HIGHLIGHTS //
Clarity Into Action.
I built and led teams to understand complex problems, challenge assumptions, and turn insight into action.
The work—and the environment around it—changed considerably over that time. Long-term relationships meant navigating evolving organizational priorities and challenges alongside our clients. Technology transformed how information could be gathered, analyzed, and put to work, and today, AI is again reshaping how researchers, strategists, and leaders work.
What endured was the need to ask better questions, find what matters, bring the right people together, and apply judgment to move from understanding to execution. The examples below reflect both that body of work and the approach to leadership I carry forward.
DEVELOPING PEOPLE //
Growth was part of the job.
Building Simply Strategy meant investing in people as deliberately as we invested in client work. I wanted people to leave an assignment—or eventually the firm—with greater capability than they brought to it.
That meant sending team members to training and industry conferences, supporting participation in longer-term and competitive leadership-development programs, and creating opportunities to stretch into new responsibilities. Inside the firm, we used tools such as StrengthsFinder and facilitated annual discussions to understand individual and collective strengths—and how people could use those strengths more intentionally in their work and development.
Development wasn't only in service of the next client assignment. We talked about people's strengths within our processes, where they wanted to grow, what the organization needed next, and where professional-development gaps existed.
The results showed up in retention and advancement. My first three employees remained with Simply Strategy for 9 to 12 years, and average employee tenure reached 6.5 years.
FROM COMPLEXITY TO EXECUTION //
Making change understandable.
Missouri was preparing to implement formal levels of neonatal and maternal care—changes that would affect hospitals, healthcare professionals, policymakers, and families across the state.
Simply Strategy helped move that work from policy to practice. The team combined research with a coordinated communications strategy, translating complex requirements for different audiences and carrying that strategy through print and digital materials, presentations, webinars, and social media.
Doing that well required more than communications. The team needed to understand the regulations, how information moved within hospitals, the needs of providers across the state, and the perspectives of multiple stakeholders involved in maternal and infant health.
The result was a coordinated effort to support understanding and implementation of the new standards across Missouri.
FINDING THE SIGNAL //
Who can be persuaded—and how?
A healthcare organization wanted to counter a persistent belief that the flu vaccine itself can cause the flu. The challenge wasn't simply finding a message people liked. It was understanding whose behavior might actually be changed—and what could move them.
When initial testing produced no clear winner—and revealed meaningful differences among audiences—we used those combined sources of evidence to refine the creative strategy and test again.
We approached the problem from several directions. Creative concepts were tested with consumers, but we also examined open-ended responses, public health and academic literature, and what was known about attitudes toward vaccination. We considered the audience as a continuum—from those already receptive to vaccination to those firmly opposed—and focused on people in the persuadable middle, whose concerns, objections, and misbeliefs varied.
The resulting campaign was implemented nationwide as part of a broader effort to increase flu vaccination uptake. Alongside other interventions, it contributed to increased vaccination—turning a nuanced understanding of who could be persuaded, and why, into action at scale.
CHALLENGING THE PREMISE //
What if the problem isn't the people?
“Non-compliant Medicaid moms.” That was the premise behind a multi-year effort to understand why some mothers were not following recommended well-child visit schedules.
I designed and led an expansive statewide qualitative research program, managing the work from study design and fieldwork through analysis and application. We listened directly to mothers across Georgia, testing assumptions about transportation, competing demands, distrust, attitudes toward vaccination, and other potential barriers.
What we found challenged the premise. The expected explanations didn't hold up. Instead, the research revealed a more complicated picture of how families were navigating care—and opportunities for the system itself to work better.
The findings informed system design and improvement, as well as communications with members, providers, and other stakeholders.
START WITH THE FOUNDATION //
Before changing the answer, understand the organization.
A new brand can easily become an exercise in logos, language, and aesthetics. We started somewhere else.
Before recommending a creative direction, we interviewed the organization's partners, employees, and clients to understand how the organization saw itself, how others experienced it, and where those perspectives aligned—or didn't.
That work became the foundation for a positioning strategy, which in turn guided the creative brief, new brand, and broader marketing strategy. Simply Strategy managed the work from inquiry through implementation, bringing together internal perspectives, customer insight, strategy, and creative partners around a common direction.
The brand was the visible outcome. The more important work came first: understanding what the organization was trying to become.
SEEING THE WHOLE SYSTEM //
Some challenges aren't solved by a study.
Our team's early work in maternal mental health began by mapping a woman's journey through pregnancy—when she interacted with physicians, nurse practitioners, health centers, insurers, Medicaid, and other parts of a decentralized healthcare system, and where mental health needs could be recognized and addressed.
But seeing the whole system required another perspective. We mapped the provider journey as well, then layered the two to identify where needs, responsibilities, and opportunities intersected—and where new maternal mental health recommendations could realistically be put into practice.
The work brought us to a table with foundations, healthcare organizations, public agencies, providers, and other stakeholders who had been working on these challenges for years. There was both commitment and frustration: significant knowledge about the problems, but persistent gaps in turning that knowledge into change.
The study ended. Our involvement didn't.
Over the years that followed, Simply Strategy continued to build expertise in maternal and infant health, participating in statewide initiatives and investing in people within our firm who developed deep knowledge and relationships in the field. That experience eventually contributed to our involvement in the Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative and later the development of The Uplift Connection—work designed to connect people, organizations, and resources around persistent gaps in maternal and infant health.
What began as an effort to understand one part of a complex system became years of learning, partnership, and work to help strengthen it.