Most transformations fail before they start.
We work where technology meets the humans who have to use it, the processes nobody documented, and the leaders who have to carry it forward. That intersection is where transformation either happens or quietly dies.
Between us, we've run the technology behind Zelle and PayPal, taken a company public, advised the board of a startup through a successful exit, and spent three decades fixing processes and driving AI integration. What drew us to that work is the same thing that drew us together - the people inside the organization and the actual problems they're trying to solve..
We've also flown kites, ridden horses, played the saxophone, and run distances that require a support crew … for fun.
We built Catalyst Partners because we kept seeing the same problems and nobody was solving all of them together.
info@catalystpartner.co
Problem 1: Nobody knows how the work actually happens.
After decades of growth, workarounds, and incremental decisions, most organizations are running on institutional knowledge that lives in some people’s heads and a prayer. That invisible layer is exactly where AI initiatives go to die, where onboarding takes forever, and where operational risk hides until it’s too late.
Problem 2: The AI rollout is already failing.
You probably bought the licenses. Maybe even conducted training. And now you’re watching a handful of power users do interesting things while everyone else quietly goes back to the old way. This is not a technology problem. It’s an order-of-operations problem and an organizational one.
Problem 3: The managers in the middle were never taught to lead.
Your managers are the most important variable in whether any of this works. Most of them were promoted because they were excellent individual contributors. That tells you nothing about whether they can build trust, give real feedback, delegate without losing accountability, or lead people through change they don’t fully understand yet.
Here's what we do about it.
We start where most firms don't, with the operational foundation. Before you automate, you need to know how work actually happens.
Does your organization actually know how its work gets done?
Mike has run organizations where that invisible layer represented hundreds of millions of dollars in operational risk. Diana has spent her career watching what happens to people when those systems crack. What they both know from experience, not theory is this:
You cannot automate what you haven’t mapped. And you cannot map it from the top.
That’s what the Operational Intelligence Suite™ surfaces: real workflows, fully documented, risk-assessed, and mapped to a clear AI opportunity roadmap. Then you can leverage something most organizations never have, an honest picture of your own operations.
What you walk away with:
- Process Map Library -Visual documentation of real workflows, decision points, handoffs, and failure modes.
- Operational Playbooks – Living documentation captured in a knowledge platform.
- Operational Risk Assessment – The fragile spots, undocumented dependencies and points of failure.
- AI & Automation Opportunity Roadmap – Where to build and leverage AI.
- Executive Workshop – A working session to prioritize what’s next.
HUMAN-CENTRIC TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION
One conversation. No deck. No pitch.
Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit, what we’d actually do, and what you should realistically expect.
If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you that too and point you somewhere better.
That’s the only way we know how to work.
Let's Work Together
info@catalystpartner.co
Mike Cahill
Partner
Born in the UK, Mike has built a career in the deep end of American fintech. CTO at Early Warning, the company behind Zelle. SVP Engineering at PayPal. COO and CTO at Boku through an IPO and several acquisition on the acquiring side. VP Engineering at American Express. Teams in the thousands. Payment systems moving over a trillion dollars.
On weekends, Mike woodworks, builds, flies and crashes drones, keeps bees and plays the saxophone. All while trying to keep his Clawdbot, eMikey, under control.
He’s also a certified executive coach Berkeley-trained which turns out to matter a lot when the real problem isn’t the technology.
People who’ve worked with Mike will tell you that he approaches organizational complexity with IQ and EQ. He sees the underlying forces. He asks the question nobody else thought to ask. He holds the vision when everyone else is in the weeds. Mike is the big idea person. The one who looks at your organization and immediately sees what it could be. And then stays in the room to help you build it.
Diana Tuman, PhD
Partner
You will rarely see Diana without a smile. She came from Ukraine as a refugee which explains a great deal about her combination of warmth, rigor, and the quiet sense that she has handled harder things than whatever is currently on the table.
Professionally she led global transformations, saw the board through a successful exit, is a strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies, and human-centered design architect. Diana holds a PhD in organizational leadership, M.S. in bioinformatics and human genetics, Stanford machine learning certificate and is a Berkeley trained executive coach. Personally, she manages to fit in more than mathematically reasonable. When not working she hikes, skis, dabbles in photography and rides horses. She also wrangles kids and two dogs, one being a 175lb Great Dane.
Diana is the AI brain and human-centered design architect of Catalyst Partners. She knows that the organizations that get AI integration right aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They’re the ones that built the human and operational foundation first, designed the change around how people actually work, and developed the leadership culture to sustain it.
Keeping up with the news
We write about what we’re seeing in operational transformations, AI rollouts, and leadership cultures that are working and one’s that aren’t.
Short. Honest. Occasionally funny.
No recycled frameworks. No thought leadership theater. Just the real stuff.
Catalyst Partners Values
Character & right fit matters
What makes us good is that we care deeply about the organizations we work with, the people inside them, and whether what we build lasts. We turn work down. Not often, but when the values don't align or we can't see a genuine path to impact, we say so. We'd rather spend time with clients who are ready to do real work than bill hours on something that won't move.
Transformation is earned, not installed
What we can do is build the foundation, create the conditions, develop the leaders, and stay genuinely accountable for whether the work sticks. The rest is yours. We're honest about that from the first conversation. We laugh. A lot, actually. We think organizations that take themselves too seriously tend to make worse decisions than organizations that can hold the weight of hard problems without losing their sense of humor. We bring both.