I solve problems and help build what comes next.

I was in the gifted program as a kid. This sounds more interesting than it was.

My school was tiny, so the “gifted program” was me and three boys sitting in a supply room once a week doing worksheets. They really didn't know what to do with us.

My favourite part of the day was hiding out in the library, thumbing through Nancy Drew novels and trying to figure it all out before she did. I was also highly entrepreneurial. I sold anything a middle-schooler would buy from me, complete with logos made in paint and printed on my parents' dot-matrix printer.

Not much has changed.

I’ve spent my career following that curiosity.

Especially when it comes to people: what they need, how they behave, what they respond to, and why they make the choices they do. It's taken me across a lot of disciplines, and eventually led me deeper into human-centred design, user experience and user testing. Understanding the people we're making something for has become fundamental to how I approach almost everything.

I've built businesses, started a podcast network, brought dozens of brands into the Canadian market, led creative teams across cultures and timezones and worked alongside changemakers like Seth Godin. I've also been a Digital Art Director and Content Creator at Food Network Canada, and a two-time culinary-school dropout, (both times for really good reasons.) I've co-authored a best-selling climate science book and won a data-viz award. I've moved to Thailand to set up an offshore design company, which failed spectacularly. (I blame Tim Ferriss and his 4-Hour Workweek.) My greatest accomplishment, maybe, was when a product launch I led resulted in both Tori Spelling and Raffi same-day Insta-Follows.

I want to understand how people think, why something works, why it doesn't and what else it could become. I love making those connections. I get excited about finding problems and even more excited about finding solutions.

I’ve never been good at staying in one lane. For a long time, I thought that made me the odd one out. (The supply room should have been a clue.) Turns out it’s the whole point.The person who sees across the whole system is exactly who you want when the real question hasn't been named yet. On yout team. At a board table. Anywhere nobody's quite sure what the hard part actually is.

That's also why my work has never fit particularly neatly into one type of role. I have enough fluency across disciplines to see the whole system. I can see how things connect, where something in one part of a project might affect another, and where there might be an opportunity no one was looking for. I pull from design, research, brand, business, marketing, technology and storytelling depending on what the problem needs. Some of my best ideas come from connecting things (and people!) that don't usually get put in the same room.

I love collaborating with smart, creative people figuring something out together. I like the questions, the big ideas, the tangents that suddenly turn into something useful. I am definitely the one with the sticky notes. I'm also probably the one bringing the pizza.

Currently, I am working out my Knots.

Knot Chats: a new channel where I pull apart the problems worth figuring out, one knot at a time. (Some professional. Some less so.)

Experience & Certifications