A life of working within change—a question that remains

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In April 2026 after more than four decades in public service—including work in the United States Air Force and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—I stepped into a different kind of question.

What actually enables people to move within change?

Across years of leading and supporting organizational change, one pattern became clear:

Change is not experienced as a plan.

It is lived.

Often as disruption.

Uncertainty.

Loss.

Delay.

And sometimes—unexpected renewal.

Yet most approaches to change focus on what to do from the outside.

- Plans.
- Processes.
- Execution.

Far less attention is given to what is happening within a person while change is unfolding.

This work emerged from that gap.

Not as a model to manage change, but as a way to recognize it.

Hope²Change is a field-based approach to human change.

It begins with a simple shift:

Hope is not optimism.

Hope is orientation.

It is the moment within change where movement becomes possible again.

This work explores how change is actually experienced—through the pulses of event, reaction, realization, grief, delay, hope, action, agency, recovery, and change.

It offers language for that movement.

Not to control it, but to recognize it.

Because when a person can recognize where they are,
something changes.

Movement becomes possible.

Clarity returns.

And participation begins again.