See Clearly.

Think Differently.

Shape What Comes Next.

An Introduction from Lane

Different Questions. One Underlying Challenge.

For more than fifty years, Lane Sloan has explored why people and organizations grow, adapt and sometimes become constrained by the assumptions that once helped them succeed.  Sloan Consulting Services brings that experience, research and original thinking together to help you better understand where you are, recognize what may be changing and intentionally shape what comes next.

Find Your Starting Point

Begin With the Question That Brought You Here.

You may be building a company, leading an enterprise, or reconsidering what you want from life. Start with the question that matters to you.

As a business grows, what once worked may no longer be enough. Explore what your company’s next stage demands, build value that doesn’t depend on you alone, and create real choices, whether you plan to grow or sell.

Grow Your Company

The beliefs that guided you through one stage of life may not fit the next. Explore how to see your own assumptions clearly, rediscover what gives your life purpose, and move forward with direction.

Develop Yourself

Every enterprise is built on premises about how its world works. When that world changes, the premises must change with it. The Perceptual Enterprise shows how organizations stay viable by recognizing when their premises no longer fit and reconstructing them while there is still time to do it well.

The Perceptual Enterprise

How do individuals, organizations, and societies stay viable when their world changes? ISLE research explains how success hardens premises and how to reconstruct them in time.

ISLE Research
ISLE Research

For Those Who Want to Go Deeper.

Lane’s work is supported by a larger research program called ISLE, Integrating Structure and Life Energy.  ISLE examines how individuals, organizations and societies develop ways of understanding the world, how those underlying structures influence their actions, and what happens when their assumptions no longer keep pace with change. At its heart is the question of how we recognize when established ways of thinking no longer fit and reconstruct for what comes next.


Explore a plain-language introduction to the research, followed by its theoretical architecture, monographs, papers and supporting materials.

Consulting

Beyond Advice.

Better Perspective.

Lane works with a selected number of senior leaders, business owners and GetReady4Sale Academy participants on questions involving strategy, leadership and self-development.


The work begins by looking beyond the immediate problem. What assumptions are shaping the situation? What has changed? What might the organization or leader not yet be seeing? And what deserves attention next?

Experience to See More Clearly. Curiosity to Keep Looking.

Lane Sloan’s work draws on nearly thirty years at Shell, half of them in executive management, including as President of Shell Chemical USA. He holds three master’s degrees in business and served as an Executive Professor at the University of Houston’s C. T. Bauer College of Business, teaching corporate strategy and strategic leadership. He has also co-founded GetReady4Sale Academy and worked as an executive coach and consultant.


Running through all of it is more than fifty years of inquiry into how people and organizations develop. He is the author of Terra Incognita: A Navigation Aid for Energy Leaders, Develop a Leadership Plan: Become a Great Leader, and The Big Puzzle. His newest book, What Is This Thing Called Life?, is scheduled for publication by the end of 2026.


That experience has sharpened his questions rather than settled them. Lane continues to examine how established assumptions shape what people and organizations can see, how they respond when their world changes, and what they might become next.


Books by Lane Sloan

Continue the Exploration

Lane’s books offer different ways into the ideas explored throughout this site, from personal development and purpose to the larger questions of how individuals and organizations understand and respond to the world around them.

The Big Puzzle

A detective-style investigation into how the thinking that creates success can also make change harder to see—following clues across individuals, organizations, and societies to explore perception, adaptation, and what it takes to question familiar assumptions when the world begins to change.

What Is This Thing Called Life?

A personal and intellectual journey through the experiences and ideas that led to ISLE—and a provocative exploration of life energy as a fundamental force underlying existence, challenging us to become builders of our own lives rather than merely tenants passing through

The Perceptual Enterprise:
The Architecture of Continuous Viability

The assumptions that make an organization successful can eventually constrain it. The Perceptual Enterprise shows how to see beyond them, recognize when the world is changing, and adapt before change forces the organization to respond.