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.
Over two decades he built and exited two businesses in hospitality. The Ruby of Crested Butte became Colorado's #1-rated boutique inn. Ruby Resorts sold for $400,000 on the strength of its system and relationships alone — buyers paid for the way he and Andrea had learned to think about serving people.
He spent fifteen years as a tenured professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, building programs where students had to navigate real uncertainty rather than rehearse case studies. He teaches business law and ethics. He reads deeply across philosophy, cognitive science, organizational behavior, and the history of technology. He has been operating at the edge of AI since the first serious language models arrived — not as a hobbyist, as a practitioner designing the AI systems that support this practice.
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 agent architecture 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
Navigator · Executive Director, sparkWILD Institute
Andrea sees what organizations miss — the human architecture underneath every system that works.
On the fast track to HR leadership at The Home Depot before she was thirty, she led cultural integration across multi-billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions — the work of taking two organizations with different instincts, different hierarchies, and different unspoken rules, and making them function as one coherent body. It is some of the hardest organizational work there is. She did it across multiple states, in high-stakes deals, 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 left, not because she burned out but because she saw the ceiling. The most important work — helping people navigate real transitions, not manage abstract ones — wasn't happening inside institutional walls.
She built the operational architecture behind The Ruby of Crested Butte, which became Colorado's highest-rated boutique inn not because of marketing but because of the quality of what Andrea designed underneath — the hiring, the service standards, the invisible choreography that made 35,000 guests feel something they couldn't quite name. She has 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.
Andrea doesn't coach. She navigates alongside. The difference is what makes this partnership work.
She 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 children, and she is unusually qualified to shape it for others.
Home Depot HR Director (multi-state M&A cultural integration) · Two decades Fortune 50 organizational leadership · Co-founder, The Ruby of Crested Butte · Operational architect, Ruby Resorts · Navigator of the partnership that carries both practices
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 and selling 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 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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