Current Research

Satellite terrain view — aerial topographic surface

An ongoing inquiry into how organizations behave, adapt, and collapse.

This is not a fixed body of work. It is a practice — a sustained effort to observe organizations with the same rigor and patience that an anthropologist brings to the study of culture. The questions I pursue are drawn from direct experience: time spent inside organizations during periods of growth, disruption, transition, and recovery. What I study is not what organizations say about themselves, but what they actually do — and the often significant gap between the two.

My central argument is that organizations are not simply structures or strategies. They are living systems — shaped by history, held together by informal norms, and constantly adapting to pressures both internal and external. To understand them requires more than surveys and dashboards. It requires presence, patience, and a willingness to sit with complexity before reaching for conclusions.

Organizational Behavior

How do people actually behave inside organizations — and why does that behavior so often diverge from what the organization intends? I study the informal systems, unwritten rules, and social dynamics that shape daily organizational life. The formal org chart tells you who reports to whom. The informal network tells you how things actually get done.

Active questions

What norms govern behavior that no policy document acknowledges?

How do power dynamics shape communication across hierarchies?

What does an organization's meeting culture reveal about its decision-making?

Leadership

Leadership is not a personality trait or a title. It is a practice — one that is deeply shaped by the organizational context in which it occurs. I am interested in how leadership capacity is built, constrained, and expressed within specific organizational environments, and in the conditions that allow leadership to emerge at every level of a system.

Active questions

What organizational conditions enable leadership to emerge beyond formal roles?

How do leaders transmit culture — intentionally and unintentionally?

What does effective leadership look like during organizational disruption?

Resilience

Organizational resilience is not the absence of disruption. It is the capacity to absorb disruption and reorganize while maintaining function. I study what makes some organizations genuinely resilient — not merely robust — and what distinguishes adaptive capacity from the performance of stability.

Active questions

How do organizations distinguish between adaptation and mere survival?

What role does psychological safety play in organizational resilience?

How is resilience built — and how is it inadvertently dismantled?

Systems Thinking

Most organizational problems are not solved for lack of solutions. They persist because the system that produces them has not been accurately understood. Systems thinking is the practice of seeing organizations as interconnected wholes — tracing feedback loops, identifying leverage points, and resisting the temptation to treat symptoms as causes.

Active questions

Where are the feedback loops that sustain dysfunctional patterns?

What are the unintended consequences of common organizational interventions?

How do organizations develop the capacity to see themselves as systems?

Customer Experience

Customer experience is not a department or a metric. It is the sum of every interaction a person has with an organization — and it is shaped, above all, by the internal culture of that organization. I study the relationship between employee experience and customer experience, and the organizational behaviors that produce loyalty, indifference, or erosion.

Active questions

How does internal culture manifest in customer-facing behavior?

What organizational conditions produce consistently excellent service?

How do organizations understand — and misunderstand — the people they serve?

Organizational Culture

Culture is not a set of values on a wall. It is the accumulated pattern of behaviors, assumptions, and beliefs that an organization has developed over time — often without conscious intention. I study how culture forms, how it is transmitted, how it changes, and how it becomes visible under conditions of stress.

Active questions

How is culture transmitted across generations of organizational membership?

What does an organization's culture reveal about its founding conditions?

How do subcultures form — and what do they signal about the larger system?

Human Adaptation

Human beings are extraordinarily adaptive. Organizations, by contrast, often resist adaptation even when survival depends on it. I study the tension between individual adaptive capacity and organizational inertia — and the conditions under which organizations become capable of genuine change rather than the performance of it.

Active questions

How do individuals adapt to organizational environments that resist change?

What is the relationship between individual resilience and organizational health?

How do organizations create conditions for collective adaptation?

AI and the Future of Work

Artificial intelligence is not primarily a technology story. It is a human adaptation story — one of the most significant reorganizations of work, meaning, and institutional structure in living memory. I study how organizations are responding to AI: what they are doing, what they are avoiding, and what the gap between those two things reveals about their deeper assumptions.

Active questions

How are organizations distinguishing between AI adoption and AI integration?

What does the introduction of AI reveal about an organization's relationship to expertise?

How will the nature of organizational knowledge change as AI becomes embedded in work?

These areas of inquiry are not separate. They are facets of a single, larger question: what does it mean for an organization to function well — not merely efficiently, but humanely, adaptively, and with integrity? That question does not have a final answer. It has only better and worse observations.