About

👋🏻 Hello, there. I'm Chad Moore.

Everyone is already creative. They may have forgotten, or had to push it aside, or had it stomped out somewhere along the way. But creativity inherent in all of us. The world is better when more people express it.

For 25 years, I've helped people and organizations do their best creative and collaborative work — directing animation teams on AAA games, coaching hundreds of people through Agile transformation at a Fortune 100 insurer, co-founding a global online school for 3D artists. Where Light Gathers is where all of that comes together: helping teams see what they already know, surface what might be and design a better versions of their work.

Edgework

There's a reason so much of what people are capable of never gets made. Not because the ideas weren't good, or the people weren't skilled — but because somewhere between the idea and the doing, the first step didn't get taken. The books, the songs, the businesses, the cures — most of what doesn't happen doesn't fail. It just never starts.

I've been thinking about this a lot since my corporate role ended. What's the first step, really? For a long time I thought the answer was somewhere out ahead of me, waiting to be found. Turns out the answer to "what's my first step" is just: the first step. As they say, the path is made by walking, not by figuring it out in advance.

I call the place where that happens edgework.

Picture your comfort zone. Edgework isn't out past its boundary, in the wide-open unknown — that's too far, too untethered, more paralyzing than useful. And it isn't safely inside the boundary either — that's just staying put. Edgework is the edge itself. The boundary has thickness. That's where the work is.

Here's the part that took me longest to actually believe: if you succeed at the edge, you grow. If you fail at the edge, you also grow. Both outcomes teach you something a comfortable choice never could. The growth was never really about winning, it was about showing up to the edge.

And it's not a single leap you take once and you're done. It's a loop: you act, you see what happens, you learn from it, and you're back at the edge again — a little more familiar with it than you were before. Build, measure, learn, repeat. Not a cliff you jump off, but a practice you return to.

You have to be with the edge, not fight it, not avoid it. It's not separate from you — it's part of how you're built, part of the systems you already are.

I'm still practicing this. Every day, honestly. But the practice is the point. Not any single thing I make or ship, but the repeated willingness to work at that edge instead of retreating from it.

I'm trusting the walking to make the path.

Why This Matters for the Work

This is the same edge I now help teams and leaders work with. The build-measure-learn loop that gets me through my own edgework is, not coincidentally, close to how Cynefin describes navigating genuine complexity: probe, sense, respond — you act because you can't fully know in advance, you watch what actually happens, and you adjust. Applied Improv works the same territory from a different angle: you can't know how a scene will unfold before you step into it, so you learn to build on what emerges rather than freezing until you're certain.

Teams get stuck at their own edges all the time. From the decision no one wants to make first, the conversation everyone's avoiding, or the change everyone senses is needed but no one can name. That's edgework at an organizational scale. It's the same practice: not eliminating the discomfort, but learning to work with it instead of around it.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, the case studies show it in action.