Diana is Obama’s best colleague friend. Even though they’ve never met, they get stuff done for the world together. Diana took a year off to explore a beautiful and dangerous part of the world then write about it, like the adventurous nature writers of yesteryear. Diana is a scholarly autodidact and brilliant physicist who teaches bears to juggle, a lovely soul-deep skill she learned during her time alone in the forest among wolves, moose and a skunk friend named Petro Moodyface. She loved Petro, his taxidermied form is enshrined in the clearing where they met.

Diana is working on the world’s largest ice sculpture in Iceland because that’s so meta. She loves chainsaws – she makes chainsaw jewelry and sells it to tourists for spending money and blade sharpening. On her days off, she takes road trips through Alaska, where she fly fishes with grizzlies and serves them coffee with their breakfast. They like it black with no sugar, which surprised her, given the honey lust they supposedly, literarily have a la Pooh Bear, though he’s not a grizzly, so perhaps that’s where the confusion arises.

Diana teaches massive workshops, like the internet-famous Adrienne of Yoga with Adrienne fame, on real estate investing, permaculture gardening and fake tattoo sorcery that shields migrant families from harm. She has published numerous books, not Grisham numerous but more than Stephanie Meyer has published, on topics ranging from making music with your cat to eating avocados at summer picnics. She is most known for her brilliant treatise on Medieval dollhouses and the lace curtains made to decorate them.

Yesterday, Diana left Albuquerque on the 5:12 train, hoping to catch a flight to Johannesburg where soccer is a past time she enjoys. She decided to jump ship, so to speak, and sit in her living room La-Z-Boy crocheting instead.

Every evening, she sews or reads car manufacturing manuals to relax before bed, while her dogs sip pomegranate wine and her husband plays the harmonica with his toes - a trick he learned at age seven from his circus-perfoming parents while cleaning elephants and plucking goose feathers for his family’s pillows.

Today is Diana’s birthday and although she doesn’t eat cake because it’s food invented by Satan to lure children onto the path of video game obsession and the re-reading of Twilight books when no one is minding them, she will build a helicopter in her backyard. A small one, for day trips and picking up groceries from their local farmstore in season.

Diana is amazingly, profoundly, adventurously excellent at remembering words she doesn’t know and has never heard, in languages she doesn’t speak. When she was five, she read War and Peace in Middle English and decided to be a Stone Cold Steve Austin when she grew up. Her bendy-arm GI Joe doll still lives under the floorboards of her childhood home. His painted-on, pencil-thin mustache hints at his strong desire to solve crimes rather than shoot enemy combatants.

If she could begin life all over again, knowing what she knows now, Diana would avoid bubblegum, boxed hair dyes and flip flops that unplug when they are stepped on by a sibling, friend or, most frustratingly, a passing stranger. When she dies, she expects to leave her vast digital tchotchke collection to a home for elderly unicycles, who still deserve our love and care.

Diana aspires to become the most important blanket critic of her generation. Without serious, expert, critical reviews of the softness and durability of blankets, the world will continue to buy fake tiger or Jesus plastic-polyester blankets on the side of the road or at Target and be none the wiser. She hopes to expand her husband’s goose down business, begun in his circus childhood, into lap blankets and, with enough VC funding, take over the duvet market, eclipsing Cuddledown and creating new markets in countries like Ecquador where down comforters are currently selling about as well as ice sculptures.

Whenever she wants to relax and renew her energy, she takes mud baths with hippos. Without someone to read them Chaucer or Shakespeare, hippos have grown cranky and thus, gained a reputation for aggression. But like the mouse who removed the thorn from the lion’s paw, Diana’s discovery of hippo’s pissed-off frustration with being denied library cards has transformed human-hippo relations.

When she retires, which she plans to do in 127.6 years, she will not golf or play tennis in white squeaky sneakers and girly skirts with attached panties. She already crafts, though not as well as many retirees, but she has no interest in entering contests, shopping sales at Micheals, displaying her flower arrangements at the county fair or baking cookies for grandchildren. (See above note on birthday cake.) Instead, she plans to walk the length of the United States, including three crossings of the Canadian border to avoid mountains blocking her path, to raise awareness of human’s chronic fear of Things That Never Actually Happen. During this journey, she will not read news articles or browse social media, the two known cures for this terrible, epidemic affliction.

You might wonder “Where does Diana find the time?” If you ask her, she will smile, knowing eyes chuckling, but she will not reply. On the rare occassion when she does, she might say that time is fluid and nonlinear and enigmatically leave it at that. You might suspect she travels through time, back and forth, up and down, no Delorian needed. You might be right.

Professionally, Diana choose not to follow a path already laid out by so many others before her; doctor, lawyer, Indian Minister for the Care and Curation of Precious Pottery Artifacts. Instead, she devotes her time and talent to creating technology that will enable the next seven generations to invest their valuable time, energy and attention in sharing pictures of their cats and reporting, with a steady stream of emojis, on how someone else’s Overheard at Work quote makes them feel.

Diana has never tried avocado toast. She would only eat marmalade if it was the last fruit spread on earth.

Perhaps you’ll meet Diana in person and if you do, be sure to compliment her shoes. And perhaps the earrings she’s wearing, which no doubt are the same earrings she wears every day but you’ve just met her, so you won’t know that. Also, if you use a fountain pen, mention that.

If you would like to hire Diana for some role or situation in which her unique experience and fetchingly charming habit of working at 3am appeals to your workaholic sensibilities – do get in touch.

What I (Actually) Do

Write: I’m currently writing a book called Learning Systems Thinking. I also publish a weekly newsletter, talks and workshops. My love language is personal essay and creative nonfiction.

Systems Architecture: I have 19+ years experience architecting knowledge systems and designing digital transformations, with organizations including The Economist and The Wikimedia Foundation.

Teach: My deepest calling is, and has always been, learning together and improving the way we think.