Where it started.
Twenty years of asking "what's really going on here."
2003-2024
Life in the industry.
Katie started her career as a journalist. Not because she wanted to report facts — but because she was insatiably drawn to understanding how things work. Why people behave the way they do. What's really going on beneath the surface of a story.
That instinct took her from journalism into strategic communications, business development, change management, and eventually consulting and speaking. The sectors changed. The organisations changed. The through-line never did.
"The friction isn't the problem. It's the signal."
2024
The inception of The Praxis Collective & Lichen Leadership.
She founded The Praxis Collective because she wanted the latitude to contribute without apology — to build something that matched the way she actually thinks. Within six months, Wiley International approached her to publish a book based on her original frameworks. That wasn't luck. It was the result of two decades of serious thinking, made visible.
2026
What Katie is up to now.
Today, Katie works with senior leaders, executive teams, and boards who are experiencing the symptoms of organisational systems that no longer fit the people inside them. She helps them see three levels deeper. Then she helps them redesign.
How Katie operates
Four things clients notice immediately.
Insatiably drawn to new ideas, people, and possibilities. Katie doesn't arrive with a fixed lens — she arrives wanting to understand your specific situation, not apply a template
to it.
An almost uncanny ability to read human dynamics — to perceive unspoken tensions, navigate subtext, and surface the thing everyone in the room already suspects but hasn't said aloud.
Exceptionally calm in high-stakes or chaotic environments. Katie steadies a room without minimising what's hard. She lowers the emotional temperature so that real thinking
can begin.
Trust builds fast with Katie — not because she's reassuring, but because she makes people feel genuinely seen. It's the warmth of someone who thinks you can handle the truth. And usually,
you can.
Beyond Her Work.
The thinking doesn't stop at the office door.
Katie paints — watercolour and acrylic. She sings and plays piano. She writes fiction, children's stories, and has a romantic suspense novel in development. This isn't a side note. It's central to how she thinks.
The aesthetic sensibility, the comfort with metaphor, the range as a communicator — all of it draws from a creative life taken seriously.
"I want to build cultures people want to be part of — and design systems people don't need to recover from."
Katie is a member of the Cuppa Collective peer network and the Adelaide EO chapter, and speaks regularly at professional associations, executive forums, and women's leadership events. Her work is not positioned as women's leadership — but she is a visible and unapologetic advocate for women in leadership.
At 40, Katie was diagnosed with ADHD. She'll tell you it came with enormous grief, enormous relief, and — eventually — a kind of freedom she hadn't expected. A total reframe of her own story.
It matters here because the lens she brings to organisations is the same one she applied to herself: what looks like a people problem is almost always a system problem. What looks like failure is almost always feedback. She doesn't just think this. She's lived the other side of it.
The Book.
Wiley approached her. Not the other way around.
Within six months of founding The Praxis Collective, Katie was approached by Wiley International to publish a book based on her original IP. She describes it as the result of creating a space where she could contribute without apology.
Lichen Leadership is the argument that organisations built on extraction — taking from people without designing the conditions that enable them to give sustainably — are structurally fragile. The alternative isn't softer. It's smarter.
Lichen: one of the most resilient organisms on earth.
Not despite its complexity — but because of it. Structure and energy, bound in an interface that enables both to survive conditions neither could tolerate alone.
Published by Wiley International. Coming 2026.
