Shirline Wilson, M.Ed.

My experience has shown me that organizations’ toughest challenges are rarely about ideas alone. They are about alignment: ensuring people, priorities, and systems move in the same direction long enough to achieve results. Alignment is never handed down; it is built through relationships, trust, and a shared commitment to doing difficult work together. My role is to create the conditions for that alignment and turn good intentions into measurable outcomes.

I founded Convergent Strategic Consulting to help coalitions, organizations, and leaders move from commitment to consequence. I design and lead coalition and partnership efforts, build strategic, executable programs, develop leaders and teams, and serve as an executive thought partner as you navigate high-stakes, complex work. My clients span the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, and the through-line across all of it is the same: turning shared commitment into coordinated action.

The people and organizations I work with tend to come to me at pivotal moments — a group of stakeholders who need to find common ground, a leadership team that looks aligned but isn’t, an emerging or senior leader ready to lead more intentionally and less reactively. What they leave with is usually consistent: more clarity about what they’re trying to do, stronger relationships to do it with, and a path to results they can point to.

My practice draws on emotional intelligence research, organizational development, communication and interaction styles, and the science of how people move through change — because each helps explain what’s really happening when a coalition stalls after its early wins, when a team’s intentions and its impact keep missing each other, or when a capable leader keeps hitting the same wall. I care as much about the human side of how people align, decide, and follow through as I do about the work itself.

Over more than 25 years, I’ve built and led coalitions, designed statewide programs, and guided organizations through change that takes more than a new strategy. Most recently, I founded and led We Are Washington Employers, a coalition of 80 private companies and education institutions advancing equity across the workforce, supply chains, and community. Before that, I led a statewide education-policy effort to improve outcomes for marginalized students, partnering with state agencies, legislators, and community organizations. And earlier in my career, I spent years delivering large, complex programs and change initiatives in the private sector — at Microsoft, Intellectual Ventures, and as a consultant — managing multimillion-dollar portfolios and the people and systems behind them. I currently serve as a trustee of College Spark Washington.

I hold a Master of Education in Education Policy from the University of Washington and a Bachelor’s in Organizational Development from Antioch University. I’m also a speaker, facilitator, and panel moderator, and I often work with leaders who lead across lines of difference.

If you’re leading something complex — a coalition that must hold together, a team that needs to find its alignment, or reenvisioning your own next chapter as a leader — I’d welcome a conversation. Much of the most meaningful work I do begins with someone who is curious but unsure where to start. That is when I am most helpful.