Lori Davis has spent more than three decades working where emerging technology meets the people, organizations and markets it must ultimately serve. Her career has crossed computing, technology go-to-market, executive advisory, national research, energy, media and education—giving her an unusually broad view of how major technological and institutional change moves from idea to real-world adoption.

Her early technology career began during the transition from centralized computing toward distributed systems. At Sequent Computer Systems, Davis developed WinCentral, an early virtual sales and executive-engagement model designed to connect emerging enterprise computing solutions directly with C-suite decision makers.  She built it for Casey Powell, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – the early A team in the burgeoning client/server age.  This was the first virtual computer sales channel in the world.  Bill Gates called it the sales model of the future.  Lori built it at age 23.  The work placed her at the intersection of Microsoft Windows NT, Sequent’s enterprise server strategy and the practical requirements of organizations considering new computing architectures; shoulder to shoulder with who are today’s technology titans.

She later carried that model into the emerging world of embedded computing at RadiSys, as computing capability continued moving outward from centralized systems toward smaller distributed and embedded nodes.

Davis subsequently founded Multi Touch Marketing, focusing on what she termed go-to-market: the operating intersection between what technology companies build, what markets are becoming, and what customers actually need technology to do. Her work included programs for major technology companies including HP and IBM.  Lori is the creator of the term ‘Go-To-Market’ 31 years ago when she trailblazer the ‘turn it all sideways’ approach which collapses vertical organizations into horizontal highly effective process architectures – product strategy, to R&D, to Operations To Marketing To global sales – Lori flipped the whole thing sideways.  This is ‘Go To Market’.  That is what Lori built for the world’s largest tech. companies.

That cross-market perspective brought her to META Group, where she worked with founder and CEO Dale Kutnick building Go-To-Market.   Dale liked Lori’s approach and moved her to Chief Marketing Officer where she ran global go to market and also advised technology companies and senior executives on emerging markets, technology adoption and strategic change. At this time per Dale’s request to figure out which markets META (now Gartner) should move into, Lori began to study mature markets, dying markets, merging markets and emerging markets.  Lori’s Paradigm work began from one question from Dale to determine the future of META Group.  Rather than specializing in a single technology category, Davis’s work focused on the edges between established markets—where new capabilities, behaviors and opportunities were beginning to form. Lori’s husband became CEO of META Group at which time Lori was part of the team to sell META Group to Gartner.  Lori has been at the center of mapping the technology roadmap for global companies from the beginning.  Not on the outside, but dead center at the beginning of the first set of questions.

During this period she began formalizing what became her META paradigm, a framework for observing complex change across technological, institutional, economic, social and human systems. The model grew from a recurring question throughout her career: How do you see change early enough to build for the world that is forming rather than the world that already exists?

Her work later extended into energy and national research. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Davis worked as a funded scientist on concepts for large-scale sensing and analysis of heterogeneous information—exploring whether computational systems could detect emerging patterns across complex environments. The work connected her long-standing cross-boundary observational approach with scientists, mathematicians, physicists and engineers working in predictive analytics and national-security research.

Alongside her technology and research career, Davis also worked extensively in media and storytelling. Her experience reaches back to the launch of public radio’s Marketplace, where she worked with founding general manager Jim Russell, and includes television production, radio, film and later digital media. That experience reinforced a principle that runs through her technology work as well: sophisticated systems ultimately have to work for real people.

She also worked early in her career with educator and international leader Thomas A. Bartlett, whose counsel to build outside established systems when necessary to improve education became an enduring influence on her work.

Today, Davis is co-founder of Stone & Arrow with her husband, engineer, mathematician and former national-laboratory executive Mike Davis. Stone & Arrow brings together education, research, media, storytelling and real-world discovery.

Her current research returns to a problem she first began pursuing decades ago: how to observe complex change across conventional disciplinary boundaries rather than from inside a single field. Working with artificial intelligence as a new observational and computational instrument, Davis is continuing development of the META paradigm and related methods for studying emerging change across human, technological and natural systems.

She is also the creator and author of The WayMaker Saga, a planned twenty-book family saga spanning roughly three centuries of American history. Through Stone & Arrow’s Adventure Learning model, those stories become gateways into science, mathematics, engineering, history, culture, geography and human discovery.

Across a career that can look remarkably varied from the outside, Davis sees one continuous body of work:

watch where the world is moving, understand what people will need when it gets there, and build the road between the two.