Turning accidental adversaries into strategic partners
When the stakes are too high for the room to stay fragmented
You’ve got smart people, a vision, and a strategy.
And…
Every leader has a different version of what the top priority actually is.
Meetings end in agreement. Execution fizzles.
Your strategy seems solid. Initiatives consistently stall.
Your offsite was a “Great meeting!” Momentum is gone in a week.
AI uncertainty is freezing your decision cycles.
The work requires organizations, agencies, or sectors that have never truly worked together to start moving as one.
Vision and strategy without alignment and accountability?
Just a PowerPoint Deck.
Leaders bring me in when:
Something that matters is not moving
The people who need to move forward need to move together
Authority alone is not going to solve it
My clients are facing one of three challenges:
A leadership team that has never truly aligned around what matters most, making shared goals and collective action elusive.
A coalition or cross-sector initiative where competing priorities and unclear accountability have stalled the work.
A complex effort that requires business units, agencies, or sectors to work together across boundaries they have never crossed.
These are accidental adversary problems.
My work is to find the common goal, turn it into real commitment, and build the accountability that holds until the work moves on its own.
My work
Unified more than 150 organizations under a single citywide plan to address the opioid crisis, sustaining that coalition for more than eight years.
Reshaped resilience planning across the National Capital Region from a jurisdictional approach to a unified regional framework, aligning emergency management leaders and senior officials across DC, Maryland, and Virginia.
Aligned a fragmented executive team in support of a new chief executive of one of the nation's most visible public institutions. The leader credited the engagement with producing more progress in the first six months than the organization had realized in the previous six years.
“You want to work with Jonathan if the stakes are high and the way forward is messy.”
-Deputy Mayor, Public Safety, Washington, DC
Leading Through AI
Your job as a leader hasn’t changed. How work gets done IS changing, and you need to understand what that means for your organization.
If your first question is, “what AI tools should I use,” you’re asking the wrong question. The tools are not the hard part. Leading people through the change is.
Most organizations are not struggling with technology. They are struggling with the leadership and people challenges that AI is surfacing.
Leading Through AI is my framework for senior executives who need to lead their organizations through that challenge. Not a technology conversation. A leadership one.