About Zera
Clarity under pressure is not a soft skill.
It's a leadership requirement—and one most systems fail to support.
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We understand leadership under pressure.
Pressure reliably exposes the same failure patterns in leaders and organizations, reducing leaders' and systems' adaptive capacity.​ When adaptability breaks down, the consequences reverberate across an organization.​
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​​Most leadership frameworks overlook how behavior shifts under pressure. They focus on traits, skills, or intentions. These frameworks often fail to capture how leaders and systems actually operate when stakes are high, decisions compound, coordination strains, and uncertainty increases.
Zera focuses on observable patterns of adaptation.
​​We prioritize how decisions are made, how relationships are navigated, and how systems respond as complexity increases. This lens directs attention away from what leaders say about themselves and toward how leaders work in real conditions.
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By making leaders' patterns visible, Zera offers a more reliable foundation for understanding and developing leadership capacity than self-report, intention, or isolated feedback alone.
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This perspective shapes what we measure, how we build development, and how adaptive capacity is sustained over time.
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Where Our Perspective Comes From
Our perspective is shaped by repeated exposure to how leadership systems behave under pressure.
​Across academic institutions, government, and small businesses, we’ve seen the same pattern surface when organizations encounter real strain—shifts in business models, growth pressure, funding constraints, mergers, or structural change.
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In these moments, capable leaders often become unmoored. Decision-making narrows. Authority either hardens into top-down control or dissolves into avoidance. At the same time, the systems meant to support collaboration, judgment, and execution stop working in the ways the organization now requires.
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Zera exists because we’ve watched different tools and interventions applied to these situations—often with effort and good intent—yet produce the same outcomes under pressure. Our approach is built from studying those breakdowns directly and designing for what organizations actually need when adaptation is no longer optional.
The Founding Team
Zera was founded by leaders who have spent their careers at the intersection of strategy, human behavior, and complex systems:
We've seen environments where mistakes are costly and clarity is scarce first hand.
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Yael Freimann
Yael is a strategist and organizational advisor focused on how leaders and systems operate under pressure. Her work centers on helping organizations move beyond surface-level change to address the underlying patterns that shape decision-making, behavior, and culture when stakes are real.
Yael’s perspective is shaped by years of advising senior leaders across sectors where complexity, credibility, and consequences matter. She brings a conviction that leadership development must be grounded in how people actually think, regulate, and respond under pressure, not how we wish they would.
Across this work, Yael has seen how even well-intentioned leaders struggle when adaptive capacity hasn’t been deliberately built.
Beth Nastachowski
Beth brings deep experience in organizational leadership, facilitation, and applied development. Her work focuses on translating insight into action, helping leaders and teams engage difficult conversations, recalibrate when systems become stuck, and sustain growth as conditions change.
Beth’s contribution to Zera reflects a practical understanding of how trust, relationships, and systems interact under strain. She ensures that Zera’s work remains usable inside real organizations, where progress depends on alignment, timing, and the ability to move forward under pressure.
Much of Beth's experience comes from contexts where misalignment, rigidity, or poor judgment carries real organizational risk.
Zeve Marcus
Zeve contributes expertise in applied analytics, systems design, and the translation of complex data into clear, usable insight. His work supports the rigor and integrity of Zera Compass, ensuring that adaptive capacity is measured and interpreted in ways leaders can trust.
Zeve’s role reflects Zera’s commitment to precision over complexity building tools that reveal meaningful patterns without obscuring them behind technical noise or abstract metrics.
Zeve's work has focused on organizations operating under sustained complexity, where leadership decisions are visible, consequential, and difficult to reverse.
Who We Work With
Zera works with organizations where trust, rigor, and credibility matter because decisions are scrutinized and consequences
are real.
​We’re most effective in environments where:
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Environments where decisions are visible, consequential, and difficult to reverse
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Systems experiencing sustained complexity rather than short-term disruption
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Organizations where coordination breakdowns carry real operational or relational cost
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Contexts where intuition and experience are no longer sufficient guides
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Situations where credibility, rigor, and trust materially affect outcomes
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Teams operating under external scrutiny, regulatory constraint, or reputational risk
If your leadership challenges show up under pressure, we created Zera for you.
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We start with measurement because without clarity, development efforts are guided by assumption rather than evidence.
Most organizations begin with Zera Compass, using it to understand:
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where rigidity is limiting decisions
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where adaptability is already present
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where intervention will matter and where it won’t
Clarity from Compass is what allows for meaningful development, interruption, and sustainment in the larger Zera Method.