Lisa Kimball of Washington, D.C., and Chilmark died on Nov. 3 after a long battle with amyloidosis. She was 69.

Lisa was born in New Britain, Conn. on June 5, 1948, the daughter of Penn Townsend Kimball and Janet Fraser Kimball. Her father was a Rhodes Scholar at Princeton, Marine officer in the Pacific, and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, where he was respected and feared for preparing students for the elbows-out competition in newsrooms. His memorial service at the National Press Club in Washington was filled with editors and reporters who had powered print and broadcast media for the last half century. Lisa’s mother was six feet tall and had shocking silver hair. As her many Vineyard friends knew, Janet had an extraordinary ability to engage with other people, and laughter and camaraderie would break out whenever she entered a room. Both are buried on Abel’s Hill.

The emotional epicenter of the Kimball family was a hilltop cottage off State Road in Chilmark. Lisa spent parts of every summer there from 1965 to 2016 overlooking West Meadow, until she became too weak to travel. After her mother’s death, Lisa’s father married Julie Kimball, and for many years they lived in Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs and summered in Chilmark. Penn and Julie adopted their daughter Laura Kimball from China when Laura was in third grade. Lisa proudly watched as Laura rose through the Vineyard Haven elementary school, the regional high school and Eckerd College.

Lisa combined intelligence, curiosity, warmth, optimism, and boundless energy with a powerful scanning radar for new ideas. She had a unique ability to connect people with complementary skills to develop their ideas. She spent summers gathering people in Chilmark for dinners that shared her love of food and talent in preparing it. Her wit, love of color, and whimsical spirit found full expression in her Washington home, which she converted into a museum displaying a joyous collection of Mexican folk art.

She grew up in Westport, Conn., graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, earned master’s degrees in education from Wesleyan University and Wheelock College, and obtained a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Catholic University. In professional life, Lisa was a management consultant focused on developing techniques to build more effective organizations and a better world by creating high-performing teams that emphasized creative innovation within a loose structure. In 1982, she found the internet. She quickly became a pioneer in the theory and practice of developing online teams that could generate and implement new ideas, without regard to separation of members by geography and time. She became a leading light in a global network of professional organizational development groups.

In 2000, Lisa founded Group Jazz, a company that assisted organizations and communities in developing the capacity to identify critical problems, and develop and implement collaborative solutions to these issues. She also was a founder and board member of the Plexus Institute, a nonprofit focused on applying ideas from complexity science to organizational and social problems. Through Plexus, Lisa worked with 40 hospitals to eliminate transmission of MRSA infections, by engaging employees from the lowest to the highest levels to identify which teams within the hospital already had developed effective processes to prevent transmission of infections and to help other groups implement those techniques. The success of the anti-MRSA effort allowed Lisa and Plexus to obtain grants to apply the sam processes in the education field, to help underperforming urban schools deliver produce better outcomes for students.

She is survived by her husband John Cooney of Washington, D.C., her step-mother Julie Kimball, her sister Laura Kimball, and her brother Barry Cerf.

A memorial service will be held in Washington at a later date.