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04 / About

I design systems.

For a while that meant landscapes and public places. Then it meant sustainability programs, carbon strategy, and how a company of thousands of people actually operates. Now it increasingly means software — AI tools that have to work with imperfect data, specific users, and real decisions attached to the output.

From the outside that can look like several careers. From the inside it has been one: see a complicated system, understand its constraints, and make something useful out of it.

01/Career arc

Designer to builder, and back again

  1. 01

    Designer

    Landscape Architecture

    2007–2011

    I trained as a landscape architect and spent my early career designing places — parks, gardens, civic spaces, master-planned communities, botanical gardens, and large international projects, as part of a design firm and multidisciplinary teams.

    Landscape architecture is a systems discipline that happens to produce beautiful drawings. You are designing for people you will never meet, in a medium that changes for twenty years after you finish, with a budget, a maintenance crew, and a climate all voting on the outcome.

  2. 02

    Builder

    LEED and Product Sustainability

    2011–2015

    Green building work moved me from the site to the building, and from design intent to measurement. This is where I learned that a good intention with no measurement behind it is a claim, not an outcome.

  3. 03

    Program Creator

    Enterprise Sustainability

    2015–2021

    Building sustainability programs inside an organization rather than advising one from outside. Data, reporting, governance, and the unglamorous work of making a commitment into something that changes a decision somewhere.

  4. 04

    Enterprise Leader

    Carbon, Operations, and Transformation

    2021–Present

    Leading at scale: a fleet of roughly 4,000 vehicles and around $70M in annual operating spend, and a carbon program that delivered a 36% absolute reduction against a 2019 baseline across Scope 1, 2, and 3.

    At this scale the work stops being about any single decision and becomes about governance — designing the structure that keeps producing good decisions after you stop paying attention to it.

  5. 05

    Builder Again

    AI, Systems, and Products

    Now

    AI is not a pivot away from any of this. It is a new medium for the same instinct.

    For most of my career, “I could build a system that solves this” ended at the point where it would have required a development team and a budget. That constraint has substantially lifted. I now build the things I would previously have specified and handed to someone else — an AI landscape planning platform, decision systems for a working farm, agent workflows inside enterprise constraints.

    What has not changed is the part that was always hardest: knowing what a good answer looks like, and being stubborn about not shipping a bad one.

02/The through-line

The unifying idea is not that I do a lot of unrelated things. It's that the same work keeps showing up in different materials.

  1. Landscape architecturephysical systems
  2. Sustainabilityenterprise environmental systems
  3. Fleetoperational systems
  4. Farm AIagricultural decision systems
  5. BloomprintAI product systems
  6. AI agentsknowledge and decision systems

Different domains, one instinct: understand the constraints, then design something practical that works inside them.

03/Personal

Where the work actually lives

I live in Missouri with my family. We farm — grain and cattle — which is both where a lot of my AI work comes from and the reason I am not precious about theory. A system that doesn't work in a truck, in the rain, at six in the morning, does not work.

My Christian faith shapes how I think about stewardship, service, leadership, and the responsible use of technology. It is part of what grounds both my work and the way I hope to live.

I am curious to a fault, happiest with a hard problem and a long evening, and consistently more interested in whether something is useful than whether it is impressive.

Family · Faith · Stewardship · Place

04/Scale

Where the work has operated

Designing systems across design, sustainability, and operations
15+ yearsDesigning systems across design, sustainability, and operations
Enterprise fleet under transformation, ~$70M annual operating spend
~4,000 vehiclesEnterprise fleet under transformation, ~$70M annual operating spend
Absolute emissions reduction against a 2019 baseline
36%Absolute emissions reduction against a 2019 baseline
Measured, reported, and reduced on an SBTi-aligned pathway
Scope 1–3Measured, reported, and reduced on an SBTi-aligned pathway

If something here is useful to you, or you're working on a problem that sounds like these, I'm glad to talk.

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