The maps used to work. Follow the path, hit the milestones, arrive at the destination everyone agreed on. School, career, promotion, retirement. It wasn't exciting, but it was navigable. The markers were clear.
That's changing — faster than most people realize. AI isn't just reshuffling which jobs exist. It's dissolving the scripts themselves — the ones that told people what success looks like, what a career looks like, what a life looks like. And the institutional response will be what it's always been: retool. Retrain people for the next path. But you can't solve a navigation problem by building a better road. The issue was never the road. It's that the territory has gone wild — and no one trained for that.
We know, because we've been navigating wild terrain for over twenty years.
Framework Originator. Author of Wild Intelligence.
Chris is a philosopher who builds things — businesses, frameworks, and the kind of clarity that only comes from sitting with hard questions long enough.
He's built and sold two businesses (The Ruby of Crested Butte and Ruby Resorts), taught business law and ethics at the university level, and spent twenty years studying what makes people capable of navigating uncertainty — not from a research lab, but from the actual practice of navigating it.
The WILD Intelligence framework emerged from that practice: two decades of exits, relocations, industry shifts, and the daily discipline of building a life without following conventional paths. He's the kind of thinker who can move between Aristotle and AI deployment in the same conversation — because the connections are real, not performed.
What Chris brings isn't advice. It's the ability to see the pattern you can't see yourself — and then help you act on it.
JD, University of Colorado · Certified Financial Manager · Certified Hospitality Educator · Stanford Innovation Certificate · IBM Enterprise Design Thinking & AI Practitioner · Tenured Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Executive Director, sparkWILD Institute
Andrea sees what organizations miss — the human architecture underneath every system that works.
With two decades in Human Resources at Fortune 50 companies, including leading cultural integration through multi-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions, she's developed an almost uncanny ability to read the invisible dynamics in a room: who's actually aligned, where the resistance lives, which relationships are load-bearing and which are decorative.
She left corporate America not because she burned out, but because she realized the most important work — helping people navigate real transitions, not manage abstract ones — doesn't happen inside institutional walls.
Andrea doesn't coach. She navigates alongside. The difference matters.
She leads the sparkWILD Institute — the educational mission for families, young people, and schools.
This is where we live — and it's not an accident. We designed a life at the intersection of beauty, challenge, and disconnection. The mountains are where we raised our son Sawyer, where we cook for friends, where we use AI daily from a home with no visible technology aesthetic.
We didn't plan a business. We designed a life. The business grew from the life — not the other way around. That distinction matters, because it's the same distinction we help our clients navigate: the difference between optimizing the path you're on and choosing the terrain you actually want to cross.
Twenty years of navigating together — raising a child, building businesses, making cross-country relocations, facing the kind of decisions that test every assumption about what matters. Their conversations are where WILD Intelligence actually lives: at the intersection of philosophical clarity and human reality.
Chris provides the frameworks, the intellectual architecture, the ability to name what's happening. Andrea provides the relational intelligence, the organizational insight, the ability to feel what's happening. Together, they create something neither could alone.
This isn't a practice where you're assigned to whichever associate is available. The diagnostic power is in the partnership, not in either individual.
We hear what you need before you can name it. That's where navigation begins.
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