Meet Erika

My Work

My work lives at the intersection of innovation, strategy, collaboration, and transformation.

As Executive Director of the Alliance for Innovation & Transformation (AFIT), I lead a national community of college presidents working to radically renew higher education. I convene leaders around complex challenges, build collaborative initiatives, design learning experiences, and help turn emerging ideas into experiments, partnerships, and action.

That work has given me a front-row seat to leadership during a period of extraordinary change and has deepened my fascination with how leaders make sense of uncertainty, recognize emerging possibilities, and mobilize people around a shared future.

Increasingly, I am bringing strategic foresight, sensemaking, and futures thinking into that work: looking beyond immediate challenges to identify signals of change, explore possible futures, and help leaders decide what deserves their attention now.

Across everything I do, there is a common thread:

I create the conditions where people can think differently together.

Sometimes that means convening a group that would not otherwise be in the same room. Sometimes it means facilitating a conversation that surfaces an unexpected insight. Sometimes it means connecting two seemingly unrelated ideas. And sometimes it means telling a story that helps people see an opportunity in an entirely new way.

Over the years, I’ve helped leaders and organizations:

• Make sense of complexity and see possibility amid disruption.
• Connect ideas, people, and organizations in unexpected ways.
• Build collaborative communities and strategic partnerships.
• Challenge assumptions and explore new ways of thinking.
• Experiment, learn, and turn insight into action.
• Imagine bold futures — and begin creating them.

At my core, I’m a connector, convener, and catalyst.

I don’t believe my job is to walk into a room with all the answers. I believe it is to help create the conditions where the people in that room can discover better answers together.

How I Work

I bring a mix of curiosity, optimism, strategic thinking, and bias toward action to everything I do.

I’m naturally drawn to the edges — where disciplines intersect, where new ideas are emerging, and where something that works in one field might unlock possibility in another.

I ask a lot of questions.

I look for patterns.

I connect dots.

I create space for people to think.

And then I help move the conversation from insight to action.

My top CliftonStrengths — Strategic, Developer, Intellection, Positivity, and Achiever — reflect that combination well. I love seeing possibilities, developing people and ideas, thinking deeply, bringing energy to difficult challenges, and turning promising ideas into forward motion.

Above all, I believe people do their best thinking when they are curious rather than certain, connected rather than siloed, and empowered to help create what comes next.