Some of the best lessons I've learned didn't come from a course or a book. They came from real projects, real people, and conversations I still think about years later.

At first glance, it looked like a technology project.

Our environmental field crews were collecting data on paper, which meant handwritten notes, scanning forms, manually entering information into spreadsheets, and hoping nothing got lost along the way. Moving to digital field forms seemed like an obvious improvement.

But the technology wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was finding the balance between making life easier for the people collecting the data while still capturing everything we needed back in the office for analysis and reporting.

The solution wasn't sitting in a meeting room.

It was waiting at the end of each workday.

Every afternoon I'd touch base with the field crews. Almost every conversation included a small frustration.

"This field should default to numbers."

"We always skip that field."

"I have to tap three extra times to get here."

"It would be so much easier if..."

Every time my answer was the same.

"We can change that."

The next morning they'd head back into the field with a form that was just a little bit better.

Then we'd do it again.

And again.

Over time, those tiny changes transformed the experience—not because of one brilliant idea, but because we kept listening to the people actually doing the work.

What stuck with me

The best systems aren't designed for people.

They’re designed with people.

The people closest to the work almost always know how to make it better. Sometimes all they need is someone willing to listen—and someone willing to say, "We can change that."

When I first started working on BC's provincial prehabilitation toolkit, the evidence was already there.

The recommendations were sound.

The people using it cared deeply about helping patients.

So why wasn't it being used consistently?

Because knowing what to do wasn't the hard part. Knowing how to do it was.

The toolkit explained what to do—but not how to put it into practice.

How do I screen patients efficiently?

What exactly do I tell my patient?

How do I get the resources into their hands?

Every unanswered question created another hurdle.

Working with a dedicated team of clinicians, we reimagined not just the toolkit, but the entire experience of putting prehabilitation into practice.

We clarified the screening tools.

We made it easier to know what to do next.

We developed patient resources that teams didn't have to build themselves.

We made everything easier to access through websites and apps for both clinicians and patients.

Looking back, we weren't just updating a toolkit.

We were removing barriers.

Every decision we could make for someone else was one less decision standing between a patient and better care.

What stuck with me

People rarely resist change because they don't believe in it.

More often, they're simply overwhelmed by everything it takes to put it into practice.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing you can do is make the next step obvious.

One of my favourite projects started with a team that had everything they needed—except time.

They had a clear vision for an online leadership learning hub.

They had the expertise.

They had the course content.

They even had the scripts.

What they didn't have was the capacity to bring it all together.

Hiring a web developer wasn't really the answer. Someone still needed to translate the vision, make hundreds of design decisions, learn new software, coordinate contributors, and connect all the moving pieces.

That's where I came in.

Over the following months I wore a lot of hats—website designer, LMS administrator, instructional designer, content builder, project manager, and occasional technology detective. Whatever the project needed next, I learned it and kept moving.

Looking back, none of the individual tasks were the point.

The real value came from connecting them.

Ideas rarely become reality because of one big breakthrough.

They become reality because someone is willing to own all the little steps in between.

What stuck with me

Great ideas don't always need more strategy.

Sometimes they just need someone who can see the finished picture, figure out all the steps in between, and keep moving until it's real.

One of the things I love most about building resources is that they're never really finished.

When we began updating British Columbia's prehabilitation resources, the goal was to improve an existing toolkit. But over time, that work grew into something much bigger.

The toolkit became clearer and more practical.

Patient resources became easier to understand.

Provider resources became more actionable.

An app made information available wherever it was needed.

Websites brought everything together in one place.

Videos made learning more accessible.

Implementation guides helped teams put ideas into practice.

Clinical pathways made it easier to know what to do next.

Looking back, I don't think we ever set out to build all of those things.

We simply kept asking the same question:

"What's the next thing that would make this easier?"

Every conversation with clinicians, every pilot site, every question from a patient, and every piece of feedback pointed us toward the next improvement.

None of those individual changes transformed the experience on their own.

Together, they did.

The resources we have today aren't the result of getting the first version right.

They're the result of giving ourselves permission to keep making the next version better.

What stuck with me

Perfection is a terrible goal for something that's meant to grow.

The first version doesn't have to be the best version.

It just has to be good enough that someone can use it, learn from it, and help make the next version even better.

One physician had a simple idea: what if patients completed a digital questionnaire before surgery that automatically identified opportunities to improve their health beforehand?

The idea made perfect sense.

Making it work was another story.

Over two years, a group of clinicians from across British Columbia worked together to create a standardized set of screening questions that could be used in hospitals throughout the province. My role was to organize hundreds of questions, compare existing screening tools, and translate them into one consistent framework. (Yes…there was a very large spreadsheet.)

From there, we designed the clinical logic that would turn a patient's answers into meaningful recommendations for medication management, preoperative investigations, anesthesia consultation, and prehabilitation recommendations.

On paper, everything worked.

Turning that into software was where previous attempts had fallen apart.

The challenge wasn't the technology.

It wasn't the clinical expertise either.

It was communication.

Developers thought in workflows and logic.

Clinicians thought in patient care.

Both were right, but they weren't speaking the same language.

Working alongside our clinical lead, I found myself translating between those two worlds—helping each side understand not just what the other was asking for, but why it mattered.

The result wasn't just a digital questionnaire.

It was a tool that fit naturally into clinical practice because it had been built with both perspectives from the very beginning.

What stuck with me

The hardest part of building something isn't always the technical work.

Sometimes it's helping people with different expertise understand each other well enough to build it together.