Erin Haertling, ACC · Founder, The Permission Problem
I work with senior technical leaders and founders who are good at their jobs and unhappy in them.
Usually in a way that is hard to say out loud without sounding ungrateful.
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Sometimes you have done your time in a high-exposure seat and you are working out what the next one should be. Sometimes something around you is making you worse at the job you are good at, and you cannot name what it is. For founders, it is often the moment the company has outgrown the way it makes decisions.
These are not problems of competence. The people I work with are capable and used to significant responsibility. What they need is an independent place to examine what is not working, look honestly at the options, and work out what has to change.
It starts with a single confidential conversation, to see whether this is a good fit.
Engagements begin with four sessions. They include a full strengths profile and a values review that asks you to name the tradeoffs you have already made, which is usually where the real conversation starts.
Some clients need longer, and continue into a standing advisory relationship.
Everything is confidential from the first email, and nothing about the work appears here afterwards.
Every decision that matters has four parts, and they are usually owned by four different people.
Are the assumptions sound, and what is the system actually capable of?
What are pressure, fatigue and identity doing to how the options are being weighed?
Who absorbs the second- and third-order consequences, and do they know yet?
Who holds the authority to make this call, which constraints are genuinely fixed, and who owns the tradeoff?
Decisions rarely fail neatly inside one of those. They fail at the seams between them.
Eight years as a U.S. Air Force officer, much of it operational testing of space systems, where a miscalculation is mission failure. Before that, manpower and resource planning at the Air Force Academy, advising commanders on personnel and organizational decisions across thousands of positions.
Then clinical training and a counselling practice. Now the study of corporate governance at Cornell.
A computer science degree and a career spent where the consequences were real. Technical literacy, and a working understanding of what sustained pressure does to a person's judgment.
High-Consequence Environments
Former U.S. Air Force Officer · Held U.S. Top Secret Clearance · Air Force Academy & Air Force Space Command · Space and defense systems
Human Judgment Under Pressure
Registered Clinical Counsellor · Canadian Certified Counsellor · Master's in Counselling Psychology, Adler University · ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) · Brown University School of Professional Studies Coaching Certification · Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach
Technical Fluency & Governance
B.A. Computer Science with a Focus in Statistics — Smith College · MBA candidate, University of Arizona · Cornell Certificate Program in Corporate Governance, eCornell, Cornell Law School (in progress)
The executive who recognized a pattern. They saw that the same over-flexibility showing up outside work was weakening boundaries at work. The same instinct, running unseen in both places. Once named, they could pull the two apart and set the right level in each.
The founders who could not agree on transparency. Both held the value. They had defined it differently and never compared definitions. What felt like a philosophical rift turned out to be an operational one, which made it something they could fix.
"She gave me the confidence to trust my own intuition, something 20 years in this industry had not done on its own. The decisions got faster. The second-guessing got quieter." — Fortune 250 C-Suite Executive, identity withheld by request
If you are carrying a decision you cannot delegate, write to me. One email, straight to me, no intake funnel. Name, organization if you want, and what you are sitting with.
I work selectively and in confidence. My clients do not appear anywhere on this site, and that is the point.
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