Guiding institutions through human-AI transformation
Current Work
I’m a Director at Guidehouse, where I help organizations redesign not just their technology, but the organizational structures, skills, and cultures needed to make that technology actually work.
Most organizations approach AI adoption backward. They bolt AI onto broken workflows, wonder why 71% of pilots fail to scale, and blame the technology. The real challenge isn’t technical—it’s organizational. Technology changes in months; organizations change in years. Bridging that gap requires simultaneous co-design of both.
That’s what Technology Organization Transformation addresses: the human side of technological change.
How I Got Here
I came to this work through an unusual path. I arrived at the University of Cincinnati as a classical cellist, expecting to spend my career performing. But a documentary about human rights abuses in Africa changed my trajectory. I found myself asking: how could I justify spending $200,000 on an instrument and focusing entirely inward when there was so much good I could do in the world?
I never came up with a good answer.
So I designed my own degree focused on cross-cultural communication, earned a certificate in international human rights, and began building a career in public service. I became the first student in University of Cincinnati history to be a dual finalist for both the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships—not because I was exceptional, but because I’d found something worth working toward.
That decision led to sixteen years at the U.S. Department of State, where I eventually served as Chief Operating Officer for Public Diplomacy.
State Department: Transformation at Scale
In that role, I managed a $1.5 billion budget and a 5,000-person global organization spanning 170+ embassies and consulates. I led the State Department’s Public Diplomacy Modernization—restructuring teams worldwide and establishing the first doctrine for how the United States practices public diplomacy.
The modernization work taught me something crucial: large-scale transformation isn’t primarily a technology problem or a process problem. It’s a habits and mindsets problem. You can deploy the best platforms in the world, but if you don’t change how people work together, you’ve just spent a lot of money on expensive shelfware.
We built systems that shifted the orientation from resource management to organizational transformation. We created the first shared planning frameworks, the first doctrine aligning training with practice, and the first data infrastructure that connected previously siloed operations. The Research and Evaluation Unit I founded helped practitioners use evidence to make better decisions—a surprisingly radical concept in government.
For this work, I received the Sean Smith Award for Innovation in the Use of Technology.
What I’ve Learned
Twenty years of transformation work—including scaling teams from 4 to 40 people and budgets from $500,000 to $10 million—taught me patterns that apply across contexts:
Systematic approaches beat ad-hoc efforts, but those systems must be practical. The best framework in the world is useless if it doesn’t fit how people actually work. I’ve watched too many transformation initiatives fail because they optimized for elegance over adoption.
Stakeholder engagement is crucial, but it must be strategic. You can’t bring everyone along at once. Identifying the right sequence—who needs to be convinced, who needs to be involved, who needs to be informed—is often the difference between success and stagnation.
Evidence-based decision making beats intuition, but evidence alone doesn’t change minds. Data tells you what happened; stories tell you why it matters. Effective transformation requires both.
Technology changes fast; organizations change slow. The organizations that succeed in the AI era won’t be the ones that adopt the newest tools first. They’ll be the ones that build the organizational capacity to continuously adapt as tools evolve.
Affiliations
I’m a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Founding Curator of the Washington DC hub of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community. I’ve served as an Agenda Contributor for the World Economic Forum, writing about the future of education and work.
In 2012, the Diplomatic Courier and Young Professionals in Foreign Policy named me one of the 99 most influential foreign policy leaders under 33.
The Cello Still Matters
I never entirely left music behind. I’ve performed at the Kennedy Center and as a soloist with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. The cello taught me something that applies to everything I do now: mastery comes from deliberate practice, not just repetition. And the best performances—like the best transformations—require both technical excellence and genuine human connection.
How I Work
I believe that most organizational transformation challenges are fundamentally habits and mindsets problems rather than technology issues. My approach emphasizes building collective capabilities rather than individual productivity, treating AI literacy as ongoing infrastructure rather than one-time training.
I focus on team and office-level engagements—typically sub-150 people—with 3-6 month timelines. This scale allows for genuine transformation rather than superficial implementation, while keeping scope manageable enough to demonstrate results.
The organizations I work with best are those that recognize they’re not just implementing new technology—they’re becoming a different kind of organization. That’s the real opportunity in this moment, and the real challenge.
Connect
The best way to reach me is through LinkedIn.
For speaking inquiries, see my speaking page.