Member since June 2026
Jen is a strategist, designer, researcher, and educator who works at the intersection of complexity science, experience strategy, and the theory and practice of learning. Driven by a deep curiosity about the hidden patterns across seemingly disparate domains — and a desire to empower other humans with those insights — she partners with teams who want to question, provoke, and occasionally subvert, so we can co-design the services, experiences, and conditions that enable people to live well, on their own terms. Previously as Chief Design Strategy Officer at Mad*Pow and now as co-founder of Topology, a systems-oriented innovation and strategy firm, she helps organizations make sense of the complex dynamics shaping human experience, from products to services to organizational change.
“This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.” ― Deleuze & Guattari
I started playing ice hockey in my late twenties, which is pretty late for most people who play. I don't have the muscle memory of people who starting skating as toddlers. My stickhandling won't turn heads. But, I can read the shape of a play, notice when the energy shifts, sense when to step up and when to hang back, and in recreational beer league hockey, that actually holds its own against people (mostly taller, heavier men) who are objectively more skilled than I am.
I tell this story because it illustrates something I care deeply about: in complex systems, technical skill doesn't always translate directly into impact. The most consequential contributions often aren't visible in a highlight reel. It's the positioning that prevented a scoring chance. The pass that set up the pass that set up the goal. The same is true in organizations: it's not just the product you ship or service you deliver or what shows up on a status dashboard. It's the relational dynamics, the informal networks, the experience-driven judgment about when to act and when to wait. Coming to hockey late taught me more about adaptive capacity and systems strategy than any framework I've studied. And I've studied a lot of frameworks.
For more than 20 years I've worked at the intersection of design, strategy, and complex systems thinking, helping organizations navigate the kind of complexity that doesn't respond to best practices or better playbooks. I came to this work sideways: I studied and then taught physics for nearly a decade, which turned out to be less about physics and more about how understanding reorganizes itself in real time, in groups, under uncertainty. That phenomenon — the way organizations, teams, and individuals actually learn and adapt — became a throughline I've followed ever since, from the classroom into design, consulting, and graduate education. I founded Topology in order to work with leaders and teams on complexity-informed strategy, and am writing a book on adaptive capacity and learning in complex systems.
I started playing ice hockey in my late twenties, which is pretty late for most people who play. I don't have the muscle memory of people who starting skating as toddlers. My stickhandling won't turn heads. But, I can read the shape of a play, notice when the energy shifts, sense when to step up and when to hang back, and in recreational beer league hockey, that actually holds its own against people (mostly taller, heavier men) who are objectively more skilled than I am.
I tell this story because it illustrates something I care deeply about: in complex systems, technical skill doesn't always translate directly into impact. The most consequential contributions often aren't visible in a highlight reel. It's the positioning that prevented a scoring chance. The pass that set up the pass that set up the goal. The same is true in organizations: it's not just the product you ship or service you deliver or what shows up on a status dashboard. It's the relational dynamics, the informal networks, the experience-driven judgment about when to act and when to wait. Coming to hockey late taught me more about adaptive capacity and systems strategy than any framework I've studied. And I've studied a lot of frameworks.
For more than 20 years I've worked at the intersection of design, strategy, and complex systems thinking, helping organizations navigate the kind of complexity that doesn't respond to best practices or better playbooks. I came to this work sideways: I studied and then taught physics for nearly a decade, which turned out to be less about physics and more about how understanding reorganizes itself in real time, in groups, under uncertainty. That phenomenon — the way organizations, teams, and individuals actually learn and adapt — became a throughline I've followed ever since, from the classroom into design, consulting, and graduate education. I founded Topology in order to work with leaders and teams on complexity-informed strategy, and am writing a book on adaptive capacity and learning in complex systems.
