About

I help leaders see the pattern they are standing inside.

I work with leaders who are carrying a situation that has become hard to hold alone.

The public language for that work lives elsewhere on this site:
Responsibility without Authority
Hidden Load, and
Leading, Rescuing, or Absorbing

This page is more simply about the path that brought me here.

I learned to notice what was happening in a room.

Long before I had a professional vocabulary for systems or group dynamics, I was paying attention to the emotional weather of groups. Some rooms made space. Some tightened quickly. Sometimes a small shift in how one or two people showed up changed what seemed possible for everyone else.

Later, I attended an international school with students from sixty-two countries. That experience made it difficult to hold onto easy ideas about how people should be. Culture, history, religion, language, politics, and family background shaped how people made sense of the same events. What connected people was not necessarily agreement. It was the willingness to stay present long enough to understand what mattered to someone else.

I did not know then that this would become part of my work. I only knew that the visible conversation was rarely the whole conversation.

Software taught me to wait for the pattern.

Before I became a coach, I spent twelve years designing custom software systems for organizations. The work required long conversations with people from different parts of a company, each of whom had a partial view of how the work was supposed to happen.

There were moments in those meetings when people became disoriented. They could not yet see the shape of the system, or why I was asking the questions I was asking. I learned to stay with that uncertainty. By the final hours, the pattern would often come together and people could recognize both the structure of the work and the places where their assumptions did not fit.

That experience gave me confidence that confusion is not always a sign that something is going wrong. Sometimes it is what it feels like before the parts of a situation can be seen together.

The personal and professional directions began to meet.

In my thirties, my divorce made it clear that I did not understand myself as well as I thought I did. That period led me toward organizational constellations, trauma-informed NLP, and other forms of developmental work. It changed the kind of attention I brought to my own life and to groups.

At roughly the same time, I was watching organizations use technology to make strained ways of working more efficient. Software could formalize a workaround, capture a process, or accelerate a handoff without resolving the human patterns that had made the process strained in the first place.

I eventually left a successful technical career to work more directly with those patterns through coaching, facilitation, leadership development, and systemic practice. It was not a rejection of systems or technology. It was a move closer to the human conditions that decide whether a system can become workable.

I work where personal experience and organizational reality meet.

For more than 20 years, I have worked with leaders, teams, and organizations through growth, conflict, change, and complexity. I have worked with startups, mid-sized companies, family-owned businesses, professional services firms, and Fortune 500 environments.

My background includes software design, facilitation, leadership development, executive coaching, systemic coaching, organizational constellations, and long involvement in the Bay Area agile community. I also use AI as a reflective thinking partner when it helps someone put a complicated situation outside themselves long enough to see it differently.

The practical shape of the work is described on Services Page. We begin with one live situation and make enough of the pattern visible to support a cleaner move. The methods vary; the situation decides what kind of attention is useful.

Sailing keeps me in contact with reality.

Outside of work, I race sailboats on San Francisco Bay. The wind changes, the boat gives feedback, and everyone has to coordinate without anyone controlling the whole situation.

It is a good reminder that a clearer reading of conditions does not make the conditions simple. It does make a better move more possible.

Bring one situation.

If a leadership situation keeps looping in your mind, that is enough to begin. We can use one conversation to see whether a Situation Clarity Map, a deeper coaching container, or another next step fits the situation.