"The case was never the problem."

— Stephanie Judd

Stephanie Judd has spent ten years on a single problem: why good ideas, argued well by smart people, so often go absolutely nowhere.


She got interested in it the hard way. As a grad student she spent a summer inside a big-box retail chain, auditing their energy use — showroom lighting, HVAC systems, ten weeks of it. What she found was a warehouse racked to the ceiling with over three hundred different SKUs of light bulb, and a facilities manager who explained, entirely unbothered, that they always replaced a bulb with the exact same one that went out. That way nothing got messed up.


She ran the numbers. Twenty-seven SKUs instead of three hundred. $31.7M over five years, no upfront investment, and the most carbon-friendly bulbs on the market.


She presented it to five executives on the top floor. They told her it was brilliant. Then everybody went back to their desks. A year later she called to ask what had changed, and her old supervisor said: "Well… change is hard."


He was right. But he shouldn't have stopped there.


When Stephanie was sixteen, she crossed state lines with a fake ID from Alabama to get her belly button pierced. For a straight-A rule-follower, this was the crime of the century. But her dad  didn't ground her. Instead he made her write it down. Draft after draft, for days, until she stopped writing a fairy tale about a princess trapped in a tower and started finding the parts of her experience she'd left out of her story. Like the fact that nobody made her take French, and she'd been drowning in it at 2 a.m. entirely by choice. Her dad changed nothing about her experience, but he changed the story she was living.


That's the thing she now teaches for a living. Every story we live by has two parts: the scenes, which are what actually happened, and the summary, which is what we decided it meant.  Summaries live in the head, and the head will agree or disagree. But scenes live in the body, and the body is what acts. Almost nobody supplies the scene, because they already lived it and forget you didn't.


Stephanie is co-founder and Managing Partner of Wolf & Heron, the leadership communication firm she and Kara Davidson started in 2017. More than 5,000 professionals have earned her Influential Storyteller certification. She works with product, sales, research and executive teams at Google, Pfizer, Ford, the CDC and the University of Michigan — usually on the same underlying issue: you have the case, everyone agrees with you, and nothing changes. Now what?


Before all of that she studied computer science at Cornell, consulted in New York, and quit (after realizing she'd been pushing snooze until 10:30 in the morning for a year and a half) to sublet her apartment and buy a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires to learn the tango. She holds an MBA and an MS from the Erb Institute at the University of Michigan, which is how a business student ended up auditing energy use in the first place.

Credentials

  • Co-founder and Managing Partner, Wolf & Heron
  • Co-creator of the Influential Communicator Framework
  • Certified coach, Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), 2017
  • MBA and MS, Erb Institute at the University of Michigan
  • BA in Computer Science, Cornell University
  • Contributor, Forbes

Outside of work

Stephanie has been a competitive salsa dancer and an international rock climber, though these days the climbing has mostly given way to hiking, yoga and two kids. She cooks seriously. She still likes getting herself into trouble, just at a scale her calendar can absorb.