About unBurnt
unBurnt is a research-backed organizational capacity and leadership development practice.
We work with companies navigating the collision of AI transformation, hybrid work, and leadership capacity erosion, at both the system and the individual level.
Because we’re operating in a time where change in how we work and collaborate is happening faster than our human capacity to absorb it. What we don’t need is more skill development on change management. We need white space. We need less friction in the way we collaborate. We need to stabilize the system, while supporting the humans carrying the change.
The Mission
To rebuild capacity and connection in a world that’s burning out.
We exist to give leaders and organizations the capacity to perform and grow, closing the gap between what’s expected and what the conditions actually support
That means:
Giving leaders a path to sustainable performance that doesn't require trading health for ambition
Diagnosing and addressing the predictable workplace conditions that increase burnout and decrease team capacity
Building personal capacity practices that hold up inside real work rhythms, not just outside of them
Moving the conversation about burnout from simply expecting the individual to fix themselves inside a system on overdrive, to a top down and bottom up approach, backed with evidence
HOW WE WORK
Addressing the system without supporting the individual leaves people without the tools to navigate the transition. Addressing the individual without changing the system puts the burden back on people who are already running on empty.
We work at both levels: the operating conditions that create overload and the personal capacity practices that allow leaders to stay clear and effective inside them.
1. System Change: Reshaping the conditions that create overload
That means redesigning rhythms and supporting teams to address the things that drive burnout and limit capacity, including unclear expectations, misalignment in execution, digital noise, and lack of recovery time.
2. Personal Capacity: Restoring access to what helps us perform at our best
When people are supported with practices to build awareness around stress triggers and learn how to restore energy, wellbeing and performance is unlocked, including clarity, creativity, and better decision-making.
The Origin Story
For years, the narrative about work followed the same script. Work harder. Sleep when you're dead. Push through. And if you couldn't? That was your problem to solve. Quietly, privately, and if you were smart, without mentioning it at work.
The real conversations happened in parking lots. In DMs. After the meeting ended and the camera was off. Never in the room where decisions got made.
That gap between what people were actually experiencing and what felt safe to name at work, became the question I couldn't stop thinking about.
Prior, I spent nearly 20 years checking all the boxes I thought I was supposed to check. And for the most part, I genuinely loved it. Finance at Morgan Stanley. Hypergrowth at Wayfair through an IPO. Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy and Analytics at HRTech company, Workhuman. From the outside, it looked like success. It was success.
It was also exhausting in ways I kept telling myself were normal.
But then, a health scare in late 2023 forced me to stop. I ended up in the ER after a board meeting and came out of it needing surgery. The wake-up call wasn't just that news. It was that I had ignored the warning for months. The same signs I had seen in teams I'd led, and yet, I didn’t allow myself to slow down and really see it in myself.
There was also something else.
When I started talking about my experience, carefully at first, I found I wasn't alone. The conversations actually were everywhere, and many coming directly to me.
Leaders, parents, high performers — all quietly running on empty, and none of them feeling safe enough to name it in the places where it would have actually mattered.
Every solution available to them was aimed at the individual. Apps. Resilience training. EAPs. All of it placed the burden of fixing a systems problem on the people being broken by the system.
Nobody was touching the conditions.
That gap became the question unBurnt was built to answer.
Alison Campbell Founder, unBurnt | Executive in Residence, Bentley University Center for Health and Business
Author: When Burnout Looks Like Productivity: The New Risk to Innovation Capacity (2026), Former Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy + Analytics, nearly 20 years across finance (Morgan Stanley), eCommerce (Wayfair pre-IPO), and HRTech (Workhuman)
SBA-certified Women-Owned Small Business | Certified Health and Wellness Coach, AFPA | Connect on LinkedIn
Our Research
We designed a study with Bentley University's Center for Health and Business of 544 full-time professionals across 15 industries to move past describing burnout and start diagnosing the structural conditions driving it.
What we found: burnout is the strongest predictor of declining innovation capacity, and this loss of capacity is happening even while visible signs of activity remain high.
The implication: We’ve been relying on outward signs of busyness as a measure of progress when actually it could just be a false positive. Instead, we need to treat burnout risk as not just a wellbeing risk, but performance and business risk signal as well.
