Dates: 2026
Location: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
Audience: Leaders and practitioners focused on improving ways of working in organisations
Cost: $1150 USD

​

Limited Spaces: Register Interest

​

​​

​

​

Why Attend?

​

The future of work can’t be built without understanding the past.

Join Jon Smart and the Sooner Safer Happier community for an immersive experience that goes beyond copying “best practice” models. Instead, we’ll trace the sparks of innovation that ignited today’s ways of working—and explore how to scale better outcomes through intentional context specific design.

This is a rare opportunity to understand the hidden forces still influencing your operating models—and how to reshape them with intention.
 

• How do we move beyond rigid org structures that don’t reflect today’s complexity?

• How can we redesign our organisation for greater flow of value?

• How can we rethink one-size-fits-all “solutions” and start designing for what works in your context?

Explore how the 3rd Industrial Revolution Tour— marked by the rise of steel, electricity, railroads, and mass production—transformed how work was organised and managed at scale. Many of the structures, incentives, and behaviours born during that time still influence how large organisations operate today.

​

This tour invites you to go upstream—to uncover the roots of today’s org patterns, understand what still serves us (and what doesn’t), and reimagine how we might organise for better value, sooner, safer, happier outcomes.

​​

​

​

​

​

What You’ll Gain

 

• A historically grounded case for change that connects legacy practices to today’s opportunities

• Ideas and patterns that support more adaptive, humane, and outcome-focused organisations​​

• New perspectives on leadership, management, and structure, rooted in how work evolved

• Practical language and tools to inspire change internally with credibility

• A purposeful pause from the day-to-day to reflect, explore, and reimagine with forward-thinking peers​​

​​​

​

​

​

Itinerary

​

Day 1 – The Rise of Industrial Giants 

 

Morning – Steamtown National Historic Site (Scranton)
Explore how steam and rail powered unprecedented growth—and how early leaders developed new systems of coordination and communication to match. Learn how concepts like org charts and time coordination emerged to support the complexity and scale.

 

Afternoon – Bethlehem Steel Tour (Bethlehem)
Step inside one of America’s most influential industrial powerhouses and explore the birthplace of modern management. Discover how the pioneering ideas of Frederick. W. Taylor and Henry Gantt—like output-driven performance measures, centralised planning, and hierarchical structures—were designed to maximise efficiency at scale. Reflect on how these practices still echo in today’s organisations, and how we can reinterpret them for a more adaptive, human-centred way of working

 

Day 2 – Distill, Reflect, Reimagine 

​

A full-day interactive session to translate history into insight—and insight into action for your own organisation.
 

Key Learning Themes & Objectives:

​

- Illuminate the Legacy: Explore how today’s org structures have been shaped by industrial-age thinking—from task specialisation to hierarchy—and what that means for modern outcomes.

​

- Contextualise Today’s Challenges: Understand the shift in environment—from predictable, production-driven models to today’s complex, fast-moving landscape—and what that demands of design and leadership.

​​

- Reclaiming Useful Lessons: What can we re-learn? From systems thinking to cross-functional collaboration, many past lessons remain vital when applied differently.

​​

- Lead with Insight: How can today's leaders evolve from directing and controlling to enabling autonomy, purpose, and flow.

​

​​​

​

​

Who Should Attend?

​

• Transformation, Agile, Product and Delivery Leaders

• Organisational Designers and OD professionals

• HR, Finance, and PMO leaders rethinking how they enable value

• SSH Advocates and anyone seeking more humane, outcome-oriented ways of working

 

By reconnecting with the origins of our organisational models, we can make better, more intentional choices for what comes next.

​

If you're ready to challenge assumptions, deepen your understanding, and discover actionable patterns to improve how work works—this is the experience for you.