People-Centered Strategy that doesn’t take all day

Most Organizations don't have a Strategy problem.

They have an understanding problem.

A flowchart titled "The Understanding Deficit Cycle" explains seven steps: 1. Pressure to deliver, 2. Less time for reflection, 3. Reduced understanding, 4. Poor decisions, 5. More rework and conflict, 6. More pressure to deliver, 7. Even less time for reflection. The right side lists challenges faced by organizations, such as constant urgency, repeated mistakes, meeting overload, stakeholder frustration, change fatigue, and reactive decision-making. A note at the bottom states everyone is working hard but nobody has time to understand what's happening.

Most organizations are trapped in an action cycle.

Action becomes the default response to every problem: More meetings. More deliverables. More surveys. More initiatives. More change.

But action without understanding creates more complexity than it resolves.

What breaks the cycle?

Diagram showing three organizational states: chaos with tangled lines and warning symbols representing insufficient understanding, reactive decisions, and constant urgency; hamster wheel with a hamster running inside a wheel indicating high activity, high output, low learning, and recurring problems; understanding with three people by a lighthouse symbolizing shared context, informed decisions, and purposeful action.

Intentional understanding happens through:

research
observation
conversation
documentation
reflection
synthesis

But who has time For That?

Creating understanding has to be an organizational capability, not a one-time occurrence. And it is easier to do than you might imagine.

Innovation, modernization, AI adoption, employee experience, customer experience, and strategy are all outcomes of this shift rather than the primary goal.

I want to help you move from activity to understanding - and back again. Every day. Seamlessly and together, as a team.

Flowchart illustrating the process of information, meaning, and movement, with icons of a file folder with documents, a human head with a heart, and a paper airplane, labeled with explanations of organizations collecting data, people creating meaning, and meaning enabling movement.

Here are a few of my favorite examples of how this looks IRL. Each past project vignette includes the organization type, primary research question, a few key methods, and the outcome.

My Past Work

A clinician sits at a desk looking at papers.

Non-profit mental healthcare provider focusing on East Africa

How do we deliver our clinical services in a scalable, client-centered way?

Interviews
Focus groups
Co-design

Guiding principles
Documentation & Reporting
Training

The engagement equipped the organization to build its own qualitative research team, positioning them for upcoming pilot and RCT work.

Two women from different generations look at each other.

Early-stage mental healthcare start-up in Minneapolis, MN

Is there a market for preventative mental healthcare and how can potential clients afford it?

Market assessment
Impact & cost modeling
Pilot & scaling models

Resource allocation
Go-to-market planning
Pitching & business development

Prototyping data and reports from the engagement opened talks for nationwide piloting with a pharmacy chain.

Multinational consumer brand and their university partner

How do we support our employees in learning about sustainability and becoming active contributors?

Interviews
Surveys & descriptive statistics
Co-design

Guiding principles
Wireframing & mockups
Roadmaps

The online course for employees was redesigned, improving engagement and learning comprehension to increase completion rates by 66%.

Conservation non-profit with a focus on human-wildlife conflict in East Africa

How can we distribute a product we have found to be effective in improving conservation outcomes?

Interviews
Prototyping
Co-design

Pilot & scaling models
Impact & cost modeling
Go-to-market plan

They went from a product idea to a financially viable market-ready brand with a distribution strategy.

Where I like to work

I'm drawn to organizations working to understand and respond to the people they serve, and to teams that treat capacity-building as central. A few areas I care about most:

Minimalist black line art on white background, resembling a face with two eyes and a mouth.

Advocacy organization in Northern California

Community advocacy and policy work — especially participatory action research (PAR) and other community-based methods that move toward policy change.

Minimalist black line drawing on a white background, with a small green circle at the top right corner.

AI-native company

AI and product teams working on how a system maps, understands, and responds to the people using it — building relational intelligence into the model itself.

Simple line drawing of three abstract, curved and straight lines within a square grid.

Food, restaurant, or nutrition company

I've spent over ten years working in restaurants and have a deep love for the industry. I'd love to bring my research and design skills to projects focused on food access, nutrition education, or the guest experience.

A black and white wall clock with minimalist design, rectangular shape, and simple hour and minute hands.

School or university

Teaching courses related to modern approaches to mixed-methods, relational research.