After more than a decade in the American tech industry, including leading behavioural change for one of the world's largest online communities, I now write about why change efforts so often reproduce what they set out to fix, and I work with organisations on what it takes to do it differently.
I grew up in Sydney and studied finance at UNSW. It was a practical choice and a good education, but by the time I graduated I was drawn to something else. Tech felt like it had a capacity for innovation and reach that finance didn't, and the possibility of building things that could actually touch millions of people felt worth chasing. That's what took me to Los Angeles in my early twenties.
I spent seven years at Cornerstone OnDemand, a global HR technology company, where I moved from technical support through data analysis and into product management. By the end I was running the team responsible for the core operational systems for the tech used by organisations across 180 countries. It was where I learned how products actually work at scale, how decisions made in one room ripple out across systems and cultures in ways that are hard to see from inside the process.
In 2021 I joined Riot Games, where I led product strategy for player behaviour in League of Legends across over 140 million monthly active users. The work was fundamentally about cultural and behavioural change at scale, figuring out how to shift the norms and habits of a very large, very diverse community using data, human-centred design, and evidence-led experimentation. We achieved a 9% uplift in community safety sentiment, the highest recorded in the game's 13-year history.
I returned to Sydney in 2024 after more than a decade in the US. I came back different from the person who left, with questions about systems and change that the work had opened up without resolving. The Riot years had sharpened those questions most of all, because trying to shift behaviour at that scale meant constantly confronting how the system itself absorbed or redirected the changes we were making. Looking back, I think some of those questions were forming earlier than I realised. The finance training I thought I'd left behind had quietly given me a way of reading how complex systems hold together, where the incentives sit, and what happens when they pull against the system's stated purpose. That thread runs through everything I've worked on, even though I couldn't see it while I was living it.
Those questions are what I'm building from now, through writing that explores why change efforts get absorbed by the systems they set out to change, and through advisory work helping organisations understand how their own systems, in and around their company, shape the outcomes they're getting, and what it would take to change them.
AI is where those two threads come together most clearly for me right now. The patterns I keep seeing in how organisations adopt it, the gap between what they say they want and what the incentives and structures actually produce, are the same patterns I've been exploring for years. AI is going to reshape how people work and live in ways we're only beginning to understand, and that convergence is why I'm building here.
"We tend to treat symptoms rather than causes, while continuing with the worldview and the behaviour patterns that caused the problems in the first place."Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures