From a very good friend, “If you don’t get this down as it’s happening, the journey will be meaningless and you’ll forget it.” There are a million lines in my head, so many clever ways I want to start this. For two years, I’ve imagined how to write this —…

When I first fell for design thinking, I fell hard. In the third month as a civilian, after 14 years of buttoned up service in military structure, and two days into our fellowship at Stanford’s d.school, we got our first taste of a design thinking workshop. It was a relatively…

There are lots of cutting edge applications of data science for urban communities, but most of them are led by some combination of universities, public sector, and non-profit research institutes. The MetroLab Network, a City-University collaborative effort, is across 41 cities. Their research projects cover everything from tracking biking routes…

A few months ago I was asked to lead a process for an indigenous social development organization, Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, Whai Maia LTD. They wanted to turn their most sacred, beautiful taonga (gift or jewel) of land, currently an untouched expanse of scrub and grass, into a public reserve that…

I moved to New Zealand last year and spent ten months embedded with indigenous tribes. It was a mix of meetings that could have been replicated in any innovative city in the world — San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore, Auckland, Wellington — building partnerships between government, business, and start ups…

A friend at a big tech firm was talking to me recently about the challenges of going from a team of 3 to a team of 30 in just over a year. …

Whenever I start writing, I think of my old roommate, adopted sister, and former Washington Post editor, Emi Kolawole. I think of her reading my blog title and, going, ‘Oh no, must be sharper, cleaner, clearer.’ She probably said about all of the few blog posts I wrote as a…

Design thinking is beloved by many, and is more than a flash in the long list of new management tools. Why? Because it’s embodied learning. In recruiting your body, emotions, and rational brain to explore problems with others, we get to better solutions than pondering them alone in a cubicle…