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-five years.
Co-founder · Navigator · Executive Director, sparkWILD Institute
Andrea builds connection, trust, motivation - all the human-centered capacities that become more important, not less, as AI handles more of the work.
Two decades of organizational leadership, including Fortune 50 HR experience at The Home Depot, where she led cultural integration across multiple states as the Builders Solutions Group acquired companies and brought them into a Fortune 50 culture. It is some of the hardest organizational work there is: taking organizations with different instincts, hierarchies, and unspoken rules, and making them function as one coherent body. She did it in high-stakes environments - often with male-dominated, change-resistant founder cultures - under pressure that would have broken most people who didn't already understand what she understood: culture is the real operating system, and you change it by changing relationships, not by announcing policies.
Then she built something of her own. As President of Ruby Resorts, Andrea designed the operating architecture underneath a company that sold on the strength of its system and relationships alone - no physical assets, only the way it worked. The hiring. The service standards. The invisible choreography that made tens of thousands of guests feel something they couldn't quite name. The Ruby of Crested Butte, which she co-built with Chris, became Colorado's highest-rated boutique inn for over a decade - not because of marketing but because of the quality of the operating architecture she designed underneath.
Andrea doesn't coach from a distance. She navigates alongside. Within days of meeting a team, she reads who is actually aligned, where the resistance lives, which relationships are load-bearing and which are decorative, and what the organization doesn't yet know about itself. Then she works - alongside leadership and the team at once - to move what needs moving.
“She doesn't coach. She navigates alongside. The difference is what makes this work.”
In addition to her work at The WILD Navigation Company, Andrea leads the sparkWILD Institute - the educational mission for families, young people, and educators. The work of developing WILD Intelligence in the next generation is the work that shaped her son Sawyer, and she is unusually qualified to shape it for others.
Two decades organizational leadership · Fortune 50 HR experience at The Home Depot (multi-state cultural integration through acquisitions) · President, Ruby Resorts · Co-founder, The Ruby of Crested Butte · Executive Director, sparkWILD Institute
Co-founder · Creator of WILD Intelligence · Author of Wild Intelligence
Chris leads the thinking and the framework that sits upstream of the practice. What he brings is the ability to see the pattern you can't see yourself - and then help you act on it.
Twenty-five years ago he and Andrea left conventional paths to design a life rather than plan a business. Together they built and exited two companies in hospitality - Colorado's top-rated boutique inn over fifteen years, and Ruby Resorts, sold not for what it owned but for how it worked. The businesses grew from the life they committed to, not the other way around. That reversal is one of the things they teach.
The framework didn't come from theory. Chris brought a legal and financial analytical mind into hospitality operations, then into fifteen years as a tenured professor of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. He still teaches in higher education today - not because he has to, but because the energy and questions of students keep the work honest, and sharing this perspective with people just starting out is some of the most generative work he does. Each domain extended the toolkit. Law gave him structural reasoning. Finance gave him analytical discipline. Hospitality gave him operator credibility. Design thinking - which he practiced for two decades before naming it as a lineage - gave him the human-centered instincts that now run through everything he does.
He has been operating at the edge of AI since the first serious language models arrived, designing the systems that support this practice as a practitioner rather than an observer. WILD×AI - the cutting-edge approach to the AI era he architected - is grounded not in tool mastery but in sovereignty: developing what AI can't replace. He moves easily between Aristotle and agent architecture because the connections are real, not performed.
Chris's career has been a series of reaches - toward bigger questions, harder domains, longer arcs of work - and each reach taught him something about how navigation actually happens. Striving for what you aren't yet ready for and learning what the reach builds is not adjacent to the WILD framework. It is the framework. The practice came from twenty-five years of exits, relocations, industry shifts, and the daily discipline of building a life without following conventional paths.
“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, Creativity, & Entrepreneurship
This is where we live, and it's not an accident. We designed a life at the intersection of beauty, challenge, and disconnection - and the disconnection isn't incidental. The mountain is part of the practice. We disconnect regularly from pace, noise, and constant connectivity, then reconnect with the kind of perspective immersion cannot give. The framework was developed and tested here, in conditions most advisory work never touches.
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 change and innovation used to be optional. They've become the expected. Helping individuals, teams, and organizations develop the capacity not just to navigate that, but to thrive in it, requires range - across the inner life, the relationships that hold it, the systems we build, and what any of it is for. That range is what twenty-five years on this kind of terrain trained.
Twenty-five years of navigating together - raising a child, building and selling businesses, making cross-country relocations, facing the kind of decisions that test every assumption about what matters. Tens of thousands of conversations across one breakfast table. Their conversations are where WILD Intelligence actually lives: at the intersection of philosophical clarity and human reality.
Chris reads systems and where they're going - frameworks, intellectual architecture, the ability to name what's happening. Andrea reads people and the cultures they make - relational intelligence, organizational insight, the ability to feel what's happening. Together they function as a diagnostic pair: two minds that have operated across enough shared terrain to see patterns neither could see 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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