I started in the classroom. Then I kept zooming out.

The title on the door changes. The work underneath it doesn’t: make sure the things we build for people actually hold up when real people try to use them.

Twenty-six years in education. Twenty of them leading. I’m a sitting Chief Academic Officer, so the strategy I talk about is strategy I’m still accountable for… the kind of seat where one decision lands on many people at once, and you don’t get to take it back.

Most of my career has lived right where big technology runs into the messy reality of human organizations. AI. Immersive learning. Design thinking. I’ve led large rollouts and watched plenty of shiny initiatives quietly collapse, which taught me the thing I keep repeating: the tool is almost never the point. Adoption isn’t impact. Technology only earns its keep when it’s grounded in something human.

I tend to build what I can’t find. A course that didn’t exist yet. A program for the questions people kept avoiding. If the road isn’t there, you make one.

Before any of it, I served in the U.S. Army… which is where I learned that leadership doesn’t have to be sterile to be strong.

I’m a Navy mom of two daughters and a genuinely terrible relaxer. (The paddleboard mostly judges me from the garage.)

And then there’s the terrain. People assume the off-roading is a hobby I bolted on for a tidy metaphor. It’s backwards. Off-roading is where I learned the thing I keep trying to teach. Nothing tells you how well something is built like ground that refuses to cooperate. A rig that’s flawless in the showroom can come apart on the first real climb… and so can a strategy, a system, a leader.

So I stopped trusting the version of anything that only works on flat, dry, predictable ground. I want to see how it does under real conditions. Off the map is where the truth lives. (It’s also absurdly fun.)