308: Leading Into the Unknown with Tameka Vasquez

Tameka Vasquez grew up in tech, where moving fast and breaking things was gospel. Then she started working with leaders outside that world and realized the gospel didn't travel. Most leaders, she found, are only equipped for change they've already seen. Everything else gets met with fear. That's the gap she has spent her career trying to close. Not by predicting the future, but by changing how leaders relate to it. Her framework, SHIFT™, treats the future as a verb. Something you do, not somewhere you arrive. The goal isn't certainty. The goal is building enough capacity to lead when nothing is certain. If you're tired of the inevitability narrative, the one that says the future is already decided and your job is just to comply, this conversation is for you. In this episode, you'll hear: How growing up in tech shaped Tameka's assumptions about change, and what working in slower-moving industries taught her about how rare those assumptions are The story of her Guyanese heritage and why multigenerational survival in precarious conditions is the personal foundation underneath all of her professional work Why she no longer tries to clear a credentials bar that keeps moving, and what she says instead when someone asks what qualifies her A full walkthrough of the SHIFT™ framework and why she calls it a practice rather than a program The false binary between being first and getting left behind, and why the whole spectrum in between is where most real strategy lives Her argument that discomfort with inevitability is a more honest starting point than certainty, and why she works with that discomfort rather than around it Why outsourcing critical thinking to institutions and thought leaders is cultural laziness, and what leaders actually need to do instead