The Aden Nepom story according to me
Hi! I’m Aden Nepom
Before I taught executives how to communicate, I did improv comedy, fronted an all-girl glam-rock band and wrote jokes for cartoon characters who taught fourth-graders how to add fractions. It took me years to see the thread running through all of it, but once I did, I dedicated my whole career to it.
How I Came to This Work
I started out as a creative for an educational software company. My team made learning fun, engaging, and memorable for k-12 students in school districts spanning the United States.
We built our products cross-functionally with input from curriculum experts, animators, engineers… and comedians. In fact, my whole department was filled with class clowns! Some of us had degrees in writing, some were stand-up comics and some of us (clears throat… ME) came from the world of improvised comedy and theatre.
Curriculum experts would hand over their concepts to my team, and then we would turn those lessons into hilarious, and engaging scripts. Those scripts would be reviewed by the curriculum experts, and then we’d rewrite (sometimes many times) before the scripts would head off to animation, voice actors and more.
Everyone one on my team was funny, but not everyone was having fun.
You might assume the miserable ones were just buried in deadlines. But actually a person’s misery or joy boiled down to something else!
The people having the hardest time were the ones with the least flexibility — the experts who treated a request to rewrite their work as an insult to their expertise. And the people having the most fun were the ones with the most curiosity — who treated those same rewrite requests as a chance to surprise themselves. Same job. Same pressure. Completely different experience of the work! And it showed up in the quality of what we made.
That was the seed of everything I do now: how we communicate and collaborate doesn’t just shape the work. It shapes whether the work is bearable.
THE LEAP…
Eventually I left the software company and decided to take a big leap. I had been working part time at an improv comedy school called Merlin Works, teaching nights and weekends, and decided to go all-in! Yes, I performed in a lot of shows. AND YES I also toured and continued teaching all over the world.
BUT going ‘all-in’ also meant doing more than shows and regular classes, it meant working with teams in businesses like the one I left behind, and in fact I turned a substantial amount of focus to the corporate side of the business. which gave me a kind of laboratory.
I designed and led team-building sessions, facilitated leadership meetings, and got to watch, across dozens of companies and industries, as the exact pattern I’d noticed in my previous work played out again and again. Flexibility and curiosity in individual behavioral mindsets were the key difference in whether or not people thrived or (barely) survived on their teams.
The Tools I grew up with
I’m the daughter of Dr. Rick Kirschner, best-selling author, expert in communication and human behavior at work, and founder of this company, I grew up around this material. As a very young person, his tools and techniques bailed me out more times than I can count. The work I was raised with and the work I was doing with companies using improv seemed like they’d be a natural fit for each other.
They were! By 2013, I was combining the playfulness of improv with the powerful, practical frameworks my father had spent a career developing. The Art of Change frameworks gave people ways to listen better, make useful instead of unhelpful assumptions, and handle the conversations everyone dreads. Improv brought it all to life — letting people practice in real time, so the skills actually stick after training ends. In 2015, my father was so delighted by this combination of tools and play that he retired early, and I became the owner of The Art of Change.
Where I am today
Over the years since — alongside a roster of very talented collaborators — I’ve had the privilege of helping thousands of associates, managers, and C-suite leaders change how they communicate, collaborate, and feel about their work.
I gave a TEDx talk on making new choices instead of safe ones. I hosted The Changed Podcast, where guests shared the fork-in-the-road moments that reshaped them. I write Making This Up As I Go for thousands of readers. And I still get a genuine thrill from a room full of people on their feet at a keynote.
What I believe
I’m convinced the world gets better one workplace at a time, through how people choose to work with and for each other. Communication isn’t a personality you’re born with; it’s a skill, and a choice, and it’s learnable. Watching someone pick it up and change what’s possible for their team is the best part of my job.
If that’s the kind of change you’re after — for yourself, your team, or your stage — I’d love to talk.