Get curious before judging the signal.
Human Behavior|Trust|Strategy|Transformation
I've spent my life trying to understand what makes us become who we become.
Question
Why do we believe what we believe?
I'm fascinated by human behavior because understanding ourselves and one another changes what becomes possible for people, relationships, communities, and organizations.
I'm Kyle Gattison, professionally known as Gattison. I'm a strategist, creator, speaker, and Co-Founder & CEO of Icon Element.
These questions didn't start with my work.
They started in my own life.
For years, parts of what I was experiencing did not fit neatly inside what I had been taught about identity, faith, relationships, belonging, and the life I was supposed to build.
I had to stop asking
“How do I make my experience fit what I already believe?”
and start asking
“What if my experience is telling me something I need to understand?”
That shift changed the way I approach almost everything.
A way of looking
Question the explanation.
Hold complexity long enough to understand it.
Never let the answer you prefer outrank the reality in front of you.
The questions got bigger.
SelfRelationshipsCommunityCultureOrganizationsSociety
The environments changed. The questions didn't.
01What are people
experiencing?
02What meaning are they
making from it?
03What are they coming to
believe?
04What will they trust next?
05What should we do with
what we learn?
The scale changed. The human questions didn't.
The ideas underneath
almost everything.
Four lenses. One recurring instinct: understand what is really happening, then decide what deserves to change.
I'm obsessed with the gap between what people do and what's underneath what they do.
Behavior is rarely the whole story.
I want to know what someone experienced, how they interpreted it, what they came to believe because of it, and what that belief is now causing them to do.
For me, the behavior is often the signal. The deeper question is what produced it.
I think trust is fundamentally about the future.
What do I believe you will do next?
What experiences taught me to expect that?
And what happens to my behavior when what you say and what I experience stop matching?
People are constantly gathering evidence about what they should expect from us next.
Understanding something should eventually change what we do.
I'm naturally a strategist. Once I understand what is happening, my brain immediately goes to the next question:
Given what we now understand, what should we actually do about it?
Insight matters. But insight that never changes a decision, behavior, relationship, or system is incomplete.
Transformation begins when new understanding becomes difficult to ignore.
Sometimes that means changing a behavior. Sometimes a relationship. Sometimes an identity. Sometimes an organization.
Now that I understand something differently, what has to change?
Why do I care about any of this?
Because I want people to thrive.
I don't think thriving means being happy all the time. I don't think it means comfort. I don't think it means achievement. And I definitely don't think it means convincing yourself that everything is fine when it isn't.
Some of the most important transformation in my own life began when I became willing to confront things that were decidedly not fine.
I think we thrive more fully when we can see reality more honestly, understand ourselves more deeply, trust wisely, value ourselves and one another, express ourselves authentically, make deliberate choices, build meaningful relationships, and contribute something beyond ourselves.
Thriving is not the absence of difficulty.
Sometimes becoming more fully yourself requires questioning something you once believed, letting go of something that no longer fits, changing how you behave, rebuilding trust, or moving through a period where you are not entirely sure who you are becoming yet.
That does not necessarily mean the process is failing. Sometimes it means something is changing.
I lived transformation before I wrote about it. And I wrote about it before I ever built a company around understanding it.
I don't only want to understand what's happening.
I want to build something useful from what I understand.
When I encounter a meaningful human problem, my instinct is usually to ask two questions:
Today, one of the clearest expressions of that instinct is Icon Element.
Icon Element Los Angeles Trust Intelligence + Organizational Strategy
IE · LA
The questions became institutional.
Organizations face a version of the same human problem.
I co-founded Icon Element because organizations face a version of the same problem human beings do:
What we believe about ourselves can be very different from what other people are actually experiencing.
But belief is not the same thing as evidence.
What an institution can believe
An organization can believe it is trusted.
01 / 05
It can believe people understand its intentions.
It can believe an initiative is creating value.
It can believe employees feel heard.
It can believe communities feel respected.
It can believe stakeholders understand what leadership is trying to do.
So we ask:
- 01What are people actually experiencing?
- 02How are they interpreting those experiences?
- 03What are they coming to believe because of them?
- 04What do they now expect the organization to do next?
- 05How will those expectations shape trust and behavior?
And then the strategist in me asks:
What should leadership do with what we learned?
Human understanding Trust Intelligence Organizational action
That is where Trust Intelligence comes in.
Icon Element helps leaders understand the trust conditions surrounding consequential decisions, initiatives, relationships, and organizational behavior, then translate that understanding into strategy.
Decenter the organization. Center the truth.
For me, that means being willing to discover that the organization's preferred explanation may not be the explanation people are actually living.
The goal is not to prove leadership right or wrong.
The goal is to understand reality well enough for leadership to respond wisely.
Two different ways of seeing.
Icon Element was built around more than my perspective.
I tend to notice the human signal: interpretation, behavior, culture, meaning, narrative, trust, and what may be happening underneath the surface.
“What is happening underneath this?”
My co-founder, Jose Aguilar, brings research architecture, measurement, methodology, systems thinking, and the analytical discipline needed to test what we think we see.
“How would we know?”
Together, the question becomes:
What does the evidence mean, and what should leadership do about it?Humanity in the data. Discipline in the system.
Some ideas need to be experienced in a room.
I love thinking through complicated human questions.
But there are moments when reading the idea is not enough.
Sometimes people need to wrestle with an idea together, challenge what they assumed was true, and leave the room seeing something they could not see before.
That is what I want speaking to do.
Not simply
inspire. Change what people can see.
inspire. Change what people can see.
Before the frameworks had names
The room was already teaching me.
Long before I had language like Trust Intelligence, I was learning how to read a room, notice hesitation, cast a vision people could enter, adjust in real time, and make leadership decisions while several human dynamics were moving at once.
That experience came through years of keynotes, leadership training, workshops, mentoring, panels, and convenings across generations and different kinds of communities.
What I keep coming back to
Today, I keep coming back to trust.
It has shaped so much of how I understand leadership, people, and what makes a relationship hold or break. That is part of why so much of my speaking now helps a room look more clearly at trust.
01Keynote
Mistrust Is Expensive
Why trust now shapes revenue, participation, loyalty, resilience, and institutional legitimacy.
A lot of organizations think they have a visibility problem, an engagement problem, or a brand problem.
Sometimes the deeper issue is simpler: people can see you and still not trust you.
The keynote gives me a room to pull that apart with leaders, to look at what mistrust is already changing, what activity can hide, and what becomes possible when trust is treated like an operating condition instead of a reputation score.
From seeing the problem to examining the relationship
Mistrust Is Expensive
See the problem differently.
The Six-Lane Bridge
Look at what the relationship is actually producing.
Mistrust Is Expensive helps me name what mistrust is already changing. The Six-Lane Bridge lets me help a room examine the relationship all that activity is actually producing.
02Workshop
The Six-Lane Bridge
A strategic workshop on trust, engagement & commitment.
I built this workshop around a question I keep coming back to: if an organization is constantly building a relationship with people, what kind of relationship is all that activity actually producing?
Most organizations can count what they did. I am more interested in whether what they did built trust, meaningful engagement, and a reason for people to stay connected.
Organization → Community
Trust
Are we showing up in ways that deserve trust?
Engagement
Are we engaging people in ways that feel meaningful?
Commitment
Are we giving people a reason to stay connected?
Community → Organization
Trust
Do people actually trust us?
Engagement
Will they participate in what we are building?
Commitment
Will they stay, support, and keep choosing us?
The question is no longer:
Are we engaging people?
What kind of relationship is our engagement actually producing?
I take ideas
seriously.
I'm a forever learner.
I'm constantly reading, observing, listening, questioning, connecting things, and testing what I think I understand.
When I decide to put an idea into the world, I have usually spent time with it.
I've turned it over. Tested the logic. Looked for what I might be missing. And arrived at a point of view that I believe is worth contributing to the conversation.
That doesn't mean I assume I have the final answer.
It means I believe the idea is developed enough to stand up to a question. And if better evidence eventually requires me to rethink it, I will.
QUESTIONS I KEEP RETURNING TO
01HUMAN BEHAVIOR
What are we missing when we judge behavior before understanding what produced it?
Interpretation, belief, identity, decision-making, context, and why people do what they do.
02TRUST
What actually makes someone believable?
Credibility, expectations, institutional trust, stakeholder behavior, loyalty, reputation, commitment, and the gap between intention and experience.
03TRANSFORMATION
What happens when something we understand becomes impossible to unsee?
Identity, belief, personal change, organizational change, discomfort, reconstruction, and what it takes for new understanding to become new behavior.
04HUMAN THRIVING
What allows us to become more fully ourselves and contribute more fully to one another?
Self-understanding, self-trust, love, expression, agency, belonging, relationships, contribution, joy, and the conditions that allow human beings to flourish.
FEATURED THINKING
01
MISTRUST IS EXPENSIVE
Why visibility, activity, and good intentions do not automatically create trust.
Watch →02
THE FIVE TRUST BREAKERS
The patterns that quietly weaken belief before leaders realize trust has changed.
Watch →03
WHAT IS TRUST INTELLIGENCE?
A leadership guide to what trust intelligence measures, why trust acts as an operating condition, and what leaders should do with the evidence.
Read →I'm more interested in what is true than in protecting what I already believe.
Some of the biggest changes in my life began when I became willing to question explanations I had once been certain about.
That left me with a pretty simple standard:
If your truth is so weak that it can't withstand a question, maybe it isn't a truth worth building your life on.
And I think the same is true of organizations.
If your truth is so weak that it can't withstand a question, maybe it isn't a truth worth building your organization on.
If I think something is worth saying, you'll find it here.
Explore My Thinking→
Sometimes I SAY IT WITH MUSIC.
Music was one of the first places I learned how to take something happening inside of me and give it a form outside of me.
IDENTITY•LOVE•DESIRE•FAITH•FREEDOM•FEAR•JOY•SENSUALITY•BECOMING• IDENTITY•LOVE•DESIRE•FAITH•FREEDOM•FEAR•JOY•SENSUALITY•BECOMING•
Together
Sometimes expression is about reaching toward somebody else.
Together made sense as the first stop here because music has never only been about me. Sometimes the point is the room, the voices, the thing we make with one another.
Gattison + Mark Pelli + Jesaiah + Torrey Mercer + Malynda Hale + David Hernandez + Solu + Griot + SashaThemNOW PLAYINGTogetherGattison
0:004:10
Some songs came out of moments when I was trying to understand myself. Some came out of things I had finally understood. Some were about another human being. And some were simply about enjoying being alive.
NOW PLAYINGPicture PerfectShaw Quentin Remix
0:005:14
Picture
Perfect
Sometimes expression also produces something worth celebrating.
Billboard Charts
#46
And yes. The human-behavior guy also made a Billboard-charting record.
Not every part of us needs to be useful.
Not every feeling needs to be optimized.
Thereisvalueincreatingbecausesomethingwantstobecreated. Inmovingandlaughing,wanting,performing,makingsomethingbeautiful,ridiculous,vulnerable,sensual,loud,quiet,orcompletelyunexpected.
#1
No. 1 debutiTunes Dance Album
Jealousy
Not every song needs to explain me.
Sometimes I want the beat, the color, the attitude, the fun of it.
NOW PLAYINGJealousyGattison feat. Logan Compton
0:002:54
THE LIFE
UNDERNEATH
THE WORK.
This was my life before it became my work.
I spent years inside a religious world that gave me a very clear understanding of who I was supposed to be. At the same time, I had known from a young age that I was attracted to men. Those two realities did not fit neatly together.
I wanted to live honestly.
none of this felt theoretical.
01TRUTH
Before we ever started dating, while we were still friends, I was honest with the woman who would eventually become my wife about my attraction to men.
I did not want someone I loved building a life with me around information I was intentionally withholding.
I sought accountability.
I pursued reparative therapy because, at the time, I genuinely believed there might be a way to reconcile my lived experience with what I had been taught about faith, sexuality, marriage, and the life I was supposed to build.
I was not trying to escape my convictions.
I was trying to live them with integrity.
And for a long time, that meant doing everything I knew to do with the understanding I had.
What happens when being faithful to what you have been taught begins to require ignoring what you are actually learning?
That is where truth became costly.
Understanding something differently was not enough. Integrity required me to decide whether my behavior would change with my understanding.
WHEN THE TRUTH MOVED, OTHER THINGS MOVED WITH IT.
My marriage changed. My relationship to faith changed. My community changed. My understanding of my sexuality changed. The future I had imagined changed. Some of the relationships I cared about most had to change with it.
Sometimes the truth costs you before it frees you.
02ALIGNMENT
TRUTH AND TRUST
ARE CONNECTED.
People cannot make informed choices about their relationship with you if you are withholding truth they need in order to choose.
That does not mean we always understand ourselves perfectly. I certainly did not.
It means I believe we have a responsibility to be as honest as we know how to be, to remain accountable for what our choices mean for other people, and to keep examining ourselves as our understanding grows.
That is part of what trustworthiness means to me. Not perfection. Not certainty.
ALIGNMENT.
Trying to keep what I say, what I believe, what I understand, and how I behave aligned enough that another person has good reason to believe me.
And when those things fall out of alignment, doing the work to bring them back together.
WHAT I SAY
WHAT I BELIEVE
WHAT I UNDERSTAND
HOW I BEHAVE
ALIGNMENTIt changed how I see other people too.
I became less interested in judging the signal and more interested in understanding what produced it.
look underneath the behavior.
When someone is angry, why?
When someone withdraws, why?
When trust disappears, what happened?
When belonging feels conditional, what taught someone that?
When someone's behavior seems irrational from the outside, what makes it logical from inside their experience?
When a person, community, or organization says one thing but people experience another, which reality is shaping behavior?
03THE BUILDER
Those questions have followed me into nearly everything I have built since. Not because all of my work is the same. Because the human questions underneath it keep showing up.
When something important feels missing, my instinct is usually to build.
Transformation came from a period when I was not simply thinking about transformation. I was living through it.
I have helped create spaces for people navigating questions of faith, identity, belonging, creativity, and what it means to live honestly alongside other human beings.
That same instinct shaped what I called The Gattison Experience: performances that were never just about performing songs. I wanted the performance itself to carry an idea and give people something to encounter.
That instinct eventually produced frameworks around self-understanding, self-love, expression, relationships, trust, and transformation.
Eventually it meant co-founding Icon Element, where questions I had spent years asking about experience, interpretation, belief, trust, and behavior became an organizational discipline.
The scale changed.The instinct did not.
I would see something that mattered, try to understand it, and eventually find myself asking:
WHAT SHOULD
EXIST INSTEAD?
I THINK CREATIVITY IS BIGGER THAN MAKING ART.
To me, creativity is the ability to imagine a reality that does not exist yet and build something that makes that reality more possible.
A song.A community.A framework.An experience.A relationship.A company.
The medium changes. The instinct to build does not.
04INTEGRITY
Conviction should be strong enough to act on and humble enough to be examined.
I am a forever learner. Some of what I believe today is different from what I believed ten or twenty years ago. I do not see that as a failure of conviction.
For me, integrity is not pretending I have never changed. Integrity is trying to keep my behavior aligned with what I have carefully examined and genuinely understand to be true.
And when deeper understanding requires realignment, having the courage to realign.
This is what I believe. This is why I believe it. This is how I am trying to live because of it. And also: I am still willing to ask the question.
My life did not give me all the answers. It taught me to take the questions seriously.
08 / CLOSING
See. Understand.
Love. Build.
Then let what you see, understand, and love change the way you move.
See morehonestly.
Understand moredeeply.
Love moreexpansively.
Buildaccordingly.
01See more honestly.
Be willing to encounter reality beyond what is comfortable, familiar, or convenient.
Notice what is actually happening, not only what you expected to happen.
Ask whether the explanation you are protecting still deserves to be protected.
02Understand more deeply.
Do not stop at the behavior.
Look for the experience underneath it. The interpretation. The belief. The history. The relationship. The conditions that made that behavior make sense.
Understanding does not require agreement. But it gives us a better place from which to choose what happens next.
03Love more expansively.
I do not think love is merely something we feel. Love looks like something.
It changes how we treat people, how willing we are to understand them, how much humanity we allow them when their experience is different from ours, and how we behave when loving someone becomes more complicated than agreeing with them.
04Build accordingly.
Understanding should eventually change something.
A choice. A behavior. A relationship. A system. An organization. Something we create. Something we stop doing. Something that did not exist before.
Because if we see something more honestly and understand it more deeply, but nothing about the way we live changes, I am not sure we have finished the work.
That is how I try to move through the world.
Curious enough to keep asking.
Grounded enough to act.
Humble enough to keep learning.