Biography

The Enterprise Years

My career grew up inside the enterprise. At companies like Lowe's and Wells Fargo, I led UX teams through the kind of complexity most people never see — thirty-plus practitioners, forty-plus stakeholders, multi-million-dollar programs spread across three continents. I wasn't there to make things pretty. I was there to make delivery predictable: to build the intake governance, decision rights, and research practices that let large teams do their best work without burning out.

I became known for a particular kind of work — turning reactive, chaotic delivery into stable, structured systems. Reducing rework. Protecting research. Bringing discipline to AI adoption before it became a liability. The frameworks I built tended to outlast me, and that was always the point.

The Throughline

Somewhere in all of it, I noticed the pattern. Whether I was stabilizing an enterprise or mentoring a teenager — and I've done more than a decade of the latter — I was doing the same work: helping people find a structure they could feel safe inside, and a language for what was underneath.

The nervous system of a team and the nervous system of a fifteen-year-old aren't so different. Both regulate better when the space around them is built with care.

What I'm Building Now

That's the work I've turned toward, under The Embodied Creative: trauma-informed, arts-based programs that use music, movement, and creativity to teach emotional regulation to the young people who need it most.

It's a transition I'm making deliberately and in the open — bringing twenty years of systems thinking to a room full of teenagers and a set of drums.

I still design. I still make art as Rob Leigh, still shape rooms, still keep the words I carry. This site is where all of it lives in one place — because it was always one person doing one kind of work, in different rooms.