Cari Guittard serves as Strategist for San Mateo County Emergency Management, where she leads the development of the department's and County’s first comprehensive crisis communications strategy and trust architecture framework for public alert and warning across an operational area of 20 cities and 18 unincorporated communities serving 775,000 residents. Her work draws on more than two decades at the intersection of national security, crisis management, and strategic influence, applying corporate brand architecture and behavioral science to one of the most consequential public information challenges in government: getting people to understand, trust, and act on a warning before it is too late.

At SMC EM, Guittard's portfolio spans alert and warning policy, crisis communications, multi-jurisdictional partnerships, and the integration of red teaming into emergency planning and exercise design. She approaches public information as a behavioral problem first and a messaging problem second. Every framework she builds, from the county's Five Elements adoption work to the SMC Alert public outreach campaign, is grounded in social and behavioral psychology, neuroscience, and organizational psychology. Her conviction is that trust is critical homeland security infrastructure, and that the field's persistent "failure of imagination" gap can only be closed by methodologies the private sector has long refined and the public sector has rarely borrowed.

Before emergency management, Guittard spent over two decades working with three U.S. presidential administrations and their National Security Councils. At the U.S. Department of State, she conducted cyber threat and critical infrastructure assessments across the Middle East, Asia, and Eastern Europe, and served as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy supporting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's post-9/11 engagement efforts. She co-founded Business for Diplomatic Action alongside advertising legends including Keith Reinhard, who nicknamed her "The Un-Guided Missile" for her relentless determination to find a way forward regardless of resources or obstacles. There she honed her approach to strategic influence, storytelling, and trust architecture, including partnering with Fortune 500 companies and the Obama White House to launch the first U.S. Middle East Entrepreneurship Initiative.

For 15 years, Guittard developed and taught graduate-level courses in Crisis Management, Persuasion and Strategic Influence, Corporate Diplomacy and Geopolitical Risk, and Global Leadership at Hult International Business School (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Dubai), the University of Southern California Center for Public Diplomacy, and the University of San Francisco MBA School. She was named Faculty of the Year four times by Hult IBS. Her teaching and applied research draw on her work with Dr. Mansour Javidan and the Thunderbird Global Mindset Institute, applying global leadership frameworks to the challenge of communicating across cultural, jurisdictional, and trust boundaries. A certified foresight and gender intelligence practitioner, she integrates futuring and inclusive methodologies into emergency planning and threat anticipation. She is also a longtime ghostwriter for executives, senior government officials, and thought leaders as well as co-host of the podcast Vantage Points by Verkada, and Co-Chair of Girl Security's All Secure Alliance.