My Intention

I am fundamentally optimistic about people. What I have experienced through art, through the institutions I have worked with, and through the most challenging experiences of my own life tells me this: people and institutions generally move toward the light. Even under serious stress, most of us work hard to make things better for ourselves and those around us. It is an expression of our life force.

When the movement toward the light is underway, we tend to move toward the clearest possible articulation of our goals. Artists describe this as each piece of work drawing closer to their central preoccupation — more simply, more directly. Institutions do the same, even when internal and external forces complicate the path. We are fundamentally rational, and we seek the most straightforward route toward betterment.

My theory of change follows from this. If we have a clear sense of our goal, and a clear view of the most direct paths to achieve it, we will take that path. We will organize ourselves in service of it.

And the real measure of whether institutions are doing their job well is the lived experience of the people interacting with them.

The work I do builds tools to help institutions clarify these pathways. They are rooted in math and economics, but they apply to deeply human questions: how we organize, how we interact, what our choices cost and what they enable. The three frameworks — Experience Economics, Capacity Economics, and Branded Economics — are each a different way of asking the same underlying question: what does it actually take for this institution to do its job well?

The work concentrates across several domains: healthcare, including northern and Indigenous health systems where the conventional capacity math produces wrong answers; fundraising, where experience and storytelling determine economics; performing arts, where brand and audience economics determine the ability to tell important stories; and public services, where the gap between mandate and delivery is expressed as capacity challenges in spite of funding levels. Reconciliation runs through all of it.