Multi-stakeholder coordination, industrial systems, and digital platforms
Most transformation efforts fail for the same reason: organizations build more capacity to act without building the capacity to decide together.
I work on the second problem — designing the conversations, methods, and platforms that let industries, agencies, and communities think and commit as one system instead of a pile of competing agendas.
For three decades that has meant enterprise product work at scale, founding and running companies, and inventing tools for collaborative sense-making. Today it means putting all of it to work on collaboration as infrastructure.
OnTrackNorthAmerica is a 501(c)(3) action think tank working to redesign how North America plans, capitalizes, and builds its industrial and freight systems — expanding rail utilization, integrating freight with land use, and replacing siloed planning with coordinated, whole-system decision-making. OTNA has held a thirty-year pledge of impartiality: it takes no sponsorship that would prioritize one party's agenda over shared interests, which is what makes genuinely level-playing-field dialogue possible.
The organization's core method is IntelliSynthesis® — a structured approach to collaborative problem-solving that gets impacted and influential parties thinking and acting together fast, so that posturing and narrow vested interests fall away rather than dominate. It runs through IntelliConference events, facilitated stakeholder dialogues, and Transportation Action Planning engagements with governments, railroads, shippers, and communities.
Developing OnTrackWorld — knitting together the future.
Enterprise product and architecture at national scale. Led work that shifted acquisition and support into a digital omnichannel — a 95-point NPS improvement over two years and $50M in annual cost savings. Through the pandemic, rebuilt legacy ecommerce systems to handle interaction patterns no one had planned for. The lasting lesson: rigor and scale are learnable, and most large organizations have neither where it counts.
Independent invention practice behind the Polyopticon and US Patent 12,197,471.
Constructed IntelliSynthesis®, a platform for multistakeholder collaboration and negotiation — mapping structures for convening online stakeholder engagements, built on early text-analytics APIs. The direct antecedent of the method now in the field at OnTrackNorthAmerica.
First technology professional in a fast-growing human performance firm. Digitized a methodology that had been almost entirely face-to-face — building the means to move tacit practice into explicit, transferable form. Knowledge management strategy and portal platform cut training cycles by 50%. Worked alongside linguists and statisticians on diagnostics tracing individual, team, leader, and enterprise performance.
Working for the firm's Chief Knowledge Officer, defined and shipped its first communities-of-practice sharing portal and the first browser-based consulting methodology platform. We were running VR goggles in 1995. I interviewed David Chaum about DigiCash in 1996 and wrote the firm's brief on it.
Guided editorial direction for Datapro Reports on Management of Personal Computers and Management of Office Automation. Launched the firm's first groupware coverage — early enough to watch computer-supported cooperative work emerge as a field, and to find Duncan Sutherland Jr., who became a lifelong mentor.
Also: adjunct faculty, Columbia University School of Professional Studies (2014–2021), teaching in the master's programs in Information & Knowledge Strategy and Applied Analytics.
An interface for navigating and retrieving temporal data through physical gesture rather than pointer and menu.
A spatial computing device built on a 32-face geodesic structure, treating physical topology as a working dimension of the interface. Aimed at people who have to hold too many moving variables at once. More at polyopticon.io.
With John Kellden, Joachim Stroh, and Ron Scroggin, developing new infrastructure for group thinking and generative ontologies.
Founded with Doug Breitbart and Howard Rheingold as a follow-on to Rheingold's Net Smart.
White paper on the capacity of organizations to make sense, out of work with Doug Breitbart at Ontologique.
Newsletter on emerging digital infrastructure. Introduced a "knowledge work" framework and coined "micro-enterprise executive," anticipating the gig economy by two decades.
University of Pennsylvania — MSE, Management of Technology (2005); BA, Economics (1983).