About Zam

I am a practitioner–researcher working at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and systems change.

My work focuses on how decisions and innovations take shape in complex systems — particularly in moments of uncertainty, transition, or when the course of the status quo runs dry.  I support leaders, teams, and multi-stakeholder initiatives through inquiry-based processes that strengthen clarity, commitment, and shared authorship.

My background includes work in social innovation, sustainability, and collaborative initiatives, alongside doctoral research focused on embodied sensing and decision-making. This research grew from lived experience. I have learned, personally and professionally, how easily quiet knowing can be overridden — and how costly it can be when decisions move forward without space for what has not yet found words. Through my work in rainforests, supply chains, and collaborative futures efforts, I came to understand that the way decisions are made — who is included, what forms of intelligence are valued, and how listening is held — can matter as much as the outcomes themselves.

In living systems, healing or the movement toward wholeness is rarely the result of expert intervention. It emerges when conditions allow innate wisdom — human and more-than-human — to be known. My work is grounded in both academic research and lived practice, and informed by approaches that are rigorous, relational, and responsive to real-world complexity.

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How I Work

My work centers on inquiry design and stewardship — shaping the conditions under which decisions and innovations can emerge with integrity.

Rather than directing outcomes or providing answers, I focus on how deciding happens. This includes attending to what counts as intelligence, how participation and authority are structured, and how responsibility is distributed across a system. Inquiry allows complex dynamics to be sensed rather than overridden, revealing patterns, tensions, and signals that traditional problem-solving approaches often miss.

A central aspect of my role is inquiry stewardship: holding the integrity of the inquiry itself. Stewardship means creating the conditions in which listening is possible and a system can be heard —including relational dynamics and the unseen. From that listening, decisions can take shape with greater coherence and commitment.

Alongside practice, I study lived decision-making across contexts, paying attention to how commitment and authorship form — and where they break down. This research informs my work by sharpening how I design and steward conditions where differences can be held, power can be acknowledged, and decisions have a chance to endure.