The Story Behind My Work

how everything is connected

For a long time, I thought I was building four seemingly different ideas. In reality, they had all grown from the same question. Mind the Gap, Rent Is Due, the Transformation • Connection • Flow Meta-Systemics equation, and the Define • Describe • Infer (DDI) framework are simply different expressions of that question. I just didn't realize it at the time.

It started with a question: How can I actually understand the world? 

Looking back, I think that question started much earlier than I realized. I was born in England, spent part of my childhood in Germany, and later lived in Michigan, Texas and Delaware. My family moved a lot, and every move meant learning a new place, new people, and sometimes a new language. 

One of my earliest memories was walking into my new classroom in Germany without speaking a single word of German. On my very first day, the class held an election. Normal enough, lol...except I had absolutely no idea what anyone was saying! So when it came time to vote, I did what seemed perfectly logical: I wrote down every candidate's name on my ballot. 🤦🏼‍♀️ After class, my teacher handed it back to me and, in broken English and lots of patient gestures, tried to explain that I was only supposed to choose one. Eventually I gained fluency in German, almost entirely through immersion.

But remembering where I started - casting my vote(s) lol - still makes me chuckle ☺️!

That experience really stayed with me. It taught me that understanding doesn't always happen because someone explains something perfectly. Sometimes your brain quietly pieces together patterns, context, and experience until one day...it simply clicks. I don't think I realized it then, but I had already started wondering what was happening behind the scenes. How does something completely unfamiliar slowly become familiar? 

How do we actually learn?

School was always strange for me. Tests came easily and I could usually teach myself anything. But I was never actually good at school. I didn't like memorizing things just to forget them a week later, and I desperately wanted to know how everything fit together. That question followed me into college.

With the goal of becoming a Medical Examiner, I took the MCAT…but I ended up taking it four times. The first three I tanked. After my third low score in a row, I got serious about figuring out the best way to study. On my fourth attempt, I earned a perfectly balanced (sciences & english) 10-10-10 and got accepted to medical school, though I decided not to matriculate. Looking back, I don't think I was chasing medicine as much as I was chasing understanding.Then life happened.

My twenties were rough in a lot of ways. During that time, I disappeared into books - I call it my hibernation period, lol (I can laugh now!). At that time, self-study and interdisciplinary learning became my way of making sense of the world. I wasn't trying to invent anything. I was just relentlessly curious. I read everything I could get my hands on. Science. History. Economics. Psychology. Philosophy. Technology.  Art.  Evolution. Physics. Pretty much anything that made me ask another question!

Eventually something strange started happening. The subjects stopped looking different. Patterns kept showing up everywhere. Biology wasn't just biology. Economics wasn't just economics. History wasn't just history. Different disciplines were describing many of the same ideas. They just had different vocabulary. That eventually became Mind the Gap. Not another way to memorize information. A way to understand anything.

Then came Define • Describe • Infer…

Years later I was working at Capital One Bank in Process Engineering, teaching Statistics, analyzing data, and helping our fraud teams solve problems. I was in the process of becoming Six Sigma Greenbelt certified and coaching several individuals and I noticed people almost always skipped straight to conclusions. Meetings inevitably would have us arguing about solutions before we even agreed on what the problem was. So I started simplifying my own thinking.

  • First...Define: What exactly are we talking about?

  • Then...Describe: What do we actually observe? Not opinions. Not guesses. Just what's there.

  • Only then...Infer: Given the evidence, what conclusions actually make sense?

It sounds simple, but it completely changed the way I approached almost every problem. Eventually I realized it worked for almost anything, not just business, and I built out the framework.

Then I noticed another pattern…

As my interests had me continually zooming out across disciplines, I found myself noticing different universal systems centered on these same three questions over and over.

  • What transformed?

  • What became connected?

  • What began to flow?

Whether I was looking at evolution, organizations, cities, AI, the internet, or financial systems, those three questions kept revealing what had actually changed. That became a relationship I defined as Transformation • Connection • Flow and how they interacted within a complicated system. Then I started writing it down. Eventually it turned into math...and somehow it kept working! My first thought was, "wait...did I accidentally discover a universal equation?" Lol, probably not, but it did seem to describe an awful lot of systems in this world. Not because everything is the same. Because those questions seem to uncover the important parts of almost every major change.

Rent Is Due was almost an accident!

This was one of my favorite turning points. Recently I'd been painting a series of detailed miniature Japanese watercolor paintings as a gift to my parents of the six houses where my family and I have lived in around the world. Around the same time, my younger brother had just moved into a new apartment in Manhattan, so between visiting him and his wife and hearing about apartment hunting, NYC neighborhoods, and rent, the idea of "home" was everywhere! (Apparently my subconscious was paying attention, ha! 😄) At the same time, I was thinking about innovation, artificial intelligence and reading extensively on quantum computing. One day those ideas collided. I suddenly asked myself: What if information has always been looking for a better home? 

That one question changed everything. Instead of following the history of technology...I started following the history of information. Particles. Atoms. Molecules. DNA. Brains. Language. Writing. Books. Computers. The Internet. Artificial Intelligence. Every time information reached the limits of its current home, it found another one. That's when the whole story appeared: Rent Is Due.

How do we actually understand the world?

I don't think I’ve discovered four different frameworks. I’ve simply spent twenty years asking one question from four different directions: How do we actually understand the world? That question eventually became my mission: to help people build understanding by recognizing patterns that connect knowledge, innovation, and complex systems. Along the way, different pieces emerged.

  • Mind the Gap became my education and learning foundation

  • Define • Describe • Infer became a method for reasoning clearly

  • Transformation • Connection • Flow became a lens for understanding change

  • Meta-Systemics became the thinking system connecting them together

  • And Rent Is Due became the first story that let me see all of those ideas working at once

They're not separate ideas. They're different expressions of the same journey.