I grew up on a farm in Ohio. That is where all of this starts.

My parents were not farmers, but they figured it out, which meant the neighbors figured it out with them. That is lesson one: community is not optional. It is survival.

I spent nearly thirty years at The Nature Conservancy, then moved to the UN Global Compact's CEO Water Mandate. The work changed shape over time, from rivers and wetlands to global partnerships and corporate stewardship, but the question never did: how do you get people who see the world differently to stay in the room long enough to decide together?

A few years ago I started building the answer differently. Instead of just convening people, I started building tools to make the systems they work inside actually visible. That became Connecting for Change, a company I co-founded with Sarah Whateley, and a set of software tools that map networks, trace capital flows, and surface governance patterns across sectors like water, conservation, and philanthropy.

I also started writing. The essay series Field Notes on Power, Flow, and Failure applies network analysis to systems most people experience but rarely see the structure of. From how philanthropy actually coordinates (or doesn't) to how geopolitical escalation follows structural fault lines to what a basketball collapse reveals about how teams come apart. The lens is always the same. The subjects are not.

I care about clean water, functional ecosystems, and whether institutions are capable of learning. I believe the future depends on whether people can sit at the same table long enough to argue, disagree, and still make decisions that matter. And I believe that seeing how a system actually works is the first step toward changing it.

I am direct. I write plainly. I don't use jargon when a simpler word exists. I build things, software, coalitions, essays, arguments, because analysis without action is just observation, and action without analysis is just motion.