You’re responsible for a project that touches the systems everyone depends on — a water supply, a transmission line, a solar field, a mine, a master-planned community, a watershed restoration. Projects like yours almost never die on engineering or economics. Somewhere between idea and delivery, opposition organizes, permits stall, suits get filed, opportunists bleed value — and the holding pattern burns your money every month it persists. The remedies that once worked no longer deliver. What’s left is a battle with no certainty of winning. The investment is lost without return — or worse.
Disputes over these systems have been fought one way: one side must lose the argument for the other to win. In a world made of networks of interdependencies, this no longer delivers. Every party — and the terrain they inhabit — is a node among nodes; when one node forces a win in isolation, the consequences come back through the interdependencies and the whole network pays.
The systems that sustain us — watersheds and forests, energy and irrigation, land use and development, and the civic capacity to govern any of it — are all interconnected, but the network is not easily visible.
Underneath every stuck project is the same conflict. On one side, we need to protect our freedom. On the other, we need shared systems that actually work. And holding the two apart, a settled resignation that the systems are failing and nothing can really be done — so the sane move is to look after your own. This is the core conflict of the Intermountain West.
Traditionally, a public affairs firm takes its client’s side and works to make the other side lose — a zero-sum game rooted in a worldview of scarcity. Even when a win is obtained this way, the unintended consequences propagate through the network and surface later — as litigation, as clawback, as repeal by the next majority, as a community that spends twenty years re-fighting what was approved.
The model solicits against the very conflict it escalates. Every round of alarm, opposition and rebuttal makes the next one necessary. Everyone in a stuck project’s orbit is paid to fight or paid to plan — and no fee anywhere depends on whether the project is standing in five years, much less delivering durable benefits. The result over time is that civic capacity diminishes and the cycle spirals down.
A network cannot be operated by command and control, and a networked conflict cannot be won, only dissolved. To produce results, the conversations that make up the network must be oriented towards their common goal. There is no other way for a complex system to evolve.
“A networked conflict cannot be won, only dissolved.”
A conflict of this kind is not split down the middle. It is dissolved by elevation — carried to a level where protecting one side no longer costs the other. Civic work has four such elevations: individual/company, community, society and culture. At each of them something is handed upward, from idea to project to enterprise to institution to tradition…to a new generation of ideas and expressions of individual freedom, in an upward spiral of expanding liberty. This is the Civic Cycle.
The individual/company elevation is where vision forms, and it must generate visible expressions of freedom. The community elevation is where that vision develops, and it must demonstrate shared success. At the societal elevation the two lines integrate into a standing demonstration that the perceived trade-off was always false, proving that liberty expands when we steward our shared systems together. The cultural elevation renews that demonstration, keeping the proof fresh and alive.
Inside every elevation the same movement runs, and it is the movement of a mind at work: something is intuited, then understood, then acted on. Potential is discerned, takes shape, finds expression. Three beats, four times — twelve civic functions, each a population doing nameable work.
Set down on a page it looks like a program: twelve steps in four acts. It is not. The movement is a description of how understanding actually arrives, not a sequence to be executed, and so it runs at every elevation at once — many ideas becoming projects inside a single enterprise taking shape, many enterprises feeding one institution’s standing proof. Nor does it end. The top of the climb is the return, where fresh innovations arise anew.
Our own work is four moves: diagnose, resolve, deliver, and steward. We map the terrain until the conflict is located and named; we dissolve it into endorsements, approvals and appropriations; we connect the threads that carry the work to done, in public; and we hold the outcome in a way that endures.
OneThe individual/company elevation
The terrain mapped, showing why the project is stuck. We see the arena one person at a time: boundaries fixed, blockages drawn out firsthand, players and functions made legible.
The move runs on the Theory of Constraints, deployed at civic scale. Intelligent Management — our methodology partner, thirty years of whole-system implementations across Europe and North America behind the method — brings the science: the terrain mapped as one network, the conflict verbalized precisely, the resolution validated before anyone is asked to commit to it.
We scan the landscape a project has to move through and find the champions already primed to carry it forward.
Our own experts run live elicitation interviews and test what a project’s case will need to say, building the analysis a campaign plan stands on.
The diagnosis becomes a visible, resourced foundation: a campaign identity and message architecture, an early creative direction, and a project’s place in a live network of backers already at work across the region.
TwoThe community elevation
The conflict dissolved, earning approvals and appropriations. We understand the stalemate party by party: the conflict beneath it verbalized, the resolution designed, validated and trimmed against its risks. It closes in commitments that hold, because all needs are protected.
We sit down with a community’s own elders and trusted voices, one relationship at a time, until the proposal earns real local standing.
Local support takes organized shape: advocates recruited, a coalition built, the case carried into earned coverage and paid channels alike.
The shared success becomes official: testimony prepared, hearings activated, and the officials who hold the vote given a clear, defensible reason to say yes.
ThreeThe societal elevation
The threads connected, manifesting the work in the world. We act in public: obstacles named, objectives sequenced, the work carried to done where everyone can see it.
Administrators keep federal, state and local government moving as one through construction, so execution proceeds on settled ground rather than fought ground.
Producers turn a project’s actual output into a public record — the numbers, the local impact, the proof that what was promised got built.
The proof takes lasting form: partners equipped, a local workforce pipeline standing, real ownership and opportunity seeded back into the community that hosted the project.
FourThe cultural elevation
The proof held, the legacy enduring. We keep what was built, turn after turn: the demonstration re-instilled as inheritance, renewed instead of left to fade. Voices — our sister civic organization, independent and led from within the watershed — convenes the stewards who hold a region’s proofs and its memory, and keeps those proofs visible and re-won in public.
That means none of this starts cold. Every engagement adds at least one commitment to a shared pool and draws on what the pool already holds — territory knowledge every prior engagement deepened, a conflict already corroborated on other ground, a commitment your project needs that may already exist, built by someone else’s. A live record of who is who and what is committed; a live map of the ground it all stands on. The network is working for you on day one.
Storytellers capture a project’s history while the people who lived it are still here to tell it — including the land itself, and the groups who steward it.
Mentors shape what was learned into a standing pipeline of people equipped to carry it forward — in classrooms, in the field, and on the trail.
Masters are honored by name, the proof re-instilled as inheritance, so the demonstration renews with every turn instead of fading into history.
Three decades of it, spent where this region’s systems intersect: water moved, stored and defended; generation of every type and the wires to carry it; ground entitled for homes, industry and the data centers the new economy runs on; minerals brought out from exploration through federal review; working lands and the interests that hold them. In every venue — federal review, state process, county hearings, the ballot — the work is the same: projects that touch what everyone depends on, carried through organized opposition.
Practice areas
Ground changing use — homes, industry, logistics, the data centers the new economy runs on. Entitlement is where every other system arrives at once: water, power, roads and neighbors, each answering to a different authority, none of them seated at the same table. The practice is making that one network visible before it hardens into opposition.
data centers · resort development · master-planned communities · entitlements
Practice areas
Senior rights, a shrinking snowpack, a species listing and the working lands that depend on all three — one argument running in several venues at once. The forest above the diversion belongs to the same practice: fuel load and hydrograph are a single problem wearing two agencies. We work the watershed as the unit it actually is.
irrigation districts · water supply and storage · working lands · forestry
Practice areas
Generation of every type, the wires to carry it, and the approvals both depend on — rate cases and infrastructure at one end, siting fights over wind, solar, storage and gas at the other. Every other system runs on this one, so this is where the region’s conflicts concentrate. The practice is carrying essential projects through the opposition essential projects now draw.
generation · transmission · interconnection · storage · biomass
Practice areas
Exploration through federal review, mine to processing to recycling — the materials the transition is built from, sought on ground people already hold dear. No practice carries a heavier burden of proof. The work is making extraction and stewardship of the same ground one argument instead of two, at every elevation it has to be won.
mining · aggregates · recycling · processing
Practice areas
Land trusts, watershed groups, access and trail interests: the constituency most often handled as opposition when it is the one most available as a partner. They are present in every practice above, and they hold the ground those projects sit on. The work is bringing them in as co-authors of a resolution rather than commenters on it.
access and trails · restoration · land trusts
Experience
We join together three decades of public affairs strategy experience, three decades of organizational science and systemic thinking, and three decades of legislative and public policy experience — the tools, method and territory — all in service of the same root conviction, arrived at from different directions — that a conflict, verbalized precisely, is an opportunity; that a resolution protecting only one need is no resolution; and that there is coherence beneath the surface of what looks irreconcilable.
Founder and CEO, Intermountain
Taylor studied philosophy at Stanford, then spent twenty-two years inside the traditional public affairs model — rising from project assistant to president of a national firm behind many of the country’s hardest-fought land, energy and resource approvals — and watched, from every seat in the house, what a paper win costs and what a stalemate burns. In 2022 he went independent, building the research and strategy architecture for a national energy communications agency’s portfolio of twenty-six utility-scale projects and embedding with a global turbine maker’s development arm to write the public affairs playbook for its entire pipeline. With Rep. Mary Dye he co-founded Voices, a 501(c)(4) for civic stewardship — and aims everything he knows about the water, energy, land and governance of the country he’s chosen as home at its stuck projects. Today he leads a deliberately small shop: a fractional bench of senior researchers, organizers, media and legislative hands, sized to each engagement, working alongside the standing partnerships — Intelligent Management on method, Voices on stewardship.
Methodology PartnerDr. Domenico Lepore — Founder of Intelligent Management. A physicist by training, Domenico has spent thirty years turning the work of W. Edwards Deming and Eliyahu Goldratt into one operational method — the Decalogue — and implementing it at more than thirty national and multinational organizations, from mining to IT. His first book, Deming and Goldratt: The Decalogue, written with Oded Cohen in 1999, was the first Theory of Constraints title Goldratt’s own publisher released from another author’s hand.
With a team of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and philosophers, he went on to develop the Network of Projects — the approach to organizational design, based on network theory, that this offering runs on — most recently set out in From Silos to Network (Springer).
Dr. Angela Montgomery co-founded the first Decalogue company with Dr. Lepore in Milan in 1996 and has carried the method’s development and teaching since. She holds a PhD from the University of London in Literature and Science and has published with Cambridge University Press, Macmillan, CRC Press and Springer. Her business novel The Human Constraint (Routledge, 2024) turns the method’s case histories into one narrative — read in more than forty countries.
Dr. Giovanni Siepe is a theoretical physicist whose research on General Relativity was published internationally. He spent years in industry management, holds patents in microelectronics, and is an expert in the Decalogue’s statistical methods and Critical Chain project management. With fifteen years of international implementations behind him, he led the development of Ess3ntial, the multi-project digital platform.
Co-founder, VoicesRep. Mary Dye — Washington State Representative for the 9th Legislative District — the wheat and river country of the state’s southeastern corner — where she and her husband Roger operate a third-generation, 3,000-acre wheat farm near Pomeroy. Her working life began with water: two years as a Peace Corps agriculture educator in Thailand, building wells and water systems for villages that had none. In the Legislature since 2015, she is the ranking Republican on the House Environment and Energy Committee and sits on the committees that write the state’s operating and capital budgets. Through Voices, the civic vehicle she co-founded with Taylor Canfield, she is telling the story of the Columbia Basin Project — the region’s biggest unfinished promise — chapter by chapter, in public.
Director, Columbia Basin ProjectMichele Kiesz — from a generational wheat farming family of the Columbia Basin, based in Moses Lake, Washington — carries deep institutional knowledge of water rights, irrigation governance, and federal conservation programs, and serves as Voices’ platform Executive Director for the Columbia Basin Project.
The Columbia Basin Project is the largest federal reclamation project in American history. Grand Coulee Dam and its canal system transformed 670,000 acres of high desert into some of the most productive farmland on earth. But the project is only half finished. The East High Canal — the eastern half of the system — was never built. Farmers who settled on the promise of water have been drilling into a declining aquifer for sixty years. Voices is working to complete the project — integrating irrigation, clean energy, and ecological restoration as one system.
