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 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. The institutional response will be what it’s always been: retool, retrain people for the next path. But you can’t fix a bearing problem by building a better road. The road was never the issue. It’s that the territory has gone wild, and no one was trained for that.
We know, because we’ve worked wild terrain for over twenty years.
Co-founder · Executive Director, sparkWILD Institute
Two decades of organizational leadership, including Fortune 50 HR at The Home Depot, where she led cultural integration across states as the company acquired businesses and brought them into one culture. It is some of the hardest organizational work there is: taking companies with different instincts and unspoken rules and making them function as one coherent body, often inside male-dominated, change-resistant founder cultures, under pressure that would have broken most people.
Then she built something of her own. As President of RubyResorts she designed the operating architecture underneath the company: the hiring, the service standards, the invisible choreography that made tens of thousands of guests feel something they couldn’t quite name. Within days of meeting a team she reads who is actually aligned, where the resistance lives, which relationships are load-bearing, 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 from a distance. She works the terrain alongside you. That difference is what makes this hold.”
She also has a particular gift for bringing people up to speed on AI fast, from children to seasoned professionals who have never touched it, honest about both what it opens up and where it can quietly cost you. She leads the sparkWILD Institute, the educational mission for families, young people, and educators. 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.
Fortune 50 HR at The Home Depot · multi-state cultural integration · certified in human-resource management · President, RubyResorts · co-founder, The Ruby of Crested Butte · Executive Director, sparkWILD Institute
Co-founder · Creator of WILD Intelligence · Author of the forthcoming WILD Intelligence (late 2026)
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. Law gave him structural reasoning, finance gave him analytical discipline, hospitality gave him operator credibility, and design thinking gave him the human-centered instincts that run through everything he does.
He has worked at the edge of AI since the first serious language models arrived, building the systems that support this practice as a practitioner rather than an observer. WILD×AI, the approach 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.
“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.”
Juris Doctor (law), University of Colorado · Certified Financial Manager · award-winning teaching in innovation & entrepreneurship · Stanford Innovation Certificate · IBM Enterprise Design Thinking & AI Practitioner · Certified Hospitality Educator · fifteen years a tenured professor
Over two decades of working through it together: raising a child, building and selling businesses, making cross-country moves, facing the decisions that test every assumption about what matters. Tens of thousands of conversations across one breakfast table. That is where WILD Intelligence actually lives, at the intersection of philosophical clarity and human reality.
Chris reads systems and where they’re going. Andrea reads people and the cultures they make. Together they function as a diagnostic pair, two minds that have worked enough shared terrain to see patterns neither could see alone.
For the work that turns on it, you get the two of them, not a handoff. That diagnostic is the core of everything the company does.
Crested Butte, Colorado. Ten thousand feet. A mountain town where the thinking is clear.
This is where we live, and it isn’t 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 step away from pace and noise on a regular basis, then come back with the kind of perspective immersion can’t 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, and the business grew from it. That distinction matters, because change used to be optional and now it’s the expected. Helping people meet that and thrive in it takes 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 two decades on this terrain trained.
What began as two people is now a company with a team.
The WILD Navigation Company runs on the framework Chris built and the book that named it, a proprietary way of measuring where a person stands with AI, and cohort programs for individuals, families, and organizations. A separate nonprofit, the sparkWILD Institute, carries the same mission into schools and families. Chris and Andrea lead it and stay close to the diagnostic work that carries the most weight. A dispersed team of specialists, with AI woven through everything, carries the rest.
It is a small team on purpose, and it delivers like a far larger one. That is WILD×AI, run on the company itself first.
We hear what you need before you can name it. That’s where the work begins.
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