Hi, I’m Emily.
Welcome to Ember Strategies. Here's the thing about an ember: it’s the part of the fire that burns long after the flame is out, the part that can spark the next blaze.
I'm interested in what smolders in the space between what's possible and what's prudent, between the questions we ask and the ones we're afraid to.
This is where I think out loud about AI, critical infrastructure, institutional change, beauty, design, leadership, and why the best ideas often come from unexpected places.
So, pull up a chair and stay a while by the fire.
Latest Thoughts
About Me
I didn’t set out to make a life in the borderlands between what we build and what it becomes. But here we are.
When I started out *mumbles number* years ago, I assumed I’d work internationally, probably in diplomacy or conflict resolution. Instead, I dove headlong into the early era of critical infrastructure and cybersecurity, moving between federal and commercial worlds and watching how different systems made sense of the future.
Along the way, across energy, defense, healthcare, water, and manufacturing, I kept noticing the same thing: the patterns rhyme, even when the industries don’t. The names change, the incentive structures change, the stakes change, but the underlying questions are the same. Who absorbs the new capability? Who resists it? Where does it break? And what happens when the world moves faster than the systems built to govern it?
My curiosity draws me to the places where new technologies collide with institutions that don’t get to fail gracefully. I write about that, advise inside it, and occasionally speak about it.
When I’m not thinking about how the future gets absorbed into the world, I rearrange interiors, admire beautiful things, read an unreasonable amount of trashy romance, and stay up too late in conversations that last longer than the whiskey.