As a practitioner and researcher, I believe organizations improve when they build the capacity to understand people, interpret uncertainty, and act with coherence. Design — and the broader disciplines of behavioral science, service design, and organizational systems — are tools toward that end, not ends in themselves. The design process is one vehicle for discovering solutions; building an organization's permanent capacity to keep discovering them is the deeper work I care about.

Understanding the full picture of what an organization is trying to become lets teams see how individual capabilities — research, design, operations — connect into a larger system of adaptation. I still draw on Jobs to Be Done thinking and Agile, continuous-discovery practices day to day. Increasingly, though, I draw on the theoretical traditions behind adaptive systems — Dewey's theory of inquiry, Wiener's cybernetics, Luhmann's systems theory — which inform my doctoral research into how organizations generate coherence under uncertainty.

Behavioral science can be used to move people toward an outcome someone else has already chosen for them. That isn't what I do with it. My work targets the biases that block people from deliberate, System II thinking about decisions that matter — the goal being a considered choice, not a particular one. Where an organization's interest and a customer's interest diverge, the design should make the divergence visible rather than exploit it.

Read more of my thinking on Medium.