Hello! I’m MaRi.

I am a Canadian award-winning, Vancouver-based emerging tech influencer and future trends consultant with more than 15 years of experience innovating digital futures leadership and organizational development.

Clients value my expertise to prepare their current and next generation leaders for the future of work. My focus area is regenerative leadership and transformative technologies, including digital therapeutics, to revitalize and regenerate the fabric of life.

I incorporate positive psychology, applied ecopsychology and expressive arts therapy in my approach, as these not only provide health and performance benefits for leaders, but also supports sustainable development.

My professional experience includes private and public sector, as well as decentralized communities in emerging tech.

I provide strategic consulting on new models of leadership and cultural development to prepare leaders and organizations to tap into emerging markets, leveraging technology to raise physical and mental health, emotional well-being and human thriving.

My specialties are executive and board level leadership consulting and partnering on strategic, responsive digital cultural design and adoption, including strategic leadership alignment, curriculum development, cascading of strategy and goals across the enterprise and ecosystem, as well as performance optimization and wellness cultivation:

• Positive Maverick Leadership Philosophy, Principles and Practices
• Strategies for cultivating regenerative cultures and transformational technologies
• Off-the-beaten track leadership skills to cultivate novel (difficult to replicate and automate) capabilities to inspire confidence in more hopeful social and cultural change
• Internal expert leadership development capacity building (train-the-trainer/facilitator).In partnership with clients, I design, prototype and develop strategic, innovative leadership, talent and cultural impact models that are easy to adopt, scale organically and contribute to more wellbeing for individuals, teams and organizations.

I enable leaders to learn the craft of preception and perception shifting skills, cultivate new habits, and find novel, curated data points based on positive mavericks: “People whose uncommon but successful behaviours or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite facing similar challenges and having no extra resources or knowledge than their peers.” (Wikipedia)

I work on carefully selected projects where my contribution will enrich and revitalize the lives of leaders, employees, customers and stakeholders.

Currently, I promote these qualities through my role as Founder and Chair of DigitalFutures, a boutique management consulting company where I lead immersive leadership experience designs and workshops, as well as facilitator training for personal growth and organizational transformation professionals.

Inspired by the need for new models and skills for 21st century leadership, I am in the final stages of consolidating my personal and professional leadership development expertise in a leadership philosophy book.

I also created BlackLlama Enchantivism –  a Nature-Connected Therapy for the Imagination. It supports personal regeneration and revitalization.

I am always interested in contributing my experience on interesting projects, including partnerships with exceptional people who work on new solutions that respectfully challenge the status quo.

Originally professionally trained as South African chartered accountant, holding a Masters degree in the Philosophy of Personal and Professional Leadership Development (cum laude).  My research article explored the practical application of contemplative practices for leadership development. I proposed a taxonomy for practices, based on goals and outcomes required.

My professional credentials include 20+ years including senior leadership roles as well as lead consultant roles in large enterprise.

I worked  for organizations such as HSBC, Barclays/Africa, Deloitte, PHSA, Mountain Equipment Coop (MEC) BC Liquor Distribution Board, Provincial Health Services Authority and Ontario Centres of Excellence; decentralized and emerging tech community leadership and programming design for the BC Blockchain Forum which includes the design of a Decentralized Financial Wellbeing Hackathon with Blockstack in Vancouver.