Adapted from an episode of the Meaningful Conversations podcast, in which Annyse sits down with Wendy Broley.

There's a moment near the end of this conversation when the recording stops and Annyse says, "I wish you could come over for a glass of wine now." By then it feels less like an interview and more like two friends thinking out loud. That ease is the throughline of everything Wendy Broley talks about - that the way forward in water, in leadership, and in our institutions runs straight through trust, vulnerability, and showing up as ourselves.

Wendy is the Executive Vice President at Brown and Caldwell, where she leads the firm's private sector business unit after serving as its Chief Technology Officer. A licensed professional engineer with 25 years across drinking water and reuse planning, engineering, and operations, she's also Executive Director of the California Urban Water Agencies and was a Co-Principal Investigator on the Water Research Foundation's Blueprint for One Water. In other words: she has spent a career thinking about water with the whole system in view.

The episode opens with a card. Wendy drew "Hope."

Hope is not soft. Hope is action.

Asked what hope means to her for the future, Wendy doesn't reach for something abstract. She names the moment we're living in - one with a lot of fear, a lot of disease, a lot of trauma, across the board and in many forms. Hope, for her, is the conviction that we can get to a better place anyway. And when it comes to water specifically, she has a lot of it. She's inspired daily by the people in the industry who are passionate, committed and dedicated to a future where everyone has access to safe, clean, affordable drinking water. That's her purpose. That's the future state she's working toward.

Annyse pushes the idea further with a practice she uses when coaching teams: naming hopes and fears out loud. People sometimes resist - hope isn't a strategy - and she agrees it isn't. But without it, what are we actually doing?

When we can articulate our hope, the future gets clearer. Saying it, saying it to each other, practising saying it - that's where the power is.

We tend to assume everyone shares our hopes, or, more damagingly, that they don't, because we never ask. It can feel strange in our practical, get-to-the-action culture to pause and say, What are your hopes about this project? This company? This family? But that pause is the antidote to a lot of the angst.

There's a quieter insight underneath this: our instinct to control. We grip our environments tightly to feel some sense of autonomy and certainty, and that grip creates tension at work and at home. Hope offers a different kind of energy. If you can point that anxious control toward a shared vision instead, it becomes movement - a way to act when you don't have control, and a way to pull others in the same direction as you. You can't build a movement without being able to name the hope behind it.

What got us here won't get us there

So what does the future actually require of us? Annyse frames it as "becoming" - the ways of being, the mindsets and belief systems we'd need to grow into. She points to Sustainable Development Goal 6, where the world is still roughly two billion people short. There's a gap, she suggests, in the becoming part. Who do we need to be for this to get solved?

Wendy thinks that's exactly the right question, and her answer is candid: what got us here is not going to get us there.

The water industry has made enormous progress - clean drinking water and sanitation now reach the majority of people - and one of the ways it achieved that was by breaking the system into manageable pieces. You handle that part, you handle this one. Water agencies, wastewater agencies, stormwater agencies. Divide the problem, solve each piece. It worked and it's worth celebrating.

But the new problems don't fit that old shape. Population growth, urban densification, and climate change are shrinking our access to the "easy water" - the supply that's cheaper and simpler to treat. Fresh water is finite. Continued access to safe drinking water and sanitation is not guaranteed, and the demands keep coming.

The solution, Wendy argues, requires us to stitch back together the very fragmentation we worked so hard to create. The disconnected governance of water and wastewater actually sits on top of a deeply interconnected urban water cycle and reconnecting our thinking to match that reality is what "One Water" is all about.

The solutions aren't just technical. They're relational. They're regional. They're about connection and trust.

The leadership One Water demands sounds like this: I'm not entirely in control of that water supply, and I'm going to need to work with you so this community has enough for generations to come. That takes vulnerability, trust, vision and co-creation. It means sewing back together what we once pulled apart.

Did we ever really have a whole, holistic relationship with water or did our left-brained, divide-and-solve engineering minds always work this way? Either way, the relational skillset keeps surfacing as the theme. As our world gets faster and more digital, the ability to see and tend the whole ecosystem starts to look less like a nice-to-have and more like a superpower. It still feels new to us. It's still an afterthought rather than the starting point.

The proof: eleven agencies, one vision

Wendy's clearest example of this in practice is the California Urban Water Agencies, the non-profit she leads - eleven major urban water agencies across the state, each serving its own communities and wrestling with its own issues. When they come together, they hold one common vision: that all Californians have access to safe and clean drinking water. Their mission is to speak with a unified voice on solutions that keep communities and the environment thriving, and their values are unity, balance, trust and commitment.

Seeing the whole picture together lets them work on the big, shared problems - supply reliability and resilience, affordability, accessibility and public trust in water. California still has hundreds of thousands of people without reliable access to safe, clean drinking water and the group acts as a technical assistance provider to communities tackling exactly that.

How did something like this get built? It comes right back to Wendy's card. Those agencies got brave enough to talk about their hopes, vulnerable enough to admit they couldn't solve it alone and willing to build trust - to decide this wasn't a competition, and that one agency's problems weren't only its own. That, Wendy says, is a lot of becoming. And it pays off: solving the broader problem helps each of them in their own backyards and the lessons from each community feed back into the whole.

Their four strategic aspirations capture the agenda neatly - a safe, reliable supply; water that's affordable and accessible; public trust in water quality; and being a model for inclusive workplaces that reflect the communities they serve.

That last one points to something we rarely say out loud: water is an economic engine. It takes enormous infrastructure and an enormous number of jobs to deliver water. Wendy sees workforce development as one of the industry's biggest challenges and one of its biggest opportunities: a chance to be part of something full of purpose, make a good living, and do it close to home. We just need to make that opportunity visible.

The "And" in everything and the case for slowing down

A lot of Wendy's leadership philosophy comes down to a single conjunction. You can run IT and be an active member of the executive driving the big picture. You can do your own job and have the capacity to notice when finance is struggling, when sales are struggling, and to lift everyone up. There's an "and" in everything.

That capacity, though, requires something our culture resists: slowing down. We've made ourselves victims of our own imagination, Wendy suggests - we've decided fast equals success, so we work at 

that pace, and then we declare ourselves too busy to do anything else. It's a self-perpetuating loop. Breaking it means lifting your head, having the broadening conversations and spending real time defining the problem before charging at the solution.

Her own path prepared her for this. Before Brown and Caldwell, she'd assumed consulting engineering firms were competitive and cut-throat and her early experience at a small, niche membrane consulting firm, where she felt like family, taught her there was another way. When she arrived at Brown and Caldwell, what moved her was how collaborative and community-focused a large firm could still be, how much empathy and connectedness she felt. Learning what doesn't work, she notes, is a good teacher too.

The lesson she's carried: high-performing teams are interdependent teams. That takes a common vision and alignment, yes, but it also takes trust and connection among the team members themselves, not just between each member and the leader.

A few of her working principles follow naturally:

• Start with the why. People often need to understand before they can lean in, trust, and follow.
• Most decisions are two-way doors. Few choices are irreversible. If we treat life as an experiment - try it, learn, adapt - the fear of getting it wrong loosens its grip.
• A mistake is just data. If the bar is getting it right 100% of the time, we never leave square one. This industry's pace demands the freedom to err and learn, because growth lives on the other side of mistakes.

Authenticity over persona and the myth of control

For Wendy, what actually changes the world isn't the polished optics of who we are. It's the whole of who we are - the angst, the hopes, the fears, the desires, the passions. That's the energy we put out, and it's what makes a difference. She's not especially moved by people performing a persona; she's moved by people showing up as themselves, because that's what gives everyone else permission to do the same.

That's not an easy journey, and leaders have to do more than talk about it. They have to model it - be stewards of the culture and willing to operate with their own authenticity, so others can bring their whole selves to the table. Action over words, every time. That, Wendy believes, is how we'll solve the hardest challenges facing communities around water and the environment: by building cultures where everyone can thrive.

So what's the fear that stops us? It's usually some version of if I let go, people will get lazy and the work won't get done. But you can reframe it - that's really a fear of losing control. And control is the myth. We chase it to feel less anxious, but in the long run it delivers very little. It gets in the way and makes us smaller.

The opposite, being more inclusive, transparent, and open, is what creates the conditions for authenticity. People share ideas, take a few more risks, innovate a little more. At Brown and Caldwell that looks concrete: a seat at the leadership table for a rising professional leader, a real voice and space to connect employee network groups to business strategy. There's a difference, Wendy says, between I'm here doing my job and I don't want you to see me and I'm here doing my job and I want you to see me and hear me. Hearing all those voices makes for better strategy and it lets a leader speak in ways more people can actually take in.

Creating room for people to just be calms the collective nervous system.

It's a fitting end note for a conversation that began with a single word drawn from a deck of cards. Hope, it turns out, isn't the soft thing we sometimes mistake it for. Named out loud and pointed at a shared future, it's clarity. It's vision. It's action. And whether the work is water or leadership or simply being human together, that's where the becoming begins.