I see what lives in the room after everyone has said what they came prepared to say.
AWARENESS IS YOUR EDGE.
Right now, that distinction matters more than it has in decades. Organizations are deploying AI at scale and discovering that the technology is the easy part. The failure isn't in the tools. It's in the human layer — the judgment, the cultural wiring, the leadership behavior that no platform can replicate or replace.
I work at that intersection. Where People and Performance meet, and where leaders can either sink their own ships or accelerate their success…those are the waters I navigate.
Twenty years of operating at the highest levels of complex organizations taught me that culture, leadership, and human behavior are not soft variables — they are the variables that determine everything else.
The Practitioner
I spent two decades inside some of the most complex organizational environments in the country. As Chief of Staff for the City of Seattle. As a senior executive at The Nature Conservancy, managing programs at global scale. As a two-term elected official — the first woman to hold my commission seat.
I have led organizational change when the stakes were real: budget crises, restructurings, leadership transitions, and the kind of cultural friction that shows up in every org chart and never gets named in one. I have navigated governance disputes, public accountability, and the particular pressure of decisions that affect thousands of people and cannot be undone.
What I know about culture, leadership, and organizational behavior, I know from operating inside it. Not from researching it, observing it, or theorizing it. That distinction matters to my clients. It should matter to yours.
Right now, that distinction matters more than it has in decades. Organizations are deploying AI at scale and discovering that the technology is the easy part. The failure isn't in the tools. It's in the human layer — the judgment, the cultural wiring, the leadership behavior that no platform can replicate or replace. I work at that intersection. Not as a technologist, and not as an observer. As someone who has been inside these systems when the decisions were real and watched, repeatedly, what breaks and what holds.
Where my methodology comes from…
In 2019, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
What followed was not a wellness journey. It was a rebuilding — complete, systematic, and in some ways ruthless. Surgery. Reconstruction. Every habit reconsidered. Every assumption audited. The practices I deployed during that period — meditation, stoicism, the neuroscience of cognitive performance under stress — were not self-care. They were the tools I used to stay functional when the stakes were my life.
And then something unexpected became clear.
The architecture of personal transformation and the architecture of organizational transformation are the same. The same resistance mechanisms. The same narrative traps. The same need for precise self-awareness as a precondition to change. The same requirement that you deal honestly with what is actually happening — not what you wish were happening, not what the data suggests is happening — before anything real can shift.
That insight is the foundation of Awareness for Impact. I developed this framework when my life depended on getting it right. My life is, without question, better because of what I went through — not in spite of it. And the tools that rebuilt it are the same tools I bring to every senior leader and organization I work with today.
Who I work with:
My clients hold senior leadership roles in complex organizations — Chief People Officers, Executive Directors, Vice Presidents navigating culture and change, and leaders who carry the kind of responsibility that doesn't come with a clear rulebook. They typically come to me after they've tried the standard approaches and found them too slow, too generic, or too far removed from how organizations actually operate.
The common thread is not sector or size. It's that the human layer is where their risk lives — and they need someone who will read the situation accurately, tell them the truth, and help them think clearly under pressure.
Credentials
Prosci Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP)
Stanford University — Artificial Intelligence in Leadership
Two-Term Elected Official — First Female Commissioner in Role
Executive Contributor, Brainz Magazine — 2026 thought leadership series on leadership, AI, and organizational performance.
Signature Keynotes: Awareness for Impact — A rigorous, practitioner-tested framework for high performance under pressure. Built when the stakes were real. Human at the Helm — The specific leadership competencies that determine whether AI implementation succeeds — and the failure modes no technology investment can fix.
Recent Thinking
Human at the Helm and Why Leadership in the Age of AI Starts with Presence, Not Code — Brainz Magazine, June 2025 Organizations are failing at the leadership layer, not the technology layer. Four principles for what must be true about your leaders before the technology can succeed.
Where Humanity Meets Technology — LinkedIn, March 2026 The personal origin story behind the professional framework — and what a moment with my father and an AI assistant clarified about why the human layer cannot be delegated.
Everything The Org Chart Can’t Hold — Brainz Magazine, 2026 Awareness is an organizational performance variable. Here's the research — and the cost of treating it as anything less.
Work With Me
The problems worth solving are rarely the ones that fit neatly into a scope of work. If you are navigating something that requires clarity, speed, and someone who will not manage your perspective — let's talk.
Tell me three things: what you're navigating, what you've already tried, and what success looks like in six months.
