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. It isn't a crisis and it isn't a reinvention. 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.

Most problems in work technology don't show up as crises. They show up as stretches where the results and the explanations stop matching.

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's behind it

I'm Lance Haun. I've spent the better part of two decades in work technology as a journalist, editor, analyst, and marketer, on both the media side and the vendor side. Beacon Turn, started in 2026, is the independent version of all of it. It's intentionally small and mostly referral-driven, and I like it that way.

I write The Turnmost Tuesdays and cover the industry at Reworked. I live in Vancouver, Washington, which explains the rock.