We care.

We listen.
We help.
We make space.
We take responsibility.
We try to understand.

And sometimes, the very things we do because we care close something down.

We reassure before someone has finished speaking.
We explain before we've finished understanding.
We take responsibility before anyone asks.
We make uncertainty disappear.

We call it care. Or competence.
We call it being a good colleague, friend, facilitator, or leader.

And something becomes less possible.

Someone stops telling us what they were about to say.

Someone gives up their own uncertainty.

Someone else's experience becomes our interpretation of it.

A question disappears before we discover what it might have changed.

Nothing dramatic happened, but something did.

This is where my work begins: with what we're already doing.

The inquiry

We become skilled at knowing what to do.

We recognize patterns. We anticipate needs. We make sense of what happens. We respond.

These capacities make life together possible.

But when they become automatic, we can stop noticing the distinctions inside them.

Care becomes repair.
Attention becomes interpretation.
Sensitivity becomes responsibility.
Difference becomes explanation.
Uncertainty becomes resolution.

The distinction is still there. We just stop experiencing it.

I'm interested in what gets lost in that collapse.

Most of what shapes our relationships happens in these small movements, often before we realize we're making them.

What might we notice if we could perceive the difference while it was still unfolding?

I don't teach people how to participate better.

I create situations where participation itself becomes perceptible.

Sometimes I work with puppets. Sometimes with another person, a group, a place, or an organization.

The medium follows the inquiry.

I don't prescribe what you should discover.

I compose situations in which the way we are participating can become strange enough to notice.

Then we stay there. Not forever. Just long enough to find out what else might happen.

Something is happening in your group that you can feel but can't quite see.

A meeting keeps going the same way. Responsibility keeps landing with the same people.

People keep trying to help, and somehow the conversation gets smaller. Something important keeps disappearing.

You may not need another explanation. You may need a way to see what is already happening.

I create situations in which groups can encounter what is already happening between them, not as a diagnosis, but as something they can perceive and experiment with.

Have something you can't quite see clearly yet?

Tell me what you're noticing. We can begin there.

Work with me

One inquiry. Different ways in.

The same inquiry takes different forms depending on what or whom we encounter.

Language

Witnessing Without Colonizing

What becomes possible when another person's experience doesn't have to become my understanding of it?

A practice of attention, difference, and relational possibility.

Read more

Objects

Deep Puppetry™

What can an unfinished thing teach us about encountering something we cannot fully know?

An artistic practice using puppetry, animation, and relational scores to investigate projection, recognition, and encounter.

Explore Deep Puppetry

Participation

School of the Small and Imperfect

What becomes possible when we can notice ourselves participating while we're still doing it?

A space for practicing different ways of being together through relational scores and collective inquiry.

Enter School

Coordination

Organizational Practice

What happens when responsibility, authority, care, and power move through ordinary interaction?

Working with organizations and groups to investigate patterns that are difficult to see from inside them.

Work together

Questions

The Living Inquiry

Some questions aren't ready to become methods yet.

The Living Inquiry is where we stay with them.

A participatory space for questions that are still changing the work.

Enter the inquiry

What people have noticed

“I’ve now noticed patterns repeating across different people and situations with such similarity that I can’t help but see my own participation in creating the outcomes. There’s a kind of zoomed-out perspective now, like I’m in the interaction and also watching it unfold.” - Kevin Karpinski

“We entered a space where things didn’t need to be fully formed, where we could delay our automatic responses and stay with what was happening. At times I didn’t understand what was happening. But I began to feel that not knowing didn’t mean I was lost.” - Anita van Ast

“Through this work, I’ve become more willing to stay with difficulty rather than resolve it. It has changed how I participate in collaborative and group environments.” - Julia Tribe

These aren't claims about transformation. They're traces of something becoming perceptible.