From Birdcalls to Boardrooms

How I learned to turn collective experience into change—and why facilitation became my bridge

The first time I felt the spark of facilitation, I was in middle school, sixth or seventh grade, some elective I can’t even name now, and we were doing the classic marshmallow-and-toothpicks tower type challenge. Working this way was completely different from the “every person for themselves” rhythm of school. For once, we weren’t being graded on our individual aptitudes;  we were invited to build something together. This way of mutual creation stuck with me.

Looking back, that little scene was a hint of what I’d later crave: the energy of people co-creating towards something, and the friction that comes with it. In school, the system trains us to excel alone, then tosses us into society and expects us to collaborate gracefully. Sure, team sports give us a taste, but most of our education doesn’t teach the more nuanced skill of working together, how to listen, plan, revise, and stay in it when things get challenging.

At Parsons, I studied product design and learned the foundations of design thinking process and methods. One project that stands out is designing toys for visually impaired kids. We visited specialized schools in New York City, played with students, and tested ideas with them. It was my first experience with collaborative design that wasn’t speculative. Our decisions were directly shaped by the people who would use what we made. This truly aligns with my values: the world is something we create for and with each other.

In school, I made a conscious transition from traditional industrial design to what is now called creative technology. I always say I entered school designing chairs and sanding furniture, and left school designing installations and rigging projectors. This led to a decade of lights, sound, and video for events across the spectrum, from raves to museum exhibitions. I learned how to design experiences at scale, shape attention, build spatial narratives, and orchestrate awe. This work was beautiful, inspiring, and a fun challenge to create. 

I was inspired by artists like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Olafur Eliasson, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell. I recall especially Lozano-Hemmer’s border project with searchlights that let people on both sides “speak” to each other with beams of light. That kind of art didn’t just entertain; it connected people into a shared phenomenon that hinted at policy, identity, and place. Work such as this led me to question, “What if the experiences could support people to act and create, not just feel and reflect?”

Years later, as a strategist at Leftfield Labs, I got a front-row seat to a different kind of collaboration challenge. I was on a well-funded project with ambitious goals to expand access to resources for female and BIPOC entrepreneurs. Powerful intentions. Something that remained with me throughout the project was that the thing we were building would likely be a solution to a systemic issue, rather than really addressing why this is a problem in the first place. While everyone wanted to do the right thing and support underrepresented business owners, the framework for creation and collaboration didn’t allow a systemic approach to be the path. It really made me wonder how collaborative system innovation can be orchestrated. I started to sense the actual value of facilitating collective change.

Tracing the Thread Between Art and Agency

In the decade of audiovisual design, I co-led a studio with my good friend, Lua Brice, called Hovver. Our work really was about directing attention to the commonly overlooked phenomena of light and sound. We worked with light smoke and mirrors literally, but not to trick people, to invite them to experience things that are all around them but usually ignored. This was a beautiful time of collaborative creation, and so much of what I know about working with others comes from that collaboration and from times working with festival-scale teams. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to create ample light and sound installations, and, towards the end, I felt like something was missing for me personally.

In 2019, I made the hard decision to leave our practice and hand over the studio to Lua, who leads it independently and masterfully to this day. I didn’t have a neat next step. The only criteria I could articulate were: I want to design experiences that create tangible impact, I wasn’t interested in systems change, and I wanted to do it with people. Admittedly, I had a lot of “figuring it out” to do. And then COVID happened, and I had a lot of time on my hands, almost too much.

I drifted between film, dance, and virtual web events, then circled back to my roots in product design, which led me to that project at Leftfield Labs. The work taught me a lot about how large initiatives can be funded and how they can progress through multiple agencies to be realized. The experience that influenced me the most came from watching Natalie Patterson, a DEI consultant, interact with and lead teams as they investigated their own relationship to the work. There was a way to hold a room, invite personal reflection, and name tensions, a way to build shared reality. Her way of working to connect humans with themselves and each other really struck me.

At the same time, I was in a constant mode of research and collection (and still am). Then I was diving deep into people like John Vervaeke, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Kate Raworth, Nate Hagens, and Yancey Strickler, all of whom were theorizing and addressing the Meta/Polycrises of our planet through different financial models and ways of sensemaking together. Then I was also diving deeper into Systems and change theory through Donella Meadows, Gregory & Nora Bateson, and the incredible resources at the Systems Innovation Network. And I was constantly collecting facilitation methods and tools from Adrienne Marie Brown’s “Emergent Strategy” to Emergent Futures Lab’s “Innovating Emergent Futures” to Strategizer’s business innovation resources. All of this was swirling in me, how to help the world make the change it’s calling for.

At the same time, I kept thinking about my background in the arts. So much of what I loved in experience design, attention, emotion, and choreography also felt critical for collective work. But I wanted more participation, more voice. I kept remembering a performance I did at a small Irish festival called Drop Everything. At one point, I played a recording of a rare Amazonian bird call in complete darkness. The crowd spontaneously called back with their own sounds. The room became a chorus of voices. It was unplanned and somehow more moving than anything else we’d done that night. The best moment wasn’t me “delivering” an experience, it was us encountering something together, live. I started to ask myself: how do I bring that same felt-sense & quality into rooms where real decisions are being made?

There’s been a dual thread in my work over the last five years, artful, human experiences on one side, and structural, outcome-oriented thinking on the other. 

These approaches were initially separate because of where and how I was interacting with them. But I kept feeling the pull to merge them. How could I close the gap between designing for human connection and designing for clear, tangible outcomes? That question is one of the few at the center of my practice.

Choosing the Container That Would Stretch Me

After the Leftfield Labs project in 2021, I knew I needed to build my capacity for group process. I wanted language, tools, and, frankly, reps. I’d already stumbled onto Voltage Control’s work. The framing of practice over perfection, systems awareness, human-centered design, and a healthy respect for the messy middle all resonated with me. I dragged my feet because the tuition would be the most I’d ever spent on professional development. It was a threshold moment for me, committing to something I was becoming. I hovered around the deadline, danced with my doubts, and then sent in my application right at the end.

What ultimately nudged me wasn’t just content; it was the promise of a container for practice. I needed a safe and honest space to try things, get feedback, recalibrate, and try again, with people who weren’t exactly like me. I’d also heard that the cohort was diverse, both geographically and professionally, and culturally. It was important to expose myself to a range of perspectives. That felt essential if I was serious about working at the intersections of art, business, and systems change.

Another factor was Voltage Control’s emphasis on the “how” behind the methods. The stance you take in the room, the way you ask questions, and how you set frames and boundaries. All the intangible things that aren’t flashy, but create the conditions for a group to do its best work. That’s what I’d witnessed through Natalie. 

I’ve witnessed this pattern in me. I resist growth and change. Honestly, I think we all do. We resist becoming who we’re becoming because it’s inherently new and will be challenging, but I knew signing up for the program meant growth, and that felt right.

What Shifted Me Inside the Certification

Those three months were dense in the best way. On one side, I dove deeper into systems thinking. Donella Meadows’ work helped me recognize patterns I’d been sensing but couldn’t name. On the other side, I was reading Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, which resonated because I’d spent a decade in experiential events. Her case studies, community rituals, and participatory theater clarified something I had witnessed: that gatherings can either reinforce the status quo or unlock something new. I began to establish a new toolkit and language for designing collaborative experiences.

I also picked up Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind and listened deeply to John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lectures. Those threads helped me articulate an intuition: 

We are sensing organisms; we sense ourselves, our environments, and each other. We are thinking organisms; we think independently, together, and through our environments. All of this shapes how we make sense of what is changing and how to change together. We’re connected, and our collaboration processes must acknowledge this. These insights evolved how I design sessions and, more importantly, how I attend to my own relationship to a group.

Voltage Control’s Facilitation Lab gave me a chance to test ideas with a live audience. I hosted a session on systems thinking and swapped the classic iceberg model for a tree. It sounds simple, but it landed. Most people don’t have a lived sense of icebergs. But everyone knows leaves tell you something about the soil. The tree helped folks map events, patterns, structures, and mental models in a way that felt embodied, connected, and intuitive. Seeing that click for people was a highlight.

The cohort itself was a gift, folks across Africa, Europe, the States, and beyond; multi-decade corporate leaders alongside independents, and founders. Sharing early drafts of workshops and getting feedback from people outside my context sharpened my thinking. It’s humbling and energizing to design for humans with different idioms, constraints, and cultural references. That feedback loop is gold.

There was also the portfolio project. I interviewed a friend working at the New York Times R&D team about a real organizational challenge, then designed a theoretical workshop series to address it. Building that proposal forced me to think about multiple paths through a session. What if the group stalls? What if the problem definition shifts? It helped me get more precise over sequencing activities and designing choice points so we could pivot without losing the thread. That alone changed how I build sessions.

From Methods to Muscles

When the program ended, the most significant difference I felt was less about knowing more methods and more about having stronger intuitions. I started applying these inside Mural, where I took on innovation work. It taught me how ideas move, or resist, within large organizations; where strategy meets reality; and how facilitation is a workshopping skill and a leadership stance. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do as a facilitator is name the water: “We’re trying to innovate while our incentives reward predictability. What do we want to do with that truth?” That’s facilitation as an offering.

The Master Certification later deepened this, especially around conflict. The “Difficult Conversations” book was so practical. I used those concepts just a week ago. “Standing in the Fire” helped me stay grounded in challenging moments and work with my own nervous system so I don’t become part of the volatility I’m working to hold. Those helped evolve what leadership means to me. Leadership is like dancing: yes, at times you need to be clear about where you want someone to move, and at other times it’s listening to what their needs are and working to orchestrate a movement together.

I also leaned into embodied practice through Social Presencing Theater (from the Presencing Institute and Theory U). It offered a way to sense into what’s emerging in a system that doesn’t start with stickies. When I bring even a little bit of that into a room, more silence, more sensing, more use of space, people often discover clarity they couldn’t reach by speaking more. I’ve noticed I’m better at inviting ambiguity and giving people space to inhabit it without panic. That’s become a quiet superpower, personally and professionally.

Parallel to all this, I was building a workshop with my friend Jason Bacasa called Whole Vision, and I started shaping a platform to hold work like that called Togethering. In the Master Cert, I got stuck trying to describe Togethering in “proper” professional language. It felt stiff and confining. So I wrote it poetically instead, more stanza-like than a spec sheet, and shared it with my cohort. They all shared that it resonated with them in a felt sense while understanding its intention intellectually. That was the point, and honestly, it made me proud. It affirmed that the work I want to do lives at the intersection of clarity and feeling.

Crossfading the Practical and the Poetic

Right now, Togethering is the lab where I’m working to fuse the two threads of my life: the practical, tactical work of product innovation and the relational, embodied work that helps groups actually move as one. I’m building it with my friend Max Lauter and with consulting support from my partner, Natalia Villalobos. In the near term, we’re focused on engagements with clear outcomes, new value propositions, service redesigns, and strategic choices, because those are legible to organizations and easy to validate. But the theory of change here is bigger: if you only build outputs without shifting the relational field that produces them, you’ll keep arriving at the same answers.

So the plan is to crossfade and intersperse. Start with the tangible, then steadily bring in more of the relational and embodied practices that help groups sense together, not just plan together. That looks like moving beyond user stories and roadmaps into practices that help people see themselves inside the systems they’re shaping. The art is in knowing when to turn each dial. Most firms pick one end of the spectrum because it’s easier to message. I believe the value is in the hard work of blending the two.

I want Togethering to be a practice that supports teams, organizations, and communities in creating the change they seek by feeling and sensing with one another and creating an actionable strategy. Where we can take on a product innovation challenge, and also work deep in the soil to repair root causes, enabling innovation to emerge on its own. Where we can borrow from art, attention, thresholds, and the poetics of experience, to make organizational gatherings that actually change how people relate. That’s the future I’m working towards, and I’m trying to build it in a way that stays grounded in what works.

In some ways, I’m still solving the middle-school puzzle: how do we create spaces where people get more done together than they ever could alone, and enjoy the process enough to keep doing it? I’m also answering the question I was working through during my art days: how might we create experiences that allow people to reflect and co-enact change? The difference now is that I have a deeper set of tools, a community of practice, and a clearer sense that the “how” is the product.

Middle school collaborations taught me the value and fun of solving problems together. Years of art and technology have taught me how to design and offer experiences that foster deep personal reflection and awe. Product innovation work taught me how to deliver tangible outcomes. Voltage Control gave me a way to weave those lessons into a craft. The next chapter is about making that valuable craft at scale, without losing the human heartbeat that makes it worth doing.

If you’ve gotten this far, I suspect a part of you might be asking for the same thing.

I’ll end with what I tell anyone considering the certification: your personal experience is already enough to begin. You don’t need to know everything before you start. Follow the questions, and let practice do its work on you. The highest value of your time is exactly where you are, not in some imagined future where you’ve “earned” the right to try.

If you feel that tug toward facilitation, toward designing spaces where people can see, sense, and act together, step in, we’re here for you. Find a container that lets you practice, not just learn. Voltage Control was that for me, and it might be for you. Say yes, even if it scares you a little. Especially, if it does.