Chelsea Lei, Ph.D.

Chelsea Lei has devoted over 15 years to helping public and non-profit institutions enhance governance strategy and culture using multiple management disciplines, including performance audit, risk management, organizational development, and leadership coaching. Her work and approach reflect her extensive training in interdisciplinary fields, including Ph.D. in Organization Science at Boston College Carroll School of Management, M. A. in International Political Economy at Stanford University, and A.B. with honors in Social Studies at Harvard College.

Chelsea is currently a research fellow at Harvard University, affiliated with the Center on Public Leadership and Program on Crisis Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is writing and speaking about effective integration of emergency management and risk management functions in public organizations critical for developing holistic risk governance and strengthening community resilience. Concurrently, Chelsea is providing expert consultation to Harvard’s Risk Management & Audit Services office on strategies to advance its institutional risk management program.

Chelsea’s expertise on institutional governance is grounded in her unique experience as an audit professional in the American public sector. She began working as a management auditor in the legislative branch of King County (the 12th most populous county in the U.S.) in Washington State, providing independent assessment of program effectiveness, operational efficiency, and compliance with legal and policy requirements. Her work improved the county’s public accountability and performance results in emergency management, climate change preparedness, and capital project management. Her writing on talent strategy for the public auditing field won an Outstanding Contributions Award from the Association of Local Government Auditors.

Subsequently, Chelsea joined a special initiative of the Washington State Auditor’s Office to create a cross-sectoral learning network to amplify and accelerate performance improvement and cultural transformation across the state’s local government ecosystem. As director of the initiative, she designed and produced innovative professional training and development programs that introduced cutting-edge management ideas and practices to thousands of local government professionals from over 150 jurisdictions. She also spearheaded the Common Municipal Dashboard Collaborative, bringing together cities and counties to co-create a groundbreaking resource that enables any municipal government to develop a clear and comprehensive account of how they create value for the public and to design strategies to drive better community outcomes. This work was recognized by the Government Innovators Network at Harvard for advancing performance management in local government.

Drawing on her experience helping government organizations and professionals increase meaningful impact, Chelsea pursued doctoral work to generate original insights into how individuals and collectives can create, sustain, and transform institutions. She wrote her master’s thesis on the origins and evolution of an organizational development practice known as “visual facilitation” and her doctoral dissertation on a major U.S. federal management reform initiative known as “reinventing government.” Her research in these distinct contexts demonstrate that building successful and sustainable institutions depends critically upon integrating multiple complex patterns of recognizing and producing social and economic value. Most importantly, her research points to the importance of learning from practitioners deeply experienced and thoughtful about building trust and facilitating collaborative relationships across culturally distinct organizational environments.

Chelsea is passionate about improving lives through bettering institutions. She welcomes opportunities to collaborate with institutional leaders and governance professionals who seek to design and build new and more productive ways to promote human flourishing through impactful institutional work.