We’re pretty normal, down-to-earth people. You’ll probably laugh with us (Tina’s laugh is infectious). There will also probably be a point where one of us says something that makes you look at yourself a little differently and suddenly feel uncomfortable (Zach is known for this), or makes you go, “Wow. I didn’t think about it like that.”

We’re genuinely curious people. We spend a lot of time in the car talking about why people do what they do, why a system keeps producing the same outcome, or why something that seems like it should be working clearly isn’t. We get coffee and keep talking about it. We put music on and keep talking about it. Sometimes we end up sitting around the table with candles lit, drawing things out on paper because we want to understand it better.

We like figuring things out, and we really like talking with people about what we find. Over the years, people we’ve worked with have joked that we should give TED Talks or become professors because once we get interested in an idea, we want to talk about it. Not because we think we have some grand answer to everything, we just really enjoy taking something apart, looking at it from different angles, and sharing what we’re noticing so other people can start seeing it too.

That’s basically what you’re getting when you work with us. Two people who are going to get interested in what you share, ask a lot of questions, notice things, push back on each other about what we think we’re seeing, change our minds when something doesn’t fit, and keep working the situation until we get to the bottom of it.

We’ve both ended up in a lot of different worlds over the years. Schools, leadership, youth and family work, community programs, crisis situations, operations, organizations, and plenty of things that don’t fit neatly into a category. Because of that, we’ve had to learn a lot about people, systems, logistics, conflict, relationships, decision-making, and what happens when all of those things start crashing into each other.

We don’t really leave those experiences in separate boxes. Something we learned working with a teenager may change how we look at a leadership problem. Something we learned managing a complicated operation may help us see what is going wrong inside a family or organization. An idea from psychology might connect with something from philosophy, education, systems thinking, or just something we watched happen in real life.

That combination is important and special. You’re getting two people who have spent more than 30 years doing this work professionally, studying people and systems, and looking at the same kinds of questions from a lot of different angles. We don’t always notice the same things or come to the same conclusion right away. We bring what each of us is seeing together, test it against what is actually happening, and keep going until the picture makes sense.

The result is often a view of the situation that you probably would never get from one perspective alone.

Underneath all of it, we care deeply about people. We’re fascinated by humanity, why we do what we do, how we become who we are, why we keep repeating things that hurt us, what helps us grow, and what happens when people finally see something about themselves or their situation that they couldn’t see before. That’s a big part of why we love this work.

Sometimes, if not a lot of the time, the thing we end up talking about won’t even be the thing you thought you were calling about.

The goal is pretty simple: when you leave, we want you to understand what’s happening better than you did when you got here, and have a better idea of what you want to do about it.