About:
THE
HACK
organizations rarely fail from bad strategy.
They fail because they don’t understand how people actually work together.
Hiring decisions are made on resumes.
Leadership decisions are made on instinct alone.
Culture is described in values — but enforced through behavior.
What’s missing is a way to see the human system underneath it all.
Why Culture Breaks Down:
The Problem No One Has Language For
People problems rarely announce themselves clearly.
They show up as:
“Great hires” that don’t work out
Smart teams that still feel misaligned
Repeating conflicts and never-ending friction
Culture that’s hard to explain — and harder to scale
These are rarely performance issues. They are compatibility and decision‑making issues caused by invisible differences in how people process information, make decisions, and create value with others.
Most companies lack this required data and understanding of people system dynamics to prevent these outcomes prior teams stalling.
Most organizations don’t have a framework for this.
So they guess — and pay for it later.
What The hack does:
The Hack Exists to Make Human Systems visible
The Hack is a culture strategy firm built on a simple premise:
How people think determines how organizations function.
Every person operates through internal knowledge filters — what they notice, prioritize, trust, and act on. When those filters interact, they produce alignment or friction, momentum or drag.
The Hack makes those filters visible at the level of individuals, teams, leadership, and entire organizations — allowing leaders to stop reacting to people problems and start designing human systems intentionally.
how it works:
This doesn’t measure Personality
Most tools label people.
The Hack predicts whether or not people will “click” together.
Instead of asking - “What kind of person is this?”
We ask - “How will this person function with others — under real pressure, over time?”
That distinction changes everything:
Hiring accuracy
Team design
Leadership development
Culture scalability
This is not a one-size-fits-none framework.
It’s a people systems infrastructure that’s functional at any level of scale.
The process:
The hack for solving people probelms
The Hack provides a 5-10 minute science‑backed assessment and culture‑mapping system that predicts how people will actually function together at work.
It helps leaders:
Predict compatibility before hiring
Reduce friction before it escalates
Make culture explicit instead of implicit
Design teams intentionally instead of reactively
This is not a personality test. It is a behavioral and decision‑making diagnostic.
What you get:
deliverables
Depending on scope:
A 5-10 minute assessment per individual + 45 min coaching session to walkthrough results
Clear profiles showing how people think, decide, and create value
Compatibility insights between team members and leadership
A leadership or culture map showing how decisions and behaviors scale
Ongoing coaching support
The output is actionable, not theoretical.
Why this matters now:
Protecting your bottom line
People problems usually show up as $100K+ emergencies:
Employee turnover
Missed growth opportunities
Slowed execution
Leadership fatigue
Preventing even one bad hire or one failed team dynamic can offset the cost.
How is this different? Most tools label individuals.
This predicts whether people will “click” or not, based on how they interact.
It answers — how will these people function together over time, under real pressure.
don’t wait:
LOW‑RISK WAYs TO START -
You can start small with:
A pilot group
A leadership-only assessment
A single team or role
No org-wide rollout required.
Get The Hack Now!
About:
THE founder
Marlee Whetten
Why This System Exists
The Hack didn’t begin as a business idea.
It began as a pattern that wouldn’t stop repeating.
I grew up in a Mormon family with ten siblings — an unusually dense human system. Within my immediate family alone, a wide range of the 18 sociality types were represented. From an early age, I wasn’t just watching personalities — I was watching interaction patterns: who understood each other effortlessly, who clashed repeatedly, and how the same behavior could be interpreted in radically different ways depending on who was observing it.
Later, I experienced a drastic cultural shift moving from Provo, Utah to New York City, New York. The contrast made something obvious that had previously been invisible: culture isn’t just values or norms — it’s how information is prioritized and acted on. That insight deepened as I traveled across Europe and Asia, where different cultures solved similar problems in entirely different ways — often with equal success.
The same pattern showed up again in the corporate world - especially visible during conflict.
Across organizations, teams would look strong on paper and still struggle. People problems would flare up “out of nowhere,” or never fully resolve. The same issues would reappear with different people. There was always someone who seemed to be speaking from a different planet — and yet others responded to them as if they were the smartest person in the room.
What was being treated as dysfunction were actually misaligned systems.
Seeing the Pattern Clearly
My academic background in evolutionary biology and psychology gave me a language for what I was observing. I began to see organizations not as collections of individuals, but as evolving systems — shaped by how people create value, exchange information, and make decisions under pressure.
I initially examined these dynamics through an anthropological lens, observing recurring value-creation patterns and the compatibility relationships between them. From there, I searched across peer-reviewed research in epistemology, knowledge management, economics, philosophy, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, organizational dynamics, and attachment science.
What emerged was a consistent throughline:
People don’t disagree because they’re irrational.
They disagree because they are calculating decisions using different inputs.
They prioritize information differently.
They trust different signals.
They optimize for different outcomes.
And when those differences go unnamed, organizations blame individuals for what are actually system-level mismatches.
From Observation to System
Once the pattern became clear, it was impossible to unsee.
Every dysfunctional manager.
Every high-performing team with chronic friction.
Every culture problem that “suddenly” appeared or never fully resolved.
They weren’t random.
They were predictable.
The Hack was built to make those patterns visible — to translate what had previously been felt, misinterpreted, or ignored into a system leaders could actually use.
Not to change people.
But to design environments where their differences compound instead of collide.
The Impact
This work isn’t about changing people.
It’s about seeing how the system already works.
Once that’s clear, the next step tends to be obvious.