Anne Gibbon likes to cause trouble in the name of asking a better question. Through a career spanning service in the Navy, working for Maori iwi (tribes) in New Zealand, amateur boxing, and leading skeptical professionals through improv and design thinking exercises, she’s pushed herself and those around her to become better leaders of teams attacking wicked problems.
Preaching a patience she doesn’t always possess, Anne has led projects leaning into the paradox that effective action in a complex world usually stems from a practice of curiosity, beginner’s mind, and spiraling layers of questions.
She’s been a co-founder several times over. During assignment to the Naval Academy’s Stockdale Center, she led a project testing a branding campaign style video series to motivate ethical decision making of young officers. She brought military students to teach boxing classes to formerly displaced children in northern Uganda. Her last tour in the Navy saw her co-found the Commander’s Action Group at a Naval Special Warfare unit, and help them write counter-terrorism campaign plans applying social network analysis.
Following her military service, Anne applied lessons from a fellowship at Stanford’s Design School to projects applying new tech to national security challenges, and for community and land wellbeing projects in New Zealand’s indigenous communities.
Most recently, she’s co-founded a data visualization startup, Matri, that still confuses her parents, they’re close to getting it. Her team is developing methods in Perceptual Engineering, upending conventional wisdom of the application of neuroscience principles to designing better interfaces exchanging information between the conscious human mind and the machines we use.
Anne graduated from the Naval Academy in 2003 with a Bachelor’s of Science in English. She escaped the library for the gym and boathouse, becoming a Second-Team All-American rower and setting the women’s 2000m ergometer record. Her senior year Anne became the first woman to box for the Academy, ending her first fight in a Baltimore union hall within a minute and 20 seconds when she TKO’ed her opponent.
From 2009 to 2011, Anne served as the officer in charge of the Naval Academy’s student cohort of the IGL ALLIES program.
“Sherman inspires organizations to form around him with his otherworldly ability to pose a question, find resources to work on it, attract amazing talent, and then get out of the way. He sets the example for the rest of us on how to put your arm around another person, look at a hard problem in the world, then look back at you and say, ‘Well, it’s clear. Something must be done about this. What can be done? How can I help you do it? Who can I introduce you to?’
It was in this spirit that ALLIES was created. What greater peace and stability could born if we taught students just launching into their careers, to not just look up a particular professional ladder, but to look across to their peers on the other ladders.
The group of students who have joined ALLIES over the years have been some of the bright, ambitious, and hopeful people that I’ve ever met. Many became people I hired and especially important, lifelong friends. ALLIES students - exploring civil military interaction - head off to careers in war zones and refugee camps. They find themselves in some of the most unstable, challenging situations we humans get ourselves into. It’s been an honor to join them in asking what relief from suffering might be had if we better understood the many voices in the civil - military community?”
Anne is simply what people really mean when they talk about a “force of nature.” Love her talk! She galvanizes people and ideas in unique ways. She mentored some of my most inquisitive students, inspiring them to reach beyond themselves
She was the decisive force in creating one of the more extraordinary moments of my Institute, magnificently hosting ALLIES at Annapolis, bringing together her midshipmen, my Tufts students and Chilean military and military police cadets who had been part of our ALLIES efforts in Chile at the Catholic University of Santiago. They were sharing their unique opportunity of studying with Juan Guzman, the courageous judge who prosecuted Pinochet, and together creating a framework for the first human rights curriculum of the Chilean military academy.
She enabled me to fulfill one of my wishes, to honor the memory of remarkable Ben Sklaver, by taking our ALLIES summer research trip to Uganda. She is the real “million dollar baby,” gentle and compassionate, yet tough minded and determined. She thrives on complexity and challenge. I have rarely met anyone as demanding, of herself.