, share internally, return to, and build on. The five below are the load-bearing deliverables, presented in the order they're produced.
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Change Risk Score
Delivered inside the Frontier Audit. Synthesizes Audit-team observations, a structured leader interview, and light team sampling into a single readiness picture (score plus narrative) that surfaces the organizational signals predicting whether the firm will actually capture the operational ROI the Audit identifies. This is what makes the change management service sellable proactively, before resistance has become visible.
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Concern Inventory
Delivered in Phase 1, synthesized from leader-endorsed team interviews. Captures what people fear, what they need from leadership, where they see role transformation, and the dynamics they won't surface in group settings. The leader receives a synthesized read: patterns, gaps between leader perspective and team reality, and the named individuals whose orientation matters most.
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AI Transition Narrative
Co-authored with the leader in Phase 1, after the listening is done. The story of where the firm is going, why, what it will and won't change, and what people can expect. Read-aloud-able, credible to the team because it's grounded in what they actually said, owned by the leader as the public expression of direction.
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The Operating Way document
Co-authored with the leader and maintained ongoing. A codified statement of how the firm operates in an AI-augmented world. Includes an AI policy framed around where humans create irreplaceable value, role evolution maps per department, decision rights, and cultural commitments. The Operating Way is the firm's institutional position on human-AI collaboration, owned by the leader, referenced in onboarding, updated as tools evolve.
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Conversation Enablement
Direct preparation for the specific conversations leadership has been avoiding. Focused work on the named conversation with the named person, not generic communication training. For each prepared conversation, the leader receives talking points, anticipated scenarios with suggested responses, framing language they can use verbatim or adapt, and follow-up guidance. Examples: helping Allison prepare what she needs to say to her strategist; helping Jackie figure out how to surface the Shannon dynamic.
A parallel track inside the Frontier engagement
The change management service would function as a parallel track inside the same Frontier engagement. Sold proactively when the Audit surfaces readiness concerns, integrated phase-by-phase with the technical work, ending alongside the Retainer.
Audit phaseDiagnosis happens together
The Change Risk Score runs as a parallel diagnostic inside the existing Audit. Same investigation, expanded lens. The Audit team is already inside the firm doing interviews; a few additional questions, a structured leader interview, and light team sampling produce a synthesized readiness picture without expanding the Audit's footprint. This could be delivered by the existing audit team, or I could conduct it, which should help "sell" me as the lead CM consultant.
This makes the proactive sale possible. We're not bolting on a service after the fact; we're surfacing the human reality alongside the operational opportunity.
Implementation phaseChange work runs alongside Foundations
Phase 1 (Narrative & Policy) begins as Foundations begins. Leadership gets clear and the Operating Way gets drafted while the tools start being installed. Phase 2 (Structured Engagement) runs as the team encounters those tools in real workflows. Phase 3 (Stewardship) extends into the Retainer relationship.
Implementation insurance for the ROI we already project
Change management ROI is notoriously hard to measure in isolation. So we don't measure it in isolation. We measure it as the percentage of the Audit's projected ROI that actually gets captured.
The cost is legible against the savings already promised
An Audit might identify significant operational opportunity for a client. If adoption stalls because leadership fumbles the communication, or because a senior person derails the rollout, or because the team never settles into the new way of working, that opportunity never shows up.
A change management engagement is the implementation insurance for that opportunity, and the case is easy to make to a client who's already bought the Audit and seen the projection.
Margin profile is strong: this is pure expertise work, Tema's time, no engineering hours. Once the methodology is built, the work scales by adding intensity, not infrastructure.
Pricing is one of the things I'd like to work through with the exec team. The shape of the engagement flexes with firm size (interview budget scales, Phase 1 depth scales, Phase 3 retainer pricing is its own question), so a single fixed price won't fit every situation. There are also open questions about how this affects existing Audit pricing, what's templated vs. bespoke, and how to package the Phase 3 retainer. These are problems to solve together once the service direction is approved.
Two things, both modest.
First: approval to proceed. I'd like to begin developing the methodology in earnest. That means drafting the diagnostic framework, building out the deliverable templates, and getting the materials ready to lead engagements.
Second: your input into the service's structure. This document is a working draft. I'd welcome reactions in any form: comments, conversations, pushback. And I need your input on delivery model, capacity, pricing, and how this is positioned externally. The goal is to land on a service we can sell with confidence and deliver with integrity.
A few questions I'd particularly value your perspective on:
- How tightly bundled should this be with the Audit, vs. visible as its own line item with its own pricing?
- What's the right delivery model? Initial deliverables/consulting with the option of an ongoing retainer, or should the retainer be required as a matter of course? How is this working for Frontier?
- Are there clients in the current pipeline where this should be proactively offered now, before the service is formalized? (Specifically, Four Kitchens, Wild Hive, and Langrand)
The signals from the field are clear. Three audits have surfaced the same need. The question isn't whether the market is real. It's whether we move toward it now, or wait until someone else does.