Why HumanWorks exists

In January 2017, I stood in front of a room of pre-transition service members as the Program Manager of the DoD SkillBridge Program at MCB Camp Pendleton. I asked how everyone felt. A Chief Warrant Officer with 25 years of service said, "Ma'am, I am more afraid of leaving the military than I was the day I left on the bus headed to boot camp."

That stopped me. Here was a man who had led people through things most of us will never face, and he was afraid of what came next.

That moment sent me back to school. My 2018 Pepperdine thesis studied 131 veterans and found something I didn't expect: the mechanism of harm wasn't depression, PTSD, or substance use on its own. It was the structural collapse of the scaffolding that made a person legible to themselves. I called the core finding "paralyzed by freedom."

HumanWorks™ was built from that research, and from a decade of watching the same pattern play out, not just for veterans, but for anyone leaving a system that organized their identity, purpose, and daily agency for them.

We build the architecture for what most change models skip: the human.

Meet The Founder

Sara B. McNamara, MSOD, founded HumanWorks™ after founding the first DoD SkillBridge internship program at MCB Camp Pendleton in 2016, and a decade immersed in transition assistance programming since.

Her 2018 Pepperdine University MSOD thesis on shifting personal agency during military-to-civilian transition is the empirical foundation of the HumanWorks™ Model. She has partnered with organizations including Amazon, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, UCLA, Johnson & Johnson, DraftKings, Fiserv, World Bank, and Accenture, translating what she learned from veteran transition into a framework any leader or team can use.

She is a Certified Emotional Agility Practitioner, a G.W. Bush Presidential Stand-To Veteran Leadership Scholar, and Co-Lead of the Pepperdine MSOD External Practitioner Guild.

When you partner with HumanWorks™, you get more than a consultant. You get someone who has spent a decade in the room with people mid-transition, and built a framework from what she saw.

The Two Frameworks

Transition Agility™ is the measurable capacity to move through change, career, identity, role, system, without losing performance, retention, or trust. It's built on two things: the internal work of processing what you're leaving (Emotional Agility), and the applied work of deciding and acting inside what comes next (Transition Agility™ itself). Most people have practiced neither, because most of their lives were organized by systems that did the deciding for them.

Witness is the piece most change models skip entirely. Most frameworks focus on the mechanics of transition, the before, the after, the stages, and never ask the most human question: who saw you while you crossed? Witness isn't advice or fixing. It's the act of letting someone be fully seen in what they're going through, without rushing them to the other side. In the HumanWorks™ Model, witness is a trainable organizational capacity, not a soft skill, and building it in is what makes transformation actually stick instead of just getting survived.

The Measurement Instrument

Transition Agility™ isn't just a concept, it's measured. The Transition Agility™ Self-Assessment surfaces where an individual, a team, or the people you serve stand across the specific forces that determine how well a transition goes, and where to focus first.

The instrument works in three parts: a private, reflective first pass; a scored measurement across the core forces; and a results and action plan that names exactly where to start.

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