Groucho: “Listen, I’m getting the manicure. Get out of here, will you?” Manicurist: “Did you want your nails long or short?” Groucho: “You better make them short. It’s getting kind of crowded in here. I don’t know. This isn’t the way I pictured an ocean voyage. …

Interested in what security design is, and how this community of practice differ from the larger commercial oriented design disciplines (strategic design, human-centered design, industrial design, etc) that focus on user experiences and novel products that enhance/enable human manipulation of reality? Security design addresses how societies, governments, groups and security…

Ignoring the contradictory nature of organisations may be dysfunctional for managers and researchers. Many theories do not consider contradictory elements- they simply assume away one of the competing elements. This may lead to dysfunction… Theories of congruence have an order bias. Synthesis is a desirable but not required in organisations…

The above image is similar to one I saw at a car museum in the Black Forest a few years ago, and it has stuck in my head for a useful way to explain a few critical aspects on complexity theory to military audiences. Emergence is an essential quality of…

This is an excerpt from an upcoming military design book chapter for an international educational textbook addressing various forms and functions of design practice. Once that project is published (digitally and in print), an announcement will be made through Medium and other social media. …

This post is a revisit to a strategic design article published back in 2015 in the British military journal Defence Studies (Routledge, 15:4, 2015). In the original article, I present how militaries and security-oriented organizations approach complexity through a systematic, linear-casual logic where we end up reverse-engineering all of our…

In the modern, data-hungry era of mainstream society, nearly all of us have experienced that sensation when the organization is unable to see the forest for the trees. We tend to become fixated on invented metrics that render us unable to gain critical or creative insight- and we often scurry…

In multiple strategic planning sessions, design working groups, and other situations where my organization confronted some complex, adaptive problems, I gained some valuable insight on organizational change. In this article, I present one approach on how to inject major reform and change without suffering the “Cassandra Syndrome” of Greek lore…