How I work
There's a moment in almost every organization I've worked in where something is clearly working, but nobody can explain why. The person who built it left, or it grew past the point where any one person holds the whole picture, or it was never designed, just accumulated. My job, whatever the title says, is to walk into that and make it explainable, then repeatable, then measurable, in that order.
Five principles
Four frameworks
Each one exists because a principle above kept needing the same tool.
The Why Game
Root cause drilling and process capture.
Ask why repeatedly until the real cause of a problem appears. Map the chain of events from trigger to outcome. Use the chain to build SOPs and prevention mechanisms, and document it so future team members can diagnose issues independently.
The event that started it.
The immediate cause.
The cause behind that one.
Keep going until the answer stops changing.
The thing that, fixed, prevents the whole chain.
Written so the next person can diagnose it without me.
Automation-First Ops Design
Reduce manual review time. Standardize touchpoints.
Reduce manual review time.
Every recurring review step is a candidate to be checked by a system first and a person second.
Standardize operational touchpoints.
The same event triggers the same action every time, whoever is on shift.
Applied in Sales capacity automation and in Sprout, the IASourceLink chatbot.
Stakeholder Map & Cadence
Who needs what, when, and why.
- Who
- Every stakeholder, with their decision authority noted.
- What
- The specific information each one needs to act.
- When
- On a cadence they can predict, not when someone remembers.
- Why
- So alignment is designed in rather than assumed.
Applied in Managing a 400+ government stakeholder ecosystem.
Era-Based Planning
Milestones with rationale gating.
I plan growth as a sequence of eras. Each transition requires evidence that the team earned progression, not just a calendar date. The gate is the point.
Each gate is a written rationale: what has to be true before the next era starts. Applied in Era-based strategic planning.