Boötes The Herdsman Arcturus, the brightest star in the Boötes constellation, functioned for centuries as a tool for orientation: helping travelers, navigators, and field workers establish bearings under uncertain conditions.

Lee Wilkers

lee@leewilkers.com

Goodneighbor – helping organizations and communities design the conditions for good collective work.

realist managementManaging what is rather than what should be. Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work, 1973. Brunsson, “The Irrationality of Action,” J Mgmt Stud, 1982. Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions, 1987. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995., generative frictionTreating tensions and disagreements as information – the gaps between what people and organizations say and what they do, between what they do and what they want, and between what they want and what they get asked about. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 1970. Argyris & Schön, Organizational Learning, 1978., strategic unplanningFor VUCA-shaped problems – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity – recognizing when the structure defeats planning. Short experiments take the place of plans until the problem’s shape comes into view. Bennis & Nanus, Leaders, 1985. Bennett & Lemoine, “What VUCA Really Means,” HBR, 2014. Mintzberg, “Crafting Strategy,” HBR, 1987. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1998. Stanley & Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, 2015., human infrastructureThe people, relationships, and tacit work that hold a program together. King, Kolopack, Merritt & Lavery, “Community engagement and the human infrastructure of global health research,” BMC Med Ethics, 2014. Svensson, Humane Infrastructures, 2025. Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” Public Culture, 2004.

Health / Science / Policy / Public interest

about

Hi, I’m Lee. I run Goodneighbor, an independent practice in AtlantaThe “global health capital” of the world – I’ve worked with most major institutions in the area. AKA: city in a forest, hollywood of the south, the A, Hotlanta.
AUTBKA: Terminus, 1830s – southern endpoint of the Western & Atlantic Railroad., by way of the DC areaThe data center capital of the world. DC stands for data center now if you didn’t know. – closer to cattle than the Capitol.

Most of my work has been in and around public health and global health ethics, with formative detours through ecology (complex adaptive systems) and hospitality (complex adaptive services).

I studied ecology along the James River at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, spent some time chopping vegetables and washing dishes and learning what makes a customer happy, then earned an MPH at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health.

what i do now

Through Goodneighbor I work with nonprofits, public-health programs, foundations, and research groups – on strategy, community engagement, facilitation, program design, organizational learning, and applied research.

Most of it starts with the people closest to the work. They sit on deep reserves of latent knowledge: tacit capacities and interests that rarely surface in formal channels. Much of the job is helping a group see what’s already there and build from it.

places i’ve worked

lately

When I’m not working with clients, I’m usually outside making wood shavings.

Lately that’s meant green woodworking: splitting and riving logs, learning how wood behaves before it’s ever milled into boards. Mostly from books, classes, and people who’ve been at it far longer than I have. I remain, happily, an informed amateurThe phrase is Jennie Alexander’s (1930–2018) – a Baltimore attorney and jazz musician who took up post-and-rung chairmaking and wrote Make a Chair from a Tree (1978), the book that sparked the American green-woodworking revival..

You might find me driving around Atlanta after a storm with the current foster dog in the passenger seat, looking for a downed oak someone else overlooked.

syllabus

You can tell a lot about a place by its shelves. Here’s some of Goodneighbor’s – the reading underneath how I work, across design, public health, and craft.

Find it →