I have spent much of my life moving between the edges of systems and the institutions that govern them.

I grew up on a farm in rural Ohio. My parents were not farmers. They were looking for a different kind of life, and like most people who move to a small town without fully understanding what they are getting into, they learned quickly that survival depended on other people.

Neighbors showed up. They shared tools, knowledge, labor, and time. Problems that looked individual turned out to be collective. That lesson stayed with me long before I had language like systems thinking or network dynamics to describe it.

Years later, I found myself crawling across frozen rivers in upstate New York collecting winter water samples because there was no one else available to do it. I spent long nights in labs improvising scientific equipment out of plastic tubing, fish tank aerators, and whatever else I could find. I sat in town halls where people who fundamentally disagreed with each other still had to figure out how to share water, risk, responsibility, and a future.

Over nearly three decades at The Nature Conservancy, I moved constantly between those worlds. Rivers and boardrooms. Local conflict and state policy. Community meetings and multi-state coalitions. Eventually, global partnerships through the UN Global Compact's CEO Water Mandate.

The scale changed, but the underlying problem rarely did.

Most systems do not fail because people are not trying. They fail because the people inside them cannot fully see how the system actually works.

Where the formal structure and the lived structure are no longer the same thing.

Over time, I realized my work was less about water itself and more about connective tissue: helping people operating at different scales understand the larger systems they are part of and the relationships that hold those systems together.

I started building tools to make hidden structures visible. Network maps. Governance analysis. Tools that reveal how organizations actually work, not just how they appear on paper.

Eventually this became Connecting for Change, the company I co-founded with Sarah Whateley, where we combine systems strategy, network analysis, and practical tools to help organizations navigate complexity across water, conservation, philanthropy, infrastructure, and public systems.

I also started writing more publicly. The essays in Field Notes on Power, Flow, and Failure explore the same patterns I encountered throughout my career: how institutions coordinate, how systems fracture under pressure, how trust erodes, how narratives spread, and why some groups are able to act collectively while others drift apart despite good intentions.

The subjects vary. Water governance. Philanthropy. Geopolitics. Sports. The lens remains the same.

I have spent much of my life moving between the edges of systems and the institutions that govern them. Fieldwork and policy. Local knowledge and global strategy. Communities and corporations. Data and lived reality.

The work now is helping make those structures visible enough for people to make better decisions inside them.

I still believe what I learned early on: community is not optional. Survival is still collective.

Most people I work with already sense something is off in their system. They can feel it before they can name it. My work usually begins in that gap, between sensing and seeing.

I build things: software, coalitions, essays, games, arguments. Analysis without action is just observation, and action without analysis is just motion.

The point is to make the structure visible, then make it workable: who is connected, where trust lives, where influence moves, and where coordination is quietly breaking down.