That’s the thing nobody talks about. Before the crisis, before the resistance, before the meeting where everything went sideways…there was a moment when you knew the conversation needed to happen. And you found reasons to wait.

We all do. I did it for fifty-four years.

I grew up in a family where difficult things weren't discussed. I learned early that keeping the peace was a form of love, and I got very good at it. By ten years old I was managing my brother’s report cards, carefully coaxing a 3—needs improvement—into a 2—satisfactory—where the handwriting cooperated, strategically leaving one in place for plausibility. I was already thinking about crisis communication before I had a name for it.

That instinct followed me into every room I entered. Conference rooms at Golf Magazine and Sports Illustrated, where I learned that being easy to work with was currency and defending my own perspective felt riskier than adding the lens flare and sending the file. Faculty meetings where I’d built a program I was proud of and watched it nearly collapse because we’d started the conversation sixty days too late. Kitchen tables. Hospital waiting rooms. Every room where the thing that needed saying kept getting deferred until the moment it couldn’t be.

What I learned—eventually, the hard way, and then through a doctoral dissertation and twenty-plus years of organizational work—is that most communication problems aren’t message problems. They’re timing problems.

People don’t resist the change. They resist being surprised by it.

That reframe is the foundation of everything I do. I call it Shift-Left Communication—a framework borrowed from software development,
where “shifting left” means catching problems earlier, while they’re still cheap to fix. Applied to human communication, the principle is the same: move the real conversation upstream. Before the decision. Before the resistance. Before the room is already defensive and the stakes are impossibly high.

I’m a TEDx speaker, an Ed.D., and the Director of Communications, Outreach, and Engagement at WSIPC—a public cooperative serving Washington State’s school districts. I practice this framework every day in a tech-heavy, change-heavy environment, which I think is the only kind of consulting worth trusting: the kind where someone is living the work, not just teaching it.

I also have a book coming. Start as You Mean to Go On: How Shift-Left Communication Builds the Trust That Decisions Require. It’s the long version of everything on this site.

I work with a small number of organizations and individuals each year, offering keynotes, workshops, and occasional coaching, and I take on the work that feels like it matters. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, I’d love to have it.

I’m based in Seattle, where I have a standing relationship with a very talented curly hair specialist and a husband named Mark who has learned not to comment on it.