Philosophy & Approach
I don’t think I’ve ever stopped being curious. I’m not sure I’d want to.
Start with curiosity
I’ve been trying to figure out how things work for as long as I can remember. Not in a restless, dissatisfied way, more like a genuine fascination with the mechanics of things. Why does this process take longer than it should? Why did that campaign perform differently in week three than in week one? Why does this team communicate well, and that one doesn’t? What is actually happening here, underneath the surface explanation?
That curiosity has been the most consistent thing about me across every role I’ve held, every team I’ve coached, and every community I’ve been part of. It’s what took me from filing paperwork at a career college at eighteen to running its operations in my thirties. Not ambition in the traditional sense, I wasn’t climbing toward a title. I was just always interested in the next problem and willing to do whatever it took to understand it.
The practical result of that orientation is that I’ve learned from an unusually wide range of people and situations. I’ve taken something useful from every manager I’ve had, every team I’ve led, every volunteer role I’ve filled, and every data set I’ve sat with long enough to actually understand. I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t know something I don’t. That belief keeps me genuinely open in a way I’ve noticed not everyone is, and it’s made me considerably better at my work than I would otherwise be.
Gather data
I came to appreciate data not as a tool for winning arguments but as a tool for honest conversation, with an organization, with a market, with a community. Numbers don’t tell you what to do. But they tell you what’s actually happening, which is something people are often surprisingly reluctant to look at clearly.
Early in my career, I noticed that many decisions were made based on what felt true rather than what was demonstrably true. Campaigns continued to run because they always did. Processes stayed in place because nobody had questioned them recently. People were assessed based on perception rather than performance. I became someone who pushed gently but consistently against that, not to be difficult, but because I genuinely believe that better information leads to better outcomes for everyone involved.
That said, I’ve also learned the limits of data. Numbers can tell you what happened. They’re much less useful at telling you why, and almost useless at telling you what something means to the person experiencing it. The best decisions I’ve been part of making combined rigorous data with genuine human understanding, and getting both right requires a different kind of listening for each.
My favourite example of this is when analyzing a campaign that was being run by a contracted marketing company. They were showing increased leads and clicks. What they left out was that they were spending more money, which will naturally increase results. However, the conversion rate and click rates dropped, meaning they were doing an objectively worse job with more money spent. Data matters, but your gut is important.
People are the whole point
Systems exist to serve people. Processes exist to make people’s work easier and their outcomes better. Data exists to help people make decisions that improve things for other people. I’ve had to remind myself of this at various points in my career, it’s easy, when you spend a lot of time optimizing things, to start treating optimization as the goal rather than the means.
The work I’m most proud of isn’t the campaigns that hit their numbers, though I’m proud of those too. It’s the student withdrawal rate that came down because we built better support structures for people who were struggling. It’s the U16 soccer team that made the semi-finals after two winless seasons, not because I drew up better tactics, but because those kids started believing they were capable of more. It’s the admissions representatives I trained who went from hitting scripts to having real conversations, because they finally understood what the person on the other end of the phone actually needed to hear.
Those outcomes happened because someone paid attention to the people involved, not just the metrics. I try to be that person consistently.
On leadership
I didn’t set out to be a leader. I set out to be useful. The leadership came from being in rooms where something needed to happen and being willing to be the one who made it happen, not because I was the most senior person there, but because I cared about the outcome and had something to contribute.
What I’ve learned about leadership, slowly and sometimes the hard way, is that it’s mostly about creating conditions. Conditions where people have the clarity they need to do good work. Where they feel safe enough to say when something isn’t working. Where the right information gets to the right people at the right time. Where effort is recognized and honesty is rewarded. You can’t manufacture those conditions by telling people they exist. You have to build them, steadily, through a hundred small decisions that most people never notice.
The best teams I’ve been part of, professionally and on the soccer pitch, had that quality. They weren’t perfect. They disagreed, they made mistakes, they had hard days. But there was an underlying trust that made all of that workable. Building that kind of trust is the leadership work I find most meaningful and most difficult.
On community
Everything I’ve described above, the curiosity, the data, the focus on people, the belief that good conditions produce good outcomes, applies as naturally to a community as it does to an organization. Maybe more so.
I’ve lived in the Okanagan since I was five years old. I’ve watched Kelowna, Lake Country, and West Kelowna change over thirty years in ways that are sometimes exciting and sometimes concerning. I have two kids who are going to grow up here, and I think about their future in this valley more than I think about almost anything else.
The questions I find myself asking about West Kelowna are the same questions I’ve always asked about the organizations I’ve worked in. What’s actually happening here, underneath the surface explanation? Who is being served well and who isn’t? What are we optimizing for, and is that the right thing to be optimizing for? What would need to be true for this place to be genuinely excellent — not just functional, but worth being proud of?
I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve spent my whole life being willing to ask the questions, listen carefully to the people who know things I don’t, and do the unglamorous work of trying to make things better. That’s not a political platform. It’s just who I am.
