About me

I am a sociotechnical scientist. I research human coordination systems: the arrangements of people, tools, and rules through which groups produce outcomes no individual chose.

My research studies the project. Nearly everything is built through one, a bridge, a drug, a company, and projects fail at astonishing rates, which the field has learned to treat as ordinary. That failure is conventionally read as a management problem. I see it as a scientific one. My work is an account of how projects work: the primitive categories a project is composed of, the activities that connect them, and the dynamics that determine whether an effort converges on a result or exhausts its resources first. The aim is diagnosis before failure rather than giving ad hoc explanations after it.

I came to projects by way of INCOSE. I was brought in on the strength of a business economics background paired with systems engineering expertise, and have since spent several years directing product development for the world's largest systems engineering society: certification, publications, technical products. Working alongside systems engineers shifted my interests toward the coordination system that governs their daily life.

Before projects, the system that occupied me was markets. I trained as an economist and then as a systems engineer, and I wanted to study markets through a systems engineering lens: economics treats a market as a group of buyers and sellers, while engineering treats it as an allocation mechanism. My dissertation modeled school choice as a sociotechnical system. I built an ontology to specify what such a system is composed of, then modeled how different configurations changed market behavior.

The two are the same research question asked of different objects. Markets allocate what already exists. Projects bring things into existence. The second is the harder case, and the less studied one.

Director of Product at INCOSE. Faculty at Stevens Institute of Technology. Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from Cornell, sociotechnical emphasis, following degrees in economics and applied mathematics.

I live on a ranch outside Boise, Idaho, with my wife and two children.