The name is a real place

Beacon Rock is an 848-foot basalt monolith on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, up the river from my house. It also marks the upper reach of tidal influence on the Columbia. Above it, the river runs on snowmelt and momentum. Below it, the ocean is in play, and the water behaves differently in ways you can't see from the shore.

That's the turn. Influence changes direction inside a system that keeps right on functioning. Results, behavior, and the explanations everyone relies on just stop lining up cleanly, and the shift is easy to miss unless you're paying attention.

I want to look for truth rather than validation.

Something I wrote back in 2015

Most of my work starts at that moment. A leader senses the old explanations have gone stale but can't yet say what replaced them. The tempting move is to grab borrowed language that sounds better than what you can articulate yourself, then fund big decisions with it. The better move is doing the work to find out what's true first. That's the practice.

Who I am

I'm Lance Haun. I run Beacon Turn, I cover the industry as a columnist at Reworked, and I write The Turn most Tuesdays. The practice is intentionally small and mostly referral-driven, and I like it that way.

Before this I spent close to two decades in work technology on both the media side and the vendor side: editor at TLNT and ERE Media, and vice president of market insights at The Starr Conspiracy. I live in Vancouver, Washington, which explains the rock.