Find the light
ABOUT
As a photographer, that means finding moments of resilience, awe, and belonging — in the skate parks of Venice Beach, the deltas of southern Africa, the fishing communities of Vietnam. As a strategist and co-founder of ENSO, it means helping organizations build futures they genuinely believe in. As a writer, it means making optimism feel possible, not naive.
Three strands of one pursuit.
Longer story
I grew up in a small village in England, spending most days exploring fields, rivers and woods by bike. That early sense of curiosity and movement has never left me, but I found new fields.
For the first part of my career, I worked as a strategy consultant helping large companies enter new markets, living and working in Boston, London, Tokyo, and eventually Los Angeles. In LA I found a different kind of question: not just how to grow, but what’s worth building. That led me to the emerging world of social innovation, and to co-founding GOOD/Corps in 2009, and then ENSO in 2012 with Kirk Souder. Over the following decade, working with partners from Google to Khan Academy to SpaceX, I became convinced that the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be is not a fixed condition, but a design challenge.
Photography is a parallel practice — a way of slowing down enough to see reality and the wonder of the world. After I was diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and spent a year in treatment, the camera became a daily discipline of re-finding life. The resulting series, Find the Light, is a quest for moments of joy, peace, resilience, community and awe. It’s currently on show at Big Red Sun, in Venice Beach, California.
Writing connects the two. I’ve contributed to Fast Company for over a decade, and I’m working on The Future Design Mindset with Hanna Siegel; a book about the tools and dispositions needed to build genuinely better futures.
I’m a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Gates Foundation Goalkeeper, and a board member of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.
I live in Los Angeles, California.