I'm always asking who's on the other side.
Producing an all-employee meeting for eight hundred people. Drafting a message for a university president during a time of transformation. Training faculty on a new technology in the middle of a disruptive change. Helping a team of nurse practitioners launch a website and a marketing plan. Writing poems that found their way into national literary magazines.
I've done all of these, and the need is the same every time.
The hardest part of any message is understanding the people receiving it. Or as I put it around here, knowing it isn't the same as getting it across.
That's the work. I help leaders and practitioners build things that actually reach people.
ABOUT ME
I launched The Direct Line to do this work on my own terms.
Two fields, one need
People ask why the same person would work with university leaders and independent clinicians. It is the same need wearing different clothes.
Medicine and education are the two fields where knowledge matters most and too often travels worst.
Both train people to be right. Neither trains them to be received. I've been surrounded by clinicians my whole life, and I spent my career inside a university, which means I've watched the same thing happen from both sides for as long as I can remember.
HOW I WORK
I talk to the people on the other side
Not just the person paying me. Faculty, staff, patients, front desk. The language that works is often not the language the leadership team would have chosen, and you only find it by listening.
Everything ends in something built
A site, a course, a prototype, a written architecture you can hand to someone. I don't deliver recommendations and leave you to implement them.
I edit, and I expect to be edited
Real editing isn't copy cleanup. It's pushing the thinking forward together, and it only works if the pushing goes both ways. My best work can come from someone telling me I had something wrong.
It has to sound like you
My name isn't going on it. Yours is. The best version of this work is the one where people say it finally sounds like the place they believe in — and where your team can keep it going long after I'm gone.
PROOF POINTS
SOME THINGS I'VE MADE
A few Higher Ed examples from things I made at Rasmussen University.
An AI agent for faculty
I built a support agent for faculty, focused on advancing the human element in teaching. It tailored its answers to an instructor's experience level and teaching modality, offering both suggestions and honest critique.
Shangri-Lab
An innovation incubator co-created with Brooks Doherty, VP and Chief Student Experience Officer at Rasmussen University. Learn how one of these initiatives led to meeting learner needs through mental health support.
Institutional Generative AI Response
An institutional response to generative AI. My part was the faculty side — professional development, the symposium that carried it, and moving people from policing the technology to using it well. I wrote about the whole initiative for Grammarly.
A Theme that Matters
For Rasmussen's 125th anniversary, I brought stakeholders across the university together to name the theme — Legacy Matters — and built an interactive timeline documenting 125 years of the place.
InspirED and The Faculty Lounge
Two internal podcasts. One with faculty about how they inspired students and how their students inspire them. One with leaders about innovations in learning and teaching across higher ed.
PACT
PACT stands for Presence, Alertness (to warning signs), Timeliness, and Caring. This framework was accompanied by an online training resource and a year-long series of development sessions dedicated to these behaviors that lead to student persistence.
Scroll through a few Health Care examples from things I made for WholeHealth NP. Pictured here are the website, and some of the conference materials and marketing assets I have created for them.
