Member since March 2026
Erin Stadler is the COO of Boomtown Innovation, where she spent 15 years building one of the country's most respected corporate-startup partnership platforms from the ground up. She has advised more than 200 startups, designed long-running innovation programs with Fortune 500 companies, and led the organizational systems that made those programs work year after year.
Her work now focuses on what she learned inside that experience: most organizations don't fail at change because of bad strategy or weak execution. They fail because the invisible operating principles already running their system are never examined. Erin helps leaders surface those principles so they can finally influence what's actually driving their organization. She speaks on organizational adaptation, the hidden reasons transformation fails, and what it actually takes to build systems that change.
She holds a Master of Engineering in Engineering Management from CU Boulder, a computer science and media arts background from Wellesley College, and certifications in StrengthsFinder coaching and Organization Relationship Systems Coaching.
Most leaders I work with are intelligent, motivated, and genuinely committed to doing better. And they keep watching their best initiatives fall apart. Not because of the initiative. Because of something underneath it that nobody has named.
Every organization is already running on a set of operating principles. They are not written down. They are not the values on the wall. They are the invisible rules the system actually follows, and they will shape every decision, every behavior, and every change effort, whether anyone examines them or not.
My passion is helping leaders learn to see that layer, name it honestly, and work with it rather than against it. When that shift happens, work gets lighter. Change starts to hold. And leaders stop wondering why the same problem keeps coming back in a different form.
Last May, after five years of running a corporate-startup innovation program, we tried something different. Instead of our usual mid-program event, we organized an invite-only partner innovation day — a small room of senior technology executives and a handful of trusted founders, brought together to explore a space everyone was navigating.
These were not people with calendar flexibility. These were heads of entire technology divisions at major companies. We asked anyway.
Almost everyone showed up.
What happened next was something I had never seen in thirteen years of this work. Executives from different organizations sat across from each other and said out loud what was actually keeping them up at night. Not the polished version. The real one. The questions they didn't have answers to. The future they were genuinely uncertain about. They discovered they were trying to solve the same problems and had been doing it alone.
None of that would have been possible in year one. It would have been difficult even in year three. It happened because we had spent five years building something those executives trusted enough to be honest with.
That room is what I talk about when I talk about organizational principles. You cannot design a moment like that. You can only create the conditions where it becomes possible. And the conditions are built by the invisible principles running your system, whether you have ever examined them or not.
My path to this work ran through three distinct phases, and each one answered a different question.
Early in my career I worked as a consultant helping established organizations change, organizations already in motion and already resistant. What I kept discovering was that the obstacle was never the process being introduced. It was what the system was already running on underneath the process.
That led me into startup coaching, working with founders at day one, before the system had calcified. Teaching the discipline of deeply understanding a problem before building the solution. Earlier intervention, more malleable conditions. A different kind of evidence.
Then I became a co-founder and COO, building an organization from the ground up on these principles and living inside it for 15 years, accountable for every design decision and its consequences. Not advising. Building and inhabiting. That experience is what made the methodology real. It isn't "I helped a client do this." It is "I built this, felt everything it produced, and can now tell you what the system was actually doing."
The methodology that emerged from those three phases is what I bring to stage work and to clients.
Last May, after five years of running a corporate-startup innovation program, we tried something different. Instead of our usual mid-program event, we organized an invite-only partner innovation day — a small room of senior technology executives and a handful of trusted founders, brought together to explore a space everyone was navigating.
These were not people with calendar flexibility. These were heads of entire technology divisions at major companies. We asked anyway.
Almost everyone showed up.
What happened next was something I had never seen in thirteen years of this work. Executives from different organizations sat across from each other and said out loud what was actually keeping them up at night. Not the polished version. The real one. The questions they didn't have answers to. The future they were genuinely uncertain about. They discovered they were trying to solve the same problems and had been doing it alone.
None of that would have been possible in year one. It would have been difficult even in year three. It happened because we had spent five years building something those executives trusted enough to be honest with.
That room is what I talk about when I talk about organizational principles. You cannot design a moment like that. You can only create the conditions where it becomes possible. And the conditions are built by the invisible principles running your system, whether you have ever examined them or not.
My path to this work ran through three distinct phases, and each one answered a different question.
Early in my career I worked as a consultant helping established organizations change, organizations already in motion and already resistant. What I kept discovering was that the obstacle was never the process being introduced. It was what the system was already running on underneath the process.
That led me into startup coaching, working with founders at day one, before the system had calcified. Teaching the discipline of deeply understanding a problem before building the solution. Earlier intervention, more malleable conditions. A different kind of evidence.
Then I became a co-founder and COO, building an organization from the ground up on these principles and living inside it for 15 years, accountable for every design decision and its consequences. Not advising. Building and inhabiting. That experience is what made the methodology real. It isn't "I helped a client do this." It is "I built this, felt everything it produced, and can now tell you what the system was actually doing."
The methodology that emerged from those three phases is what I bring to stage work and to clients.
