Lyn Wiltse
Lyn is the founder and president of PDSA Consulting, Inc. She has over 25 years of experience facilitating public meetings with diverse stakeholders who have conflicting interests. She believes that true consensus can unlock creative solutions that benefit all over the long term. Her consulting experience includes strategic planning, collaborative problem solving, team building, conflict resolution, and productivity initiatives in public and private sectors. Her style is highly energetic and infused with humor, creating a safe environment for considering new ideas.
Lyn has developed and presented interactive courses in the areas of leadership, process improvement, systems thinking, communication styles, facilitation, and teamwork. She also leads retreats in the areas of strategic planning, leadership, and teambuilding. She is dedicated to helping others discover better ways to work together.
Lyn co-authored the article “FERC Relicensing: Working Together to Determine the Best Use of a Public Resource” published in Hydro Review Magazine in 2011. She is a graduate of Willamette University and holds a Master’s degree in Educational Policy and Management from the University of Oregon.
J.Marie
A member of the PDSA team since 2004, J.Marie provides ongoing resource group facilitation to support the implementation of a local hydro project FERC license. She is also the founder and Principal of J.Marie & Associates. She is a nationally recognized communications strategist, facilitator, leadership trainer, and presenter. As a former communications director in the K-12 and non-profit communities, she brings more than 25 years of experience helping organizations, teams, and leaders grow their communication and leadership skills to nurture strong, purposeful relationships. Known as a leader who can speak plainly about complicated and emotionally difficult topics, J.Marie is naturally both kind and direct—with a proven ability to get right to the heart of important matters. She balances the need to attend to the relationships in the room with the need to efficiently move the group’s purpose or agenda forward. As someone who regularly works with people holding different and even competing interests, she is also accustomed to situations where strict confidentiality is a must. J.Marie’s style as a consultant is understated; she brings a joyful heart to her work and encourages leaders and groups to own their processes and grow their skills. Well-versed in systems thinking and systems dynamics, she understands the nature of change and the stages people go through to make change possible. As an educator at heart, she loves learning and sharing meaningful ideas in engaging ways to help clients and session attendees deepen their abilities and effectiveness as leaders.
Lori Sortino
Lori has over 25 years of experience in operations, business analysis, process improvement, and whole systems problem solving, with experience specifically in inter-department communications. Her experience with converting legal contract language into administrative function with customer focus coupled with her ability to listen and ask the right questions make her a valued asset when the goal is to avoid mistakes, foresee the things that will trip the system, and see the human behavior patterns in the system.
As facilitator, Lori focus’ the team energy on the priorities and making positive progress in systems based change and business process improvement. Lori has a deep awareness of communication with an emphasis on intent and she helps her clients listen and inquire beyond the words. She is deeply committed to personal and professional growth and inspires her clients toward their own improvement by example, both in and out of the projects they work on together. She enables the individuals on the team to support each other by becoming self-managing and learning when and how to ask for help. She teaches circle meeting structure to support better collaboration among peers and then coaches individuals as needed to support their self-leadership.
Lori is a photographer, a consultant and facilitator, and Lori and Lyn developed a workshop (playshop) called Playful Inquiry, which also lead Lori to contribute additional blog posts and interviews on the concept of work and play.
Dan Moss
Dan has nearly 40 years’ manufacturing experience in composites, metals, plastics, and electronics, 17 of which were working for Boeing suppliers as Production Supervisor, Training Manager, Quality Inspector, and Quality Engineer. He also spent 20 years at Boeing, most recently as a Quality Assurance Investigator on the Everett Flight Line. This affords him a unique inside-out perspective that allows him to be especially insightful in understanding and resolving complex quality issues through root cause analysis. He has been a member of the PDSA Consulting Board of Directors since 2002 and provides leadership and strategic planning counsel.
Jennifer S. Arnold, Ph.D.
Jennifer has 15 years of experience in facilitation, research and skills training focused on collaborative approaches to conservation and community development, including an emphasis on equity. She specializes in launching new collaborative efforts, supporting organizations through transitions, managing conflicts productively, and engaging diverse stakeholders. She integrates training and mentoring into her facilitation practice to build the collective capacity of the groups she works with. She enjoys helping people grapple with complex issues and building momentum to advance a collective vision.
As owner of Reciprocity Consulting, Jennifer serves government agencies, foundations, non-profits, universities and community-based groups. Her work spans both urban and rural issues, including agriculture, food justice, environmental education, active transportation, outdoor recreation, forestry and wildlife management. Jennifer holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida with an emphasis on planning, conflict and collaborative process design. She is fluent in Spanish.
Dave Nave
Dave’s extensive improvement methodology, coaching, and contextual thinking experience ranges across production, process architect, to Management Engineer. He has designed assembly lines in the automotive industry, accelerated process improvement in the aerospace/defense industry, and is Chairman of The Deming Cooperative. He goes past the obvious and beyond improvement, to create a structure which prevents problems.
Dave’s unique combination of engineering, operations, and management perspectives is featured prominently in his practice of creating the appropriate strategy, culture, structure, processes, and values needed to produce dynamic and meaningful change.
Dave holds a MBA in Management Systems (Deming Scholars Program) from Fordham University and a BS in Manufacturing Engineering Technology.
He was one of only 12 people worldwide selected by The W. Edwards Deming Institute® to reconfigure Dr. Deming’s famous “Four Day Seminar” into the 2.5 day seminar “Out of the Crisis” and subsequently named as a training representative. He is also on the ‘Board of Advisors.’
Dave is the co-author of a book titled A Guide To Balanced Hoshin A Better Way to Plan and Execute Strategy, Amazon, 2017 (website), and authored several articles: Improvement Triad: Processes, Products, and Management Practices, Winter 2008 SAVE International – Value World, How To Compare Six Sigma, Lean and the Theory of Constraints: A framework for choosing what’s best for your organization, March 2002 ASQ – Quality Progress, and others.