How I think about
organizations and change
Strategy consulting is full of frameworks that treat organizations as machines: pull lever A, get output B. I work from a different premise. Organizations are living systems, adaptive, relational, and shaped by the ecosystems they inhabit. The work is to understand that system before presuming to improve it.
Strategy as metabolism
The metaphor I return to most often is metabolic. A healthy organism carries more than a plan. It has the capacity to sense changes in its environment, process them, and respond with intention. Organizations that thrive over time have built that same adaptive capacity into their structure, culture, and leadership.
Most strategic planning fails for a reason that has little to do with the plan itself. The organization lacks the metabolic infrastructure to act on it. The plan sits on a shelf. The board retreats to its comfort zone. The staff runs out of bandwidth. Nothing changes.
My work addresses both problems at once. I build plans that are genuinely grounded in the organization's reality, and I build the organizational capacity to carry them out.
A strategy is only as real as the capacity to act on it.
What shapes every engagement
Systems thinking
Connections over componentsBefore recommending any structural change, I map the connections between governance, culture, finance, programs, and community relationships. The presenting problem usually turns out to be a symptom of a dynamic playing out somewhere else in the system.
That means early engagements involve a lot of listening and mapping before any advising. A board that cannot make decisions might have a structural problem, a trust problem, a role-clarity problem, or a leadership problem. Diagnosing which one requires understanding the whole.
Governance depth
Structure as strategyStrong boards are a strategic asset. Too many organizations treat governance as a compliance exercise and leave that asset unused. I bring deep policy knowledge and practical board experience, as Co-Chair of Strategy at the Pride Center of Vermont and Board Chair of Chittenden Housing Corporation, to governance work. I have sat in the chair. I understand what boards actually struggle with and how to help them get there.
Governance design is about more than policy. It is about helping a group of people understand what they are collectively responsible for, how they will make decisions together, and how they will hold themselves accountable over time. That is the work.
Appreciative inquiry
Assets over deficitsI begin with a forensic look at what is already working: the relationships worth strengthening, the programs with real momentum, the leaders quietly carrying more than they should. These are the assets a strategy should build on.
Appreciative inquiry is a rigorous methodology. It consistently produces more durable change than deficit-focused approaches, because it builds on energy an organization already has.
Emergent strategy
Plans that learnPlans change. Funders shift priorities. Leaders turn over. A global pandemic arrives. The organizations that navigate these moments well are not the ones with the most detailed strategic plans. They are the ones whose plans were built with explicit decision points, learning loops, and permission to adapt.
I build scaffolding around key funder relationships, partnership decisions, and strategic pivots, so that when circumstances change, the organization has a process for responding rather than starting from scratch. Emergence is structured flexibility, a way to hold direction while the ground keeps moving.
Ecosystem mapping
Context as strategyNo organization exists in isolation. Understanding the funders, partners, peer organizations, policy environments, and community relationships that surround an organization is essential to understanding what it can realistically accomplish, and where the real opportunities are.
Ecosystem mapping is how I help organizations see their place in the larger system: who they are accountable to, who depends on them, where there are gaps only they can fill, and where there are redundancies worth examining. It is what turns a list of partners into a real coalition strategy.
Strategic metabolism
Built to adaptThis is the thread that connects everything else. An organization with strong governance, a realistic strategy, an appreciative culture, and a clear sense of its ecosystem still needs the internal capacity to act, to sense when something is changing, process what it means, and respond before it becomes a crisis.
Building that metabolic capacity means developing the right internal rhythms: board cycles that produce decisions, staff structures that can absorb leadership transitions, financial practices that create flexibility rather than fragility. This is what organizational resilience actually looks like, built from the inside out.
The frameworks at the core of the practice
Each reads the distance between the organization an institution represents itself to be and the one it actually operates as, and each turns that reading into a move. The Currency Index reads power inside a single organization. Ecosystem Cartography is the same read across a whole field. The Crisis-to-Clarity Arc is the applied engine for stabilization, and it runs on the Currency Index. All three sit under strategic metabolism.
One idea, worked at two scales: power inside an organization, and power across a field.
The Organizational Currency Index
Inside one organizationA framework for reading how change actually moves through an organization.
An org chart tells you who is supposed to be able to make things happen. It rarely tells you who actually can. The Currency Index reads the full set of value an organization holds and spends, so you can predict how an idea will travel, who has to spend something for it to live, and who can stop it at no cost. A map names the currencies an organization runs on. An index reads how any one of them moves.
The six currencies
PoliticalFinancialSocialKnowledgeNarrativeOperational
Kept in balance, the six produce what outlasts any single leader: longevity, institutional knowledge, network resilience, cultural legitimacy, reputation, and emotional connection.
The index: how it was acquired, where it holds value
A currency held formally and one held informally do not spend the same way, which is exactly why the org chart misses the second kind.
The read, in three moves
Name the currency the change requires. Most changes need more than authority. A program redesign needs cultural capital. A new funding strategy needs external development capital that no internal memo can supply.
Locate where each currency sits. Map the currencies onto people. The finding that matters is usually the person holding a great deal of currency in a quadrant where they hold no title.
Find the fatal gap. Look for the currency a change needs that its sponsor does not have. That is where sound plans die, and once it is visible you can route around it.
The Crisis-to-Clarity Arc
When an organization is in crisisA stabilization sequence that brings an organization's two versions back together.
Every organization keeps two versions of itself. One is the represented organization: the bylaws and the org chart, the official story of who is in charge and how money moves. The other is the operating organization, where decisions actually get made and power actually sits. A crisis is what happens when the two come apart. The Arc is the sequence you run to reunite them. Its mechanism is assess, realign, clarify.
Assess and stabilize. Stop the bleeding and learn what is true. Financial triage, recovered access and records, and a power read underneath it all: the Currency Index run under pressure.
Realign. Reset who holds authority and how it is exercised. Governance and personnel, repaired structures, the right controls, and outside pressure where formal authority has failed.
Clarify. Establish what the organization actually is and where it goes next. Legal and structural footing settled, and a forward direction it can carry.
The phases overlap and the arc doubles back, but the dependency order holds. The one discipline that matters most is to resist the urge to realign first. The first move is always to learn what is true.
Ecosystem Cartography
Across a whole fieldThe Currency Index read at the scale of an entire field.
It goes past a roster of who occupies a space to a read of how the field actually works: who holds the currencies in it, where resources and referrals and trust flow, and where the field is thin, blocked, or redundant. It maps power and flow across a sector, carrying the same represented-versus-operating signature that the Currency Index brings to a single organization.
What earns the word cartography
Power is the payload. The field is weighted by where influence and resources concentrate, who is structurally load-bearing, and who can convene or block.
Ground-truthed. The rosters are surveyed and verified, built town by town across counties, so the map stays current instead of leaning on a funder's memory.
Ecological primitives. The map uses real ecological terms, a vocabulary sharper than "stakeholders" and coherent with the rest of the practice.
It ends in a move. The map lands on a gap you can act on, whether that is who to recruit, what to fund, or where to intervene. It is built to be used.
The primitives
- Niches
- the functional role each actor fills
- Gaps
- niches nobody fills
- Redundancy
- niches too many fill
- Keystone actors
- disproportionate structural weight
- Thin spots
- one departure from failing
- Flows
- dollars, referrals, information, trust
Curiosity, coherence, collaboration, clarity
Four qualities run through every engagement. They are the throughline of how the work moves, from the first conversation to a direction you can carry forward. I work as a flat-fee retainer partner, with no billable hours, no scope-creep negotiations, and no surprise invoices.
The work starts with deep listening. Before any recommendation, I work to understand where your organization actually is, beneath what the plan or the org chart claims. That includes ad-hoc advisory for your board and senior leaders as questions arise, without billing for every conversation.
A planning process, a crisis, or a crowded field of choices can feel like noise. My job is to make sense of it, to find the throughline in the chaos and turn an overwhelming set of decisions into a clear set of questions the organization can actually answer.
We do this together, out loud. I work in the open so the thinking is visible as it forms, which is how an organization arrives at alignment. Alignment is a shared, durable understanding of what comes next that the whole organization can carry, which is a sturdier thing than everyone agreeing on everything.
Clarity is the point of the work. It is the ability to see the context and conditions shaping your organization, deeply and broadly, and to feel affirmed in the direction you have chosen. It is what lets you move forward without being pulled off course by chaos or noise.
Engagements typically run three to twelve months, structured as flat-fee retainers.
Six settler generations in Vermont, and nineteen years working across the sector both inside the state and well beyond it, mean I understand the nonprofit and civic landscape you are operating in before we have had our first meeting. The relationships, the funders, the political dynamics, the conditions on the ground. Much of it is terrain I have already worked.
That grounding travels. My work has reached national foundations, funder collaboratives, and organizations across the country, so I bring a close read of Vermont alongside a wider view of how the field operates elsewhere. When I connect you to a partner, advise on a funder, or weigh a governance model, I am usually drawing on both.
Depth in one place and range across many are what make strategy durable.
Ready to think through what your organization needs?
I work best with organizations at a consequential moment: a transition, a relaunch, a question that will not go away. Let's talk about whether this is the right fit.
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