Carpe Disruption

Jeremy Sholl & Alaina Schnipke

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Every story has a fault line. The tension between who you were and who you're becoming. Carpe Disruption.

3d ago

Podcast Riff Session 1

56 percent of people surveyed say they feel psychologically safe at work. That means 44 percent do not. Jeremy Sholl and Alaina Schnipke spent a long time with that number in the first ever Riff Session of Carpe Disruption. And what followed was one of the most honest conversations about the workplace that this show has produced, without a guest, without a script, and without a clean ending. They cover the stat itself and what the 44 percent are actually experiencing. They cover COVID as the event that did not create the psychological safety problem but made it impossible to ignore. They cover employee listening surveys, the difference between doing them and acting on them, and why the companies that talk about psychological safety the most are often the ones with the biggest problems. Alaina shared advice a professor gave her at 21 that she has thought about regularly for the fifteen years since. "When you realize an environment is toxic and no longer suiting your growth, you can either stay and get poisoned by it and become toxic yourself, or you can take whatever light is left within you and go reignite it somewhere else and allow it to heal." They also go somewhere most psychological safety conversations do not. The employee side. The responsibility that sits with the individual to be part of the solution, to give feedback that can actually be used, and to make the choice to leave when the honest answer is that the environment is not going to change. And they close on the epidemic nobody is naming directly, organisations putting people in leadership roles who do not want to lead, have not been trained to lead, and are creating a ripple effect into culture and psychological safety that takes years to undo. No guest. No script. No tidy conclusion. Just the conversation that needed to happen. Carpe Disruption — Riff Sessions — Episode 1.
Sep 10

Series 1/Episode 8 - Virginie Zaghini

Carpe Disruption — Series 1: Transitioning is a Frame of Mind. Episode 8. Virginie Zaghini. Virginie Zaghini started her career testing blood compatibilities in a medical laboratory. The margin for error was zero. A patient at the end of the process was waiting for vital care. She now leads global talent acquisition across forty countries. The path between those two things involves a biology degree she walked away from, an au pair position she took because it was the smartest investment she could make with exactly the means she had, a leap to India at twenty three that her parents did not understand but could not talk her out of, and a chain of moves that deposited something in her from every environment she passed through. What she chose to keep from each one is the episode. In this conversation Virginie sits down with Jeremy Sholl and Alaina Schnipke to talk about what it actually means to move through very different professional cultures without losing yourself in any of them. The specific things each organisation deposited in her that she still carries. The things she had to unlearn. The boundaries she set on day one of every new role and never moved. And the moment she decided she was not going to let a career transition dictate her decision to have a child. This episode also covers the Paris Brest pastry, driving too fast, dishwashing, what happens when a meeting organiser says "so who wants to kick us off?", the Northern Lights, and a private pilot's license that is still on the list. Her philosophy in one line: you do not have to become the environment to survive it.
Sep 3

Series 1/Episode 7 - Paul Heyes

Carpe Disruption Podcast - Series: Transition is a Frame of Mind - Paul Heyes This episode is for every military professional in the world who has ever wondered whether the extraordinary thing they built in uniform will ever be seen for what it actually is. It will. Paul Heyes spent 25 years in the Royal Navy. He contributed to live conflict operations in eastern Europe. He built intelligence systems at NATO that tracked adversary movements across four seas simultaneously. He stood on HMS Prince of Wales at her commissioning by King Charles III. He is a decorated Warrant Officer whose record spans aircraft engineering, cybersecurity, international intelligence, and operational leadership at the highest level. He is also currently in Luxembourg. In the middle of the military to civilian transition. Figuring out how to make what is genuinely extraordinary visible to a professional world that has almost no language for it. In this conversation Paul sits down with us to give the most honest account of military transition we have recorded. Not the version from a programme or a brochure. The version from inside it. What the identity cost actually is. What the specific loneliness of the decompression feels like. What it takes to translate 25 years of formation into language a hiring manager can receive. And what the civilian hiring world is consistently getting wrong about the most capable candidates available to it. This episode carries two messages simultaneously. To every military professional navigating this transition right now. The pressure did not make you. It revealed what you were made of. That capability does not disappear when the uniform comes off. It reorganises. Into something the right environment will finally see and name. Take your time. You built something extraordinary. Now give yourself the space to find out what it becomes next. To every business leader, HR director, and talent professional. The military professional sitting across from you is not a translation problem. They are the most pressure-tested, ethically grounded, leadership-proven candidate you will encounter. The document in your hand is not a CV/Resume you cannot read. It is a map to one of the most capable people you will ever have in your building. Learn to read it.
Aug 27

Series 1/Episode 6 - Kim Acosta

🎧 Series 1, Episode 6 — Carpe Disruption: Transitioning is a Frame of Mind - Kim Acosta Geologists use something called the Mohs Hardness Scale to figure out what a mineral is actually made of. You scratch the surface with something harder, and whatever leaves a mark tells you the truth. Seven and a half years at Amazon, a move to Luxembourg, two kids learning German and French at the same time, and a return home that didn't feel like coming home at all, that's basically a Mohs hardness test for a person. Kim Acosta went through it. Then she built a company from scratch, and Amazon became one of her first clients. In this episode, Kim talks about growing up the daughter of an immigrant father who worked night shifts at a paint factory and laid timber floors by day to build a business from nothing. She talks about watching her daughter sit alone in a Luxembourg schoolyard with a book because she couldn't speak the language yet. She talks about the six-month window she gave herself to build a personal brand before walking away from a stable paycheck, and the moment she realized she'd already stopped trying to get the job offers she was interviewing for, because her brain had already moved on to something else. This is a conversation about what gets revealed, not created, when life applies pressure. About choosing discomfort on purpose, twice. And about finding out that home was never a place to begin with. The question this episode leaves you with: What pressure are you currently under that isn't breaking you — it's just showing everyone, including you, what you're actually made of? 💬 "Home is not a place. Home is your family. So wherever they are, I'm going to feel at home." — Kim Acosta
Aug 20

Series 2/Episode 2 - Jeremy Sholl

For every other episode of this show, Jeremy's been the one asking the questions. This time, we turned the mic around. Because there's a story most people don't know: before Jeremy built talent intelligence functions from scratch inside hyper-growth companies, before he learned how to move rooms full of executives using nothing but data and timing, he was a geologist. Walking through the woods with his grandfather. Reading rock formations for a living. And the thing his grandfather told him decades ago never left him: "The surface is always lying to you." That line became the whole career. Because organizations today don't have a data problem. They have dashboards, forecasts, AI models, more workforce data than any generation of leaders before them. They can see the wall coming from a mile out, sometimes years in advance. The problem was never seeing the wall. The problem is that knowing and believing are two completely different muscles, and only one of them changes behavior before it's too late. This episode goes places we don't usually go on this show, building a function nobody asked for, influencing executives who didn't want to hear the truth, and a moment of real vulnerability about mental health that reframes everything he's built his career around. If you've ever tried to get a room to believe
Aug 13

Series 1/Episode 5 - Laurie Hickey

Most people have a Bentonville. Not literally. But the feeling of it. The place, the circumstance, the orbit that keeps pulling you back before you are fully ready to leave. The version of your life that is safe and significant and respected and somehow still not quite the one you were meant to be living. Laurie Hickey has spent twenty years navigating hers. She left northwest Arkansas for California when everything in her said go. The sun, the beach, the feeling of a bigger world. Life brought her back. Family brought her back. And she came back and built something extraordinary inside the orbit she had tried to escape, running some of the most significant brand work in retail and entertainment on the planet. She left for Hollywood. She came back. She went to Los Angeles to give the world of television production a try but found herself building licensed partnerships and developing consumer products for film and television. She came back. And every time she came back she told herself it was a choice. This episode is about whether it was. The question at the heart of this conversation is the one every person listening is quietly carrying about their own orbit. What does it actually take to finally leave the version of your life that is good enough for the one that is actually yours?
Aug 6

Series 1/Episode 4 - Catherine Baez

Series 1/Episode 4 - Catherine Baez Her dream dinner party guests are Maximus from Gladiator, Professor McGonagall, and Tony Stark. And she once had to talk herself out of a very dramatic moment by simply saying out loud... "this is temporary, this is temporary".... until it was. Catherine spent twenty years working with the most vulnerable young people in a county. Kids navigating substance abuse, family breakdown, crises that most of us never have to look at directly. She built real expertise. Real relationships. A career trajectory that people in her field spend a lifetime reaching for. Then life asked her to start again. New city. New context. Twenty years of experience that the corporate world looked at and said; "we don't quite see it. Try this entry-level role instead." Showed up anyway. Found one leader who looked at her differently than everyone else had. And walked through a door that made no logical sense on paper. On the other side of that door she discovered something worth the whole journey. That everything she had built helping the most vulnerable people reach their potential had quietly prepared her to help everyone else do the same thing. The skills just had different names now. This is a warm but serious conversation about what it costs to go backwards before you can go forward. And there is a moment where she says something so quietly true that we had to stop and sit with it. This one is for anyone who has ever been told their experience does not translate. It does. You just need the right person to see it. "Do not believe everything you hear. Know who you are and the skills that you own." — Catherine Baez
Jul 30

Series 1/Episode 3 - Will Warren

Series 1/Episode 3 - Will Warren Will is an operations and people leader whose story is, at its core, about one thing: understanding what human beings are actually capable of, and building everything around that. For more than thirty years he built and led high performing teams inside one of the world's most recognised companies. Not by directing from above. By learning from the inside. What does this specific person need to do their best work? What are they genuinely capable of that their job description doesn't capture? How does the team need to be structured to get the best of every individual in it, rather than fitting every individual into a predetermined shape?That question became the spine of everything he built professionally. And it became the spine of what he built next. The Grey Rabbit sits on Wealthy Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A room for forty five people. Original art on every wall. A hand carved bar from a demolished nineteenth century French church behind the counter. And a team of people between 21 and 28 years old who are receiving, whether they fully know it yet or not, one of the most valuable leadership educations available anywhere. Will Warren spent a career understanding what people are capable of. He is now passing that understanding on to the generation that needs it most.
Jul 23

Series 1/Episode 2 - Alaina Schnipke

Series 1/Episode 2 - Alaina Schnipke Alaina has been the one asking the hard questions on this series, pulling at the seams. Today we turn the mic around. Alaina has spent a decade building systems inside some of the most demanding people operations teams; Goldman Sachs, Amazon AWS, Hinge Health, running talent, scaling, and transformation work at high pressure. She built a pre‑IPO people tech stack, launched an international entity, holds multiple recruiting certifications, and started her career teaching public speaking, which is why she’s so direct, clear, and unexpectedly warm. What makes Alaina compelling right now is that she’s living the disruption at the core of this series; a new job, a new city, split‑living with her partner, and the weird, quiet work of re‑building a life after years of building systems for other people.
Jul 15

Series 1/Episode 1 - Martyna Urban

Series 1/Episode 1 - Martyna Urban Martyna Urban is a coach, consultant, and former corporate TA leader whose career reads like three separate lives that, in retrospect, were always the same life. She arrived in London with almost no English, built a career in one of the world's most demanding corporate environments, and then, at the exact moment everything looked most successful, started hearing the signal she'd been ignoring for many years. She listened. What she built next is the most honest version of who she always was. She is precise, self-aware, and allergic to comfortable answers. She is also, in the best possible way, still working it out. That combination is rare. It's why she's in this chair.
Jul 15

Series 2/Episode 1 - Toby Culshaw

Series 2/Episode 1 - Toby Culshaw Toby Culshaw literally wrote the book on talent intelligence. Not as a credential, as a description. When the field of talent intelligence was still fighting for a seat at the table, he was already building the methodology that would define it. His career sits at the intersection of labour market analysis, workforce strategy, and the specific discipline of turning data into decisions that organisations actually make differently. He has operated inside some of the world's most complex talent environments, built intelligence functions before most organisations knew they needed them, and published thinking, through the Talent Intelligence Collective, that has shaped how practitioners around the world understand what the field is for and what it can do. What makes Toby unusual is the combination: rigorous technical intelligence capability alongside a genuine willingness to say the uncomfortable thing. He does not do conference-keynote optimism. He does not soften the diagnosis to protect the room. What he has to say about the gap between where talent strategy is and where it needs to go is specific, evidence-grounded, and deliberately honest.

11 Episodes

Every story has a fault line. The tension between who you were and who you're becoming. Carpe Disruption.

Creator

Jeremy Sholl & Alaina Schnipke
Years Active

2026
Episodes

11
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2026 Jeremy Sholl & Alaina Schnipke