Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. -- Bruce Lee

Recently, I was chatting with old first-wave gov tech friends and realized I needed to articulate what I'm actually doing these days. The work is fluid, often invisible, and doesn't fit neatly into traditional innovation frameworks. But after the 2025 LA fires in January cut very close to home, the urgency of climate-proofing our region became impossible to ignore. This is an attempt to map the territory I'm navigating.

What I'm doing is fluid and dependent on tactical availability, crossing the river by feeling the stones.

Who I'm working with is uncertain in a time of global and local change.

How I'm operating is mostly through "collecting the dots in order to connect the dots."

Where this happens is mostly digital aka URL viz a viz teams meetings, emails, word memos, powerpoint decks and the like with a keen eye grounded IRL.

Why is straightforward: finding radically common sense paths to climate-proof the region. The fires made the stakes clear. You can read more context in my earlier post, "What We Build Before Everything Breaks Apart."

As an innovation program manager, I try to avoid tightly wound project management cycles. Instead, I embrace what I think of as "fat thinking," maintaining a maker studio mindset where there's room to experiment, room to fail, room to learn and most importantly capacity to act when conditions allow.

The terrain I'm operating in has some peculiar features:

Water is wonky. It doesn't fit neatly into the city innovation space that's more clearly defined by the Bloomberg-funded universe of fellowships, CDO positions, and adjacent NGOs. A few innovation roles are popping up in water utilities, but it's still nascent territory.

Time of change. Locally and globally, the ground is shifting. This creates both uncertainty and opportunity.

One official mandate from my first year was leading an organization-wide process improvement initiative. Nothing to write home about in terms of results: we helped get five minutes of buffer time as a default between meetings, which was a small existence proof that change is possible.

I have friends and allies in the industry from the water data movement over the last decade. These relationships matter more than any budget line. Since I left my role project managing the CA data collaborative focused on urban water use efficiency, the org has grown >5x to almost fifty utilities and was featured by the UN as a globally leading example. Shows what's possible when you ditch overhead 😛

I'm really lucky to have done a tour of duty at my hometown water utility, where I got a 360-degree, in-the-trenches experience managing day-to-day realities across a utility with a staff of 33. Supporting our GM through that gave me something you can't get from books—lived understanding, what the Greek's called Metis. I wrote about some of that here.

There's also family legacy at play. The stone and stream series I've been writing traces lineages of work and motion that run deeper than job descriptions. You can read more about that here.

My toolkit is deliberately simple:

Notion is where the work takes shape—flow week by week, then specific projects and ideas. Mostly writing. Taking lots of notes. Trying to capture the ephemeral before it evaporates.

Email and calendar structure the time. I try to spend most of my time either in scheduled meetings or in completely open, unstructured time. The in-between kills creativity.

Generative AI serves as glue and translation layer—helping me move between different organizational languages and contexts.

A variety of devices depending on the situation. Sometimes mobile, sometimes desktop, whatever fits the moment.

In the office, I'm mostly scouting:

Finding fertile soil to plant new ideas that may later sprout, which really means finding spare bits of loam in a sea of sand. Making friends and allies. Understanding the terrain: where meetings happen, where resources are held, where people go for those resources. Leveraging in office time to work through various information bottlenecks like IP and paper constraints where physical presence is important.

Little things matter, like learning the numbering system for conference rooms. I try to keep an open eye to see where people congregate, where historical resources reside, where information and power flows.

At home, the rhythm is different:

I try to keep mornings clear for reading and writing. That means following up on potential ideas and fleshing them out through memos or other artifacts—wireframes, decks, something simple and sticky that can be reshared internally.

Afternoons are mostly small group meetings, typically 1:1, a mix of internal and external conversations. We're finding and exploring possible technologies, methods, little cultural artifacts to deploy.

Field visits happen when there's a confluence of reasons like investigating process with historical archives while also seeing how folks do things day-to-day for a critical function that's amenable to a new tool or technology.

This is where Bruce Lee's wisdom becomes method: "adjust to the object."

Find and scout out opportunities, then follow up to water the promising ones. Like water, I'm looking for the cracks, the openings where something might grow.

Flow around obstacles. More force, more resistance. Better to create conditions where the right things can happen naturally.

Be ruthlessly efficient with core activities so there's ample time for "extracurriculars." This sort of fat rather than lean approach is critical for innovation. Batch process administrative tasks. Double-dip with "chores."

For example: there are mandatory, hyper-bureaucratic trainings that many treat as check-the-box exercises. But there's value in actually digging into those trainings—really grokking the underlying principles and systems. Not just the theory of procurement and the concepts and policies, but parallel processing that with the ongoing flow of our activities. The continuous improvement process initiative gives me a good reason to indulge in this deeper understanding.

Pull on threads. Sometimes a small thread can unravel into something significant. Stay curious and see with unclouded eyes.

Much of what we face regionally and globally are tangles of interrelated challenges: a changing climate, the end of a stable post WW2 era, aging infrastructure, public finance challenges. As Venkat Rao writes in his piece on theorizing protocolization, we're not dealing with discrete problems but with complex, knotted tangles.

Water doesn't try to untangle the knot all at once. It finds the weak points, the natural openings. It persists. It adapts. It flows around obstacles when it can't flow through them.

That's the posture I'm trying to maintain.

I'm open to advice, ideas, insights, and really any help this cause can get. If you're working on similar challenges (climate adaptation, digital transformation, water innovation, organizational change in public systems) and/or if you have experience navigating these kinds of tangles, I'd love to hear from you.

The work is too big and too urgent for any one person or organization. There is a massive mountain of problem to modernize legacy public institutions to meet today's moment. Let's find the way forward, together.

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. -- Bruce Lee

Recently, I was chatting with old first-wave gov tech friends and realized I needed to articulate what I'm actually doing these days. The work is fluid, often invisible, and doesn't fit neatly into traditional innovation frameworks. But after the 2025 LA fires in January cut very close to home, the urgency of climate-proofing our region became impossible to ignore. This is an attempt to map the territory I'm navigating.

What I'm doing is fluid and dependent on tactical availability, crossing the river by feeling the stones.

Who I'm working with is uncertain in a time of global and local change.

How I'm operating is mostly through "collecting the dots in order to connect the dots."

Where this happens is mostly digital aka URL viz a viz teams meetings, emails, word memos, powerpoint decks and the like with a keen eye grounded IRL.

Why is straightforward: finding radically common sense paths to climate-proof the region. The fires made the stakes clear. You can read more context in my earlier post, "What We Build Before Everything Breaks Apart."

As an innovation program manager, I try to avoid tightly wound project management cycles. Instead, I embrace what I think of as "fat thinking," maintaining a maker studio mindset where there's room to experiment, room to fail, room to learn and most importantly capacity to act when conditions allow.

The terrain I'm operating in has some peculiar features:

Water is wonky. It doesn't fit neatly into the city innovation space that's more clearly defined by the Bloomberg-funded universe of fellowships, CDO positions, and adjacent NGOs. A few innovation roles are popping up in water utilities, but it's still nascent territory.

Time of change. Locally and globally, the ground is shifting. This creates both uncertainty and opportunity.

One official mandate from my first year was leading an organization-wide process improvement initiative. Nothing to write home about in terms of results: we helped get five minutes of buffer time as a default between meetings, which was a small existence proof that change is possible.

I have friends and allies in the industry from the water data movement over the last decade. These relationships matter more than any budget line. Since I left my role project managing the CA data collaborative focused on urban water use efficiency, the org has grown >5x to almost fifty utilities and was featured by the UN as a globally leading example. Shows what's possible when you ditch overhead 😛

I'm really lucky to have done a tour of duty at my hometown water utility, where I got a 360-degree, in-the-trenches experience managing day-to-day realities across a utility with a staff of 33. Supporting our GM through that gave me something you can't get from books—lived understanding, what the Greek's called Metis. I wrote about some of that here.

There's also family legacy at play. The stone and stream series I've been writing traces lineages of work and motion that run deeper than job descriptions. You can read more about that here.

My toolkit is deliberately simple:

Notion is where the work takes shape—flow week by week, then specific projects and ideas. Mostly writing. Taking lots of notes. Trying to capture the ephemeral before it evaporates.

Email and calendar structure the time. I try to spend most of my time either in scheduled meetings or in completely open, unstructured time. The in-between kills creativity.

Generative AI serves as glue and translation layer—helping me move between different organizational languages and contexts.

A variety of devices depending on the situation. Sometimes mobile, sometimes desktop, whatever fits the moment.

In the office, I'm mostly scouting:

Finding fertile soil to plant new ideas that may later sprout, which really means finding spare bits of loam in a sea of sand. Making friends and allies. Understanding the terrain: where meetings happen, where resources are held, where people go for those resources. Leveraging in office time to work through various information bottlenecks like IP and paper constraints where physical presence is important.

Little things matter, like learning the numbering system for conference rooms. I try to keep an open eye to see where people congregate, where historical resources reside, where information and power flows.

At home, the rhythm is different:

I try to keep mornings clear for reading and writing. That means following up on potential ideas and fleshing them out through memos or other artifacts—wireframes, decks, something simple and sticky that can be reshared internally.

Afternoons are mostly small group meetings, typically 1:1, a mix of internal and external conversations. We're finding and exploring possible technologies, methods, little cultural artifacts to deploy.

Field visits happen when there's a confluence of reasons like investigating process with historical archives while also seeing how folks do things day-to-day for a critical function that's amenable to a new tool or technology.

This is where Bruce Lee's wisdom becomes method: "adjust to the object."

Find and scout out opportunities, then follow up to water the promising ones. Like water, I'm looking for the cracks, the openings where something might grow.

Flow around obstacles. More force, more resistance. Better to create conditions where the right things can happen naturally.

Be ruthlessly efficient with core activities so there's ample time for "extracurriculars." This sort of fat rather than lean approach is critical for innovation. Batch process administrative tasks. Double-dip with "chores."

For example: there are mandatory, hyper-bureaucratic trainings that many treat as check-the-box exercises. But there's value in actually digging into those trainings—really grokking the underlying principles and systems. Not just the theory of procurement and the concepts and policies, but parallel processing that with the ongoing flow of our activities. The continuous improvement process initiative gives me a good reason to indulge in this deeper understanding.

Pull on threads. Sometimes a small thread can unravel into something significant. Stay curious and see with unclouded eyes.

Much of what we face regionally and globally are tangles of interrelated challenges: a changing climate, the end of a stable post WW2 era, aging infrastructure, public finance challenges. As Venkat Rao writes in his piece on theorizing protocolization, we're not dealing with discrete problems but with complex, knotted tangles.

Water doesn't try to untangle the knot all at once. It finds the weak points, the natural openings. It persists. It adapts. It flows around obstacles when it can't flow through them.

That's the posture I'm trying to maintain.

I'm open to advice, ideas, insights, and really any help this cause can get. If you're working on similar challenges (climate adaptation, digital transformation, water innovation, organizational change in public systems) and/or if you have experience navigating these kinds of tangles, I'd love to hear from you.

The work is too big and too urgent for any one person or organization. There is a massive mountain of problem to modernize legacy public institutions to meet today's moment. Let's find the way forward, together.