Signature Practices & Frameworks
Leadership during transition isn’t one-size-fits-all. The strategies we need depend on where we are in the work—whether we’re imagining new directions or guiding a team through complexity. I use two signature frameworks that reflect distinct but complementary orientations to transitional leadership.
They’re not roles or identities, but modes—rhythms you might step into, shift between, or return to over time. One might resonate more strongly right now. Or you might recognize both.
Seeding: Speculative Tools for Transitional Leadership
Start with the seed. Shape what grows.
Seeding is for leaders working at the edge of what’s known. Whether you're shaping a new initiative or confronting limitations in the systems around you, this mode supports expansive thinking, narrative strategy, and creative experimentation. It’s about cultivating possibility when direction isn’t yet fixed.
Ideal when the path forward is undefined or constrained.
Offers tools for visioning, speculative design, and narrative reframing.
Supports leaders who are reimagining, initiating, or breaking inherited patterns.
Shepherding: Future-Making for Leaders with Purpose
Read the terrain. Lead with care. Move your team with intention.
Shepherding is for leaders already in motion, navigating transitions with others in tow. This mode supports purposeful pacing, ethical discernment, and collective alignment. It helps you sustain momentum, care for your people, and move the work forward without losing your center.
Ideal during leadership shifts, mission pivots, or institutional reorientation.
Focuses on decision-making, relational trust, and value-based leadership.
Supports leaders managing evolving teams, processes, or cultural direction.
Signature Practices
These practices form the foundation of my approach across facilitation, advising, and organizational listening. Each one is designed to help teams move beyond surface-level change and engage more deeply with the cultural and relational forces shaping their work.
✦ Understory Listening
A method for conducting interviews and small-group listening sessions that attends to both what is said and what is submerged. Understory Listening helps surface nuanced dynamics and meaningfully reflect them back to the team, centering both personal experience and structural context.
✦ Relational Intelligence & Culture Currents
Most teams think of gossip, tension, and avoidance as signs that something is going wrong. I see them as signs that something is trying to surface. In workplaces where people feel unheard or unsafe speaking plainly, the truth tends to leak out sideways—through triangulation, backchannels, sharp silences, or “toxic” dynamics.
I help teams listen differently to these relational patterns. Not to fix the people involved, but to understand the culture that produced them—and to use that understanding as a guide for change. These dynamics can be repurposed as insight, not dismissed as dysfunction. When we follow the current, it often leads directly to where care, clarity, or repair is needed.
✦ Speculative Facilitation
Facilitation designed not just for consensus, but for cultural change. Drawing on backwards design, experimental planning, and Black feminist speculative methods, I help teams imagine alternative ways of working—and practice the futures they want to move toward.
Contact Me
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and I will be in touch shortly. I can’t wait to hear from you!