For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to build the same thing without knowing it: a way to hold a complex system up to a mirror and finally see it whole.
At McKinsey, the system was a company. They'd struggle with declining profit and we'd need to understand what was actually driving it: a leadership pipeline that had quietly broken, an operating model pulling teams in opposite directions, or incentives that made individually rational decisions add up to a dysfunctional whole. What struck me every time was the moment of clarity the final presentation brought. From the outside, the issues seemed fairly obvious. From the inside, however, no one had the vantage point to see the entire system at once.
Then the system became people. At the McKinsey Health Institute, I worked on mental health and wellbeing across global workforces, trying to understand something far harder to measure than revenue: the conditions that allow human beings to actually thrive.
Then the people became an individual: at an AI startup, I became fascinated by the possibility of building a "digital twin" with a whole human being, including its biology, history, circumstances, and behavior, integrated into one picture. We never ended up building it, but the idea stayed with me.
The fascination wasn't abstract. While I was measuring wellbeing at scale, my own went unmeasured. I was exhausted, anxious, restless, and caught in the widening gap between how much I knew about health and how I actually felt. I chased deficiencies, hormones, childhood patterns, bloodwork, genetics, habits… I wasn't casually curious. I was trying to figure out what was broken. I became an obsessive collector of lenses because each one offered a piece of the answer.
One of the "breakthroughs" came from an endocrinologist, one of countless that I had seen by that point. At the end of the appointment, half-jokingly, she said that the most important thing for thyroid health, after all, was having someone who hugs you tightly. It wasn't medical advice at all, but it struck a chord. In an almost banal sentence, she captured the fact that the person experiencing a biological problem is also a person with relationships, work, history, ambitions, fears, and a particular life.
I stopped looking for the missing intervention and started looking for a better way to understand the whole person.
So I set out to build it. I researched medicine, psychology, behavioral science, philosophy, and organizational dynamics, not to collect isolated fragments, but to see where each fell short and bring them together into a single picture.
Then came the testing. Domain structures collapsed. Questions produced the answers people thought they should give rather than the truth. Dimensions I assumed were essential added little. Others I nearly discarded revealed the most important patterns. Through repeated trials with real people, the method became more precise.
Applying it to myself was the most useful test. It showed patterns I couldn't see from the inside: where I was over-investing in one explanation, mistaking a symptom for a cause, and letting different parts of my life quietly reinforce one another.
I am not a physician or a therapist, and The Tessera Method does not aim to replace either. What I have spent my career learning is how to see relationships between things usually examined separately, identify what is actually driving a system, and turn complexity into something people can act on.
That is what I would love for Tessera to do.