Go beyond planning for change
to being the change --
together
Download or view a 4-page overview of Jen and her work here:
As a leader, do you feel like standard management practices and meeting norms frustrate (and/or bore) people while getting poor results?
Jen supports leaders and groups looking for effective ways to take themselves, their work, and their organizations or networks beyond what is often deemed possible.​
Instead of creating static plans that don't evolve with the times, Jen supports groups to listen, quickly find common ground, strengthen relationships for the tough conversations, co-create strategy that lives within them (not just a binder), and to learn, adapt, and improve together.
Jen works with governments, tribes, nonprofits, and multi-sector collaboratives facing challenges where traditional approaches have stalled.
Recent projects include a small City's reinvention by community and staff, supporting on-the-ground practitioners to upgrade state wildfire and forest resilience strategy, supporting departments across a California county to build and put to work climate resilience strategy, regional tribal economic development collaboration, co-creative state master planning with remote rural communities, and a variety of organizational culture and strategy transformation projects.
By creating the conditions for groups to bridge diverse interests and complex power dynamics, seemingly impossible goals become achievable results.
Experience
Jen brings rare cross-sector expertise
and vision-to-implementation savvy
to support innovating leaders
going after bold results.
She puts her diverse background, degrees, and 35+ years of experience to work with motivated, pragmatic change-makers.
Jen helps us become better humans, leaders, teams, organizations, networks, and communities while we work -- rather than through trainings or static strategic planning retreats that are disconnected from the day-to-day.
To every project, Jen brings experience in collaborative innovation, complex project development and funding, team-, leadership- and capacity-building, rural and Native communities engagement, community planning, strategic organizational evolution, relational community organizing, community philanthropy, human-centered design, ecosystem management... and more.
Client Testimonials
WHY EFFECTIVE LEADERS ARE REINVENTING HOW THEY WORK
Traditional planning, engagement, and collaborative approaches often fail in today’s complex operating environment.
What Jen calls "standard operating turbulence" has become the norm, so we need to adjust trusty old mindsets, tools, and frameworks, accordingly.
Groups that listen carefully, then co-create shared purpose and strategy so they can operate adaptively get next-level results.
Complex socio-environmental challenges exceed familiar leadership, strategic, and collaboration constraints. ​​
Leaders need to learn and practice new mindsets, tools, and norms to successfully navigate what has become standard operating turbulence. ​
The way we work needs to simultaneously improve our ability to collaborate, adapt, and get results -- while we work.
Consider: when best-laid plans go sideways or strategy remains shelved, is it usually due to technical elements, or human elements?
We often let urgency drive a focus on the technical, missing opportunities to transform teams, organizations, and communities.
One-off retreats or public/collaborative workshops often lack productive outcomes.
Groups that iterate co-creation of agreements, strategy, and experiments co-own and LIVE the plan... far beyond just giving input to it and shelving it.
Jen has lived, led, learned, experimented, and adapted her way through the challenges we face. She loves supporting innovative leaders to do the same.