Our Team

SUSAN STICKLEY

Founder & CEO of Stratus, Inc.

Susan Stickley (she/her) is the founder and CEO of Stratus, Inc., and is a seasoned strategist, scenarist and facilitator. Susan approaches each client situation as unique and creates a custom process of strategic engagement, discovery, and decision making for each client. She has most recently been concentrating on merging strategic planning and scenario planning with organizational and individual learning methodologies to achieve high impact transformational experiences for organizations, community groups, and individuals. Susan leverages a wide range of tools and methodologies, including scenario planning, success formula, systems thinking and three horizons planning in flexible and unique programs.

Susan has had over 35 years of experience with nonprofit and for-profit organizations. She has consulted in healthcare, higher education, research sciences, and in a wide range of additional sectors. She specializes in facilitating processes to create actionable, transformative strategic plans for complex sectors and situations. Susan has been a grant proposal panelist in the grantmaking decision process of the National Science Foundation.

She worked for over 15 years as a senior practitioner for Global Business Network, the world-renowned leader in scenario planning. Susan has been a member of Future Search Network, helping community groups and organizations chart their futures. Susan served as President of the Board and as Chair of the Strategy Committee of Bethesda Project, a nonprofit agency focused on people experiencing chronic homelessness in Philadelphia.

Laure Haak (she/they)

Stratus practitioner, is an entrepreneur, strategist, researcher, and author. She enjoys working with communities to weave compelling stories and create collaborative spaces that inspire sharing, trust, and transparency. Her practice areas are socio-tech entrepreneurship, research infrastructure, nonprofit governance, decision frameworks, and product strategy.

Laure is currently a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute and founder of the Mighty Red Barn consultancy. Her work draws on diverse experiences – workplace, sector, community, travel - including service as founding Executive Director of ORCID; leadership roles at Thomson Reuters, The US National Academies, and Science Magazine; as well as volunteer service on nonprofit Boards and as a SCORE small business mentor.

Laure is the recipient of the NIH Director’s Award and the Vietsch Medal of Honour. She has a BS and MS in Biology and PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University and did postdoctoral work at the US National Institutes of Health.

Susan Wynne (she/her)

Stratus practitioner, is a senior strategy and management consultant with over a decade of experience working with Stratus, Inc., in scenario and strategic planning. Susan has more than 30 years of strategic planning, business development, marketing and management experience. Most notably, Susan’s focus is business evolution and transformation, reflected in her proven record of customer and revenue growth.

In 1988, Susan began a 19-year association with Main Line Health (MLH) one of the largest and most successful healthcare systems in the Philadelphia area. Susan was instrumental in elevating strategic and business planning within the growing health system.

In 2007, Susan joined Penn Medicine, Lancaster General Health as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Planning with responsibility for strategic planning and business development and for launching new programs services and expanding the health system into new markets. During her tenure the PMLGH, she also held the titles of Senior Vice President of Ambulatory Services and Acting Chief Mission Officer. Susan provided leadership oversight of several strategic planning cycles that employed scenarios that brought invaluable insights that challenged the thinking of leadership in how best to proceed in an unpredictable future. During the merger of Lancaster General Health with Penn Medicine, Susan co-led the corporate services integration task force, a rewarding and challenging engagement to facilitate the alignment of unique teams and cultures.

Janell Thomas MPH, CMS (she/they)

Stratus practitioner, is an equity advisor and strategist who partners with organizations reshaping their workplace culture to build and sustain equitable environments where all employees can thrive. For over 15 years, Janell has provided strategic counsel, executive coaching, and technical support to organizations that desire to address inequities. Her current portfolio consists of working with well-known philanthropic and non-profit organizations, hospital systems, universities, several national healthcare organizations, professional sports teams, and a prominent leadership institute.

After years of witnessing untapped talent and barriers to success, Janell founded My CoLab
Partners to deliver effective solutions to organizations seeking equitable outcomes. Janell
has met each organization's unique needs by aligning them with key strategies to
operationalize equity. Janell believes that positive change at the nucleus of an organization
transforms experiences at the individual level and fosters equitable engagements and
investments in communities.

Jonathan Star (he/him)

Stratus practitioner, is a designer and facilitator specializing in scenario planning. He learned the tradecraft of scenarios, design and facilitation at Global Business Network (GBN), a pioneering consulting and membership organization. Over the last 25 years he has facilitated hundreds of scenario, strategy consulting and facilitation engagements, dealing with many issues. His main areas of focus are:
• Climate change, working mostly with US government agencies such as the National Park Service and NOAA, exploring how climate change impacts will affect park planning, conservation and fishery management
• Healthcare, working with a range of players across the spectrum of healthcare, including US regional health systems and global pharmaceutical companies.
• Technology change and the future of consumers and business, working with numerous commercial organizations investigating issues such as home electrification, trends in auto demand and the future of technology.

In 2014 he established Scenario Insight LLC, providing consulting, training, and facilitation services to a wide range of organizations in commercial, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Earlier in his career, Jonathan worked in public policy in the UK. He was Director of Research at Scottish Enterprise. There he helped establish a Strategic Futures Team, an early example of an organization using trends research, foresight and scenarios to help influence policy and strategy. He also worked at London Business School, conducting research into business strategy and long-term corporate success.

He holds degrees in Business Economics from the University of Nottingham and the University of Warwick in the UK. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jim Butcher (he/him)

Stratus practitioner, is a scenarist and is the Founder and Managing Partner of Entegra Partners, a leading strategy, innovation and leadership firm. He has worked extensively across healthcare, sustainability, and higher education areas. In healthcare, he has worked with a variety of healthcare clients across the spectrum, from pharmaceuticals, insurance, community-based providers, integrated regional providers, state providers, children’s healthcare providers and foundations. In sustainability, Jim has recently been leading sustainability and ESG efforts for a new city, NEOM, in the Middle East. Prior, he was a Managing Director in Morgan Stanley, where he held two roles: leading a long-term global strategy group, and second, creating and leading their first Global Sustainability Office (GSO), which became the #2 global green bank. Jim has also worked in the higher education sector helping associations and foundations strategically plan around the future of higher education.

Jim was a senior partner, since its early years, of the Global Business Network (GBN), the world’s leading global scenario planning consultancy. Earlier, he was a senior consultant with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and a program officer with the Ford Foundation directing their international and U.S. sustainability programs across ten field offices that linked environmental issues with rural economic development. Mr. Butcher received his M.A. and B.A. degrees in Politics and Economics, with an emphasis in advanced economics, at Oxford University, England, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His undergraduate degree is in civil and environmental engineering from Utah State University. Jim is a budding author, including a new Harvard Business Review (HBR) article on scenario planning roots.

Kristyn Stickley (she/her)

Kristyn Stickley is a graphic recorder, capturing dynamic discussions in visual form. As a graphic recorder, she uses words and symbols to synthesize complex group dynamics and create visual representations of the group process, assisting groups in identifying new insights and alternate ways of understanding their situations. Kristyn has assisted various Stratus clients in their strategic planning process.

Jenny Johnston (she/her)

Jenny Johnston is an independent writer, editor, and strategic storyteller based in San Francisco. Part journalist, part anthropologist, she is an expert in helping organizations and authors find innovative and “sticky” ways to communicate their visions and their stories to the wider public. She writes about systemic change efforts, social justice, and human-centered design and is a seasoned scenario narrative writer. All of her writing puts people at its center; she specializes in finding and telling human stories that bring complex ideas and concepts to life.

Jenny has written major reports and case studies for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Levi Strauss Foundation, Omidyar Network, Deloitte, and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health, among many others, and has served as developmental editor on several bestselling books. Previously, she served as senior editor at Global Business Network (GBN), a scenario planning consultancy and futurist think tank based in the Bay Area, where she shepherded an ever-changing range of publications and presentations from concept to completion and ran modules on “strategic storytelling.” Jenny holds an AB in cultural anthropology from Princeton University, and master’s degrees in both anthropology and journalism.