I help institutions see how influence, trust, coordination, and decision-making actually move through complex systems, and what that means for strategy.
Most engagements begin with a thin slice. A targeted pass on a specific system, institution, coalition, or strategic question using publicly available data. IRS filings, governance records, stakeholder networks, public signals, organizational relationships. Just enough to surface patterns and see whether the structure tells a story worth going deeper on.
Often the first thing that emerges is a gap between how the system is formally described and how it actually behaves under pressure.
From there, the work builds. The analysis can scale from dozens to thousands of actors. Each project adds to a layered dataset rather than starting from scratch. The result is faster insight and something cumulative rather than purely transactional.
What comes out is not simply a report. It is a clearer picture of the system itself: where leverage sits, who occupies bridging positions, where fragmentation exists, where coordination quietly fails, and what those patterns imply for strategy and action.
I do not just analyze systems. I build the instruments.
Most organizations already generate enormous amounts of structural information. The challenge is that the patterns are buried across disconnected filings, governance structures, relationships, funding flows, and public signals. The tools help surface the system hiding underneath.
Parses federal filings to map funding landscapes and institutional relationships. Reveals where philanthropic capital overlaps, fragments, or concentrates across ecosystems.
Maps professional networks, governance overlaps, and institutional relationships. Helps identify brokers, bridge-builders, influential actors, and hidden coordination pathways across organizations and sectors.
The interpretation layer. Combines structural analysis, network metrics, and human-readable reporting to explain what the system is doing, not just what the data says.
These tools emerged from a practical problem. Most systems are too complex to understand through intuition alone, but too human to understand through metrics alone.
The goal is not simply more data. It is better visibility into how systems actually function.
This work lives at Connecting for Change, the company I co-founded with Sarah Whateley.
WWF and GlobeScan wanted to understand how people talk about water and how to make those conversations more connected, inclusive, and impactful. We analyzed Twitter and LinkedIn data during the UN 2023 Water Conference and World Water Week to understand how conversations were shaped and who was driving them.
Vitamin Angels helps mothers and young children get the vitamins and nutrients they need to grow up healthy. They wanted to identify new corporate partners across sectors. We used network and sentiment analysis to look at over 1,200 companies and how they are connected.
A directional scan of environmental grantmaking across the Great Lakes basin. Despite significant investment, the ecosystem showed almost no structural overlap. Few shared grantees, limited governance connections, and largely discrete portfolios.
Multi-stakeholder water management, where regulators, farmers, utilities, and environmental groups each held different pieces of the picture.
Coastal fish habitat restoration across multiple states, bridging federal agencies, state wildlife departments, and conservation nonprofits.
The perspective behind this work was built over decades moving between fieldwork, watershed conflict, coalition governance, public policy, and global institutional partnerships.
At The Nature Conservancy, that meant everything from frozen rivers and dam removals to basin strategy, stakeholder negotiation, and state water policy. Later, through the CEO Water Mandate at the United Nations Global Compact, the work expanded into corporate water stewardship, global coalitions, institutional partnerships, and systems operating at international scale.
Over time, the same pattern kept appearing across sectors and scales: the formal structure and the lived structure were often not the same thing.
The analytical tools and frameworks emerged later as a way to make those hidden patterns more visible, and therefore more actionable.