Chris Hoff

Chris Hoff is the founder and executive director of California Family Institute, a social enterprise dedicated to making quality narrative-informed therapy accessible to the Orange County community.

Chris describes his work as cultural architecture: designing the conditions under which new possibilities become thinkable, then buildable. Most therapy treats problems as things to be solved and most consulting treats organizations as machines to be optimized. He works differently, using chronotopes (time-space patterns that organize experience), futuring practices, and what he calls “counter-defuturing” to resist the systematic elimination of our capacity to build meaningful futures. This is compositional work - studio work.

Background

Before becoming a therapist, Chris built companies, including co-founding and exiting an eight-figure staffing firm. He founded CFI as a social enterprise and has worked in organizational development and leadership coaching, supervised therapists, and served on nonprofit boards supporting arts and social justice. His formal training includes a Ph.D. in MFT with a concentration in organizational development (Loma Linda University) and a Master’s in Clinical Psychology (Pepperdine). He is a licensed marriage and family therapist in California (#53081).

How He Works

Chris is interested in moments when people realize the story they are living no longer tells the truth. He works as a thinking companion, a careful listener to language, and someone attuned to liminal space - helping surface the stories already shaping people’s choices. He is less interested in why things happened and more interested in how certain stories keep repeating and how they might loosen.

Influences

His work draws from Michael White’s narrative therapy, Pierre Wack’s scenario planning, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopes, alongside contemporary thinkers such as Byung-Chul Han, Édouard Glissant, Bruno Latour, Arturo Escobar, and AnaLouise Keating. It is also shaped by philosophy and cultural theory, Zen practice and contemplative inquiry, and art, design, and speculative futures.

Beyond CFI

He writes about these ideas on his Substack, Liminal Lab, and hosts The Radical Therapist podcast, exploring the intersections of collaborative therapy, philosophy, art, and science and technology in a post-postmodern world. Dangerous Stories Studio is where all of this comes together: a constellation of offerings for people and organizations who have outgrown the story that once made sense.