My Thinking
When you hire me, this is what comes with me: the ideas I've worked out, the simulations I've built to test them, the research I keep in the Wisdom Library, and the books behind all of it. You can read most of it here, and the full research with a free sign-in, so you can judge the thinking before we talk.
Applied research
I read and research all the time, and the same few questions come up again and again. I don't claim the answers. Working on them is what lets me tell a durable idea from a passing one when I advise on AI.
What is wisdom?
Reading from: The Wisdom Library, Braiding Sweetgrass, Sources of Power
What is humanity?
Reading from: The Atomic Human, Friends, Infectious Generosity
What is thinking?
Reading from: Framers, Six Thinking Hats, The Ideological Brain
What is learning?
Reading from: How We Learn, Brain Rules, The Talent Code
What is human intelligence?
Reading from: The Importance of Being Educable, A Thousand Brains, Range
What is artificial intelligence?
Reading from: The Master Algorithm, Redesigning AI, The Atomic Human
What is natural intelligence?
Reading from: An Immense World, The Serengeti Rules, Biomimicry
What is plant intelligence?
Reading from: Planta Sapiens, Braiding Sweetgrass
What does the next generation of K-12 look like?
Reading from: How We Learn, The Element, My pro bono work with schools
Ideas I've named
Each one is a claim I've argued in writing. Follow the link to the full argument.
Artificials
I call my AI teammates Artificials, not agents or AI. They are my primary builders, and I am the architect of intent. Artificials have no instincts; humans do, so the intent and the judgment stay with people.
The Business Engineer
Product engineering merged software and product work. Agents will now fold in operations, finance, marketing and support, so one person or a very small team can build a whole business, and they win by starting where trust already exists.
Team of One
AI lets one person carry a product through every role, so the relay of handoffs between specialists gives way to teams of one.
The Zipper Problem
A failed tool does not mean the need was wrong. Keep a list of the AI uses that failed for good reasons, and test them again as the tools improve.
Research That Compounds
Knowledge trapped in documents and recordings stops growing. It compounds only when its stories, questions and mistakes are harvested, checked and fed into the next round of work.
Skills Outsourced to AI Disappear
A skill you use less gets weaker. A skill you hand to AI entirely is lost, so the work has to be designed to keep people practicing what matters.
When Building Is Cheap, Judgment Is the Constraint
Speeding up the parts of a system does not raise its output unless the bottleneck moves. As AI makes building cheap, the bottleneck becomes deciding what to build.
Tinkering Before AI Literacy
Schools should not start with AI tools. Children who build things by hand, with trusted teachers and older mentors, learn to ask questions, and AI literacy grows out of that habit.
The AI-Shoring Model
A cost model for when routine offshore work should go to agents checked by a small senior team: the agent wins when its cost plus the cost of checking falls below the human cost.
28 simulations I've built
Two standalone simulators, and interactive simulations inside the intelligent textbooks I've written.
Theory of Constraints: Bike Shop
Run a small bike shop and watch work pile up at the bottleneck. Speed up the wrong station and nothing improves.
Theory of Constraints: Software Delivery
The same idea in a software delivery pipeline. Faster coding with AI does not ship more unless the constraint moves.
Minnesota Native Plants
An intelligent textbook with simulations of fire ecology, restoration timelines, rain gardens and pollinator matching.
Mastering Technical Communication
An intelligent textbook with tools for audience analysis, the pyramid principle and presentation timing.
Teaching
I teach executives, school leaders, engineers and students, and I build the courses myself.
With the Stone Arch Collective
I co-founded the Stone Arch Collective, a practitioner-owned AI cooperative in the Twin Cities, and teach with its members. Together we ran a three-day AI Leadership Academy for Minnesota school and district leaders in August 2026, and we run an executive intensive, Management in an AI World, and cohorts for business owners and senior practitioners.
University programs
I teach in a university program on trustworthy AI for medical-device teams, and I give guest lectures in engineering, business and MBA classes on technical communication, innovation and AI.
A complete online curriculum, built like a factory
For a specialized technical training company I designed and built a full online curriculum: nearly twenty hours of narrated video with quizzes, glossaries and ready-to-load learning-platform packages. Behind it is a production system I built. A lesson is written once and the system turns it into narrated video, a quiz bank and a platform package, checks it against written quality rules, and turns every review comment into a new rule.
Intelligent textbooks I build and maintain
An intelligent textbook starts from a map of hundreds of concepts and how they depend on each other, then grows chapters, quizzes, a glossary and interactive simulations from it. I build them with Dan McCreary's open-source method and contribute back to it. So far: 7 books and 104 chapters, kept current as their fields move.
Minnesota Native Plants
Native plants, ecology and restoration for gardeners and land stewards, with simulations of fire ecology, rain gardens and pollinator matching.
Mastering Technical Communication
Clarity, impact and influence for engineers and technical professionals. I use it in my guest lectures.
Pain Management
Living with and managing chronic pain, written for the person in pain and the person who cares for them.
Course textbooks for a specialized technical training company
Companion textbooks for a client's online courses. The client and the course topics stay unnamed, because together they would identify the client.
Tools that outlast the technology
AI is the question of the moment. The tools I use to answer it are older, and they work the same for a one-person shop and a global company. They are other people's ideas; what I add is how I apply them.
Theory of Constraints
Eliyahu Goldratt
Every system has one bottleneck that sets its output. Find it before spending on AI, or the money speeds up parts that don't matter.
The Evaporating Cloud
Eliyahu Goldratt
When two good goals seem to conflict, write down the assumption that makes them conflict. Usually one assumption is wrong, and the conflict goes away.
Useful Knowledge
Joel Mokyr
Growth comes from linking knowing what is true with knowing how to act on it. Companies stall on AI when they build the know-how without the know-why.
Goodhart's Law
Charles Goodhart and Marilyn Strathern
When a measure becomes a target, people find ways to move the number without moving the goal. Every AI metric needs a second measure that would catch the gaming.
TRIZ
Genrich Altshuller
Inventive problems repeat across industries. Someone has often solved your contradiction already, in a field you would not think to look.
Where I'm working now
New fields I'm building expertise in, much of it pro bono.
AI you can trust in high-stakes science
I lead AI architecture and evaluation for a rare-disease research program in computational biology. Models and simulations narrow down what is worth testing, and lab experiments decide. I design the evidence layer: every number is labeled with how strong its evidence is, every result traces back to its source, and computed results are kept apart from a model's judgment so a reviewer can tell which is which.
AI for road safety
I am executive director, pro bono, of the Shreya R. Dixit Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit working to end deaths from distracted driving. Its innovation lab builds AI tools: a device that alerts a distracted driver, safer route planning, and an AI studio that turns stories and reports into multilingual audio for safety campaigns.
Teaching in the age of AI
I advise schools, pro bono, on teaching once AI is everywhere. The work starts with how children learn to ask questions, not with tools. I am also building intelligent textbooks with dozens of interactive simulations, and writing my own standards for what makes teaching work.
Research I've written
Longer briefs in the Wisdom Library, where I bring together the work of economists, organizational scientists and engineers and say what it means for leaders using AI.
- The Invisible Architecture — How natural connectors, glue people, and idea brokers power organizational intelligence.
- Beyond Efficiency: Designing Collective Intelligence in the AI Era — Why the next competitive advantage isn't artificial intelligence — it's shared wisdom. A practical framework for engineering organizations that think collectively.
- The Core Theory of Useful Knowledge — Understand why some nations and organizations thrive while others stagnate—through the lens of Nobel Prize-winning economic theory.
- TOC Bike Shop Simulator — An interactive Theory of Constraints experience — see bottlenecks, WIP, throughput, and the Five Focusing Steps in motion.
- TOC Software Delivery Simulator — Apply Theory of Constraints to software development — see how handoffs, queues, reviews, and context switching affect delivery velocity.
- Mastering Technical Communication — An interactive intelligent textbook on clarity, impact, and influence for engineers — featuring 15 chapters, 275 concepts, and hands-on MicroSims.
People I've helped
Clients, founders and the organizations I help for free. I never name a client; everything else is as it happened.
Advising every chief at the table
A company of about fifty people brought me in to help it change how it works with AI. A company that size still has a full C-suite, and each chief faced a different version of the same question.
Over three months I worked with each of them directly: the chief executive, and the chiefs of operations, information, business, science, marketing and people.
A morning with a school's teachers
A K-12 school asked me to spend a morning with its teachers and staff on using AI in their work. Everyone brought a laptop, so it ran as live demonstrations and open questions rather than slides.
The same worries came up again and again: what happens to private data, how to catch invented citations in student papers, whether it is fair to grade with AI when students may not write with it, and how small fakes slip by unnoticed. The last question was the biggest: how do we protect people whose jobs AI will change?
Pro bono: an hour instead of two days
I serve on the board of a community association in Minnesota. They first asked me after I had given them two free workshops on AI, and this year they asked me to stay on. I am now helping with their grants as well.
Recently one of their leaders needed a video montage and could not get one AI tool to make it. I tried that tool too, then switched to others. The montage was done in about an hour, at a quality that would otherwise have taken two full days. She looked at it and said it was perfect.
Pro bono: how should schools teach once AI is everywhere?
I advise the chief executive of a community foundation, without charge, on what its schools should do about AI.
The easy answer is to put AI tools in classrooms. We went the other way. Children learn best by building things with their hands, alongside teachers they trust and older students who mentor them, in classrooms run as conversations instead of lectures. Each experiment raises a question, and each question drives the next experiment. AI literacy follows from that habit of mind.
He had never heard of Claude. Now he runs his own ventures.
A man walked into a bookstore where I was spending the afternoon, and we got talking about what he wanted to build. He had ideas and no way to make them. He had never heard of Claude.
I told him what it was, and to download it that night and try it. He was stunned by what it could do.
Since then he has launched several ventures of his own, and built a complete app from scratch, on his own.
She had never written code. Seven months later she had a private beta.
A founder came to me with an idea for a consumer safety product. She had worked out the method by hand, one investigation at a time, and she had never written a line of code.
She built the product herself with AI, and she made every product decision. I coached her on the parts that sink first-time builders: the architecture, a running list of technical debt, and a plan for hardening security before real users arrive.
Seven months after her first investigation she opened a private beta.
Community
The rooms I help keep, and two I want to start.
The Dojo
A practice lab I run every Monday at The Thinking Spot, the science-first bookstore in Wayzata founded by my wife, Rima. It has met every week since January 2026. Small groups learn by making: coding with AI, 3D printing, laser cutting, Arduino. It has grown into a tech club, and ventures have started there.
Mentoring people in their 60s and 70s
Most AI help goes to the young. I also work with people who have decades of judgment and want to build with these tools. Unblocking people is my favorite part of the work.
A book club and a book festival
I take part in the store's "What's Next" book club, and I lead sponsorship and moderate panels for the Minnesota STEM Book Festival, including its AI panels.
A non-technical dojo
The same practice-lab idea for people who don't build software: writing, deciding, leading and learning with AI, side by side.
A Medici gathering
New ideas come where fields meet. I want to bring together people from science, business, the arts and the trades in one room, the way the Medici once did, without the ill-gotten wealth.
What I read
I've shared books in public for more than a decade, on learning and the brain, systems and complexity, judgment, software craft, the commons, and the natural world. A few that shaped how I work:
Wicked Problems
Guru Madhavan
An engineer's guide to problems that won't hold still. I reviewed it, and I highly recommend it.
Range
David Epstein
A long-time favorite. It makes the case for exploring broadly before going deep.
How We Learn
Stanislas Dehaene
It changed how I think about attention, curiosity, mistakes and sleep in learning.
Scale
Geoffrey West
One of the most important books of our time for anyone who builds or leads.
Team of Teams
Stanley McChrystal
How to lead when the world is too complex to plan. One of my most highlighted books.
The Importance of Being Educable
Leslie Valiant
Our strength is the ability to learn and adapt, a point lost in most of the AI hype.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Indigenous wisdom and science together, teaching reciprocity and gratitude as a daily practice.
Right Kind of Wrong
Amy Edmondson
A must-read that recasts failure as a tool for growth.
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander
The root of software patterns, and a good study for design thinking.
Biomimicry
Janine Benyus
It led me to teach biomimicry in my graduate software architecture course.
Infectious Generosity
Chris Anderson
Generosity spreads, and it gives leaders an edge. Every leader should read it.
The rest of the shelf
- A Thousand Brains — Jeff Hawkins
- An Immense World — Ed Yong
- Appreciative Inquiry — David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
- Atomic Habits — James Clear
- Between Us — Batja Mesquita
- Birth of the Chaordic Age — Dee Hock
- Blockchain Revolution — Don Tapscott
- Brain Rules — John Medina
- Bullshit Jobs — David Graeber
- Bursts — Albert-László Barabási
- Collapse — Jared Diamond
- Creating Your Dojo — Dion Stewart and Joel Tosi
- Deep Medicine — Eric Topol
- Democratizing SaaS — Feyzi Fatehi
- Ecocivilization — Jeremy Lent
- Emotional — Leonard Mlodinow
- Faceted Search — Daniel Tunkelang
- Framers — Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
- Friends — Robin Dunbar
- Good Thinking — David Robert Grimes
- Guns, Germs, and Steel — Jared Diamond
- Hidden Brain — Shankar Vedantam
- How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
- Incorruptible — Eric Ries
- Linked — Albert-László Barabási
- Notes on the Synthesis of Form — Christopher Alexander
- Object Thinking — David West
- Planta Sapiens — Paco Calvo
- Project UnLonely — Jeremy Nobel
- Raving Fans — Ken Blanchard
- Redesigning AI — Daron Acemoglu (ed.)
- Refactoring to Patterns — Joshua Kerievsky
- Six Degrees — Duncan Watts
- Six Thinking Hats — Edward de Bono
- Slack — Tom DeMarco
- Slow Productivity — Cal Newport
- Soulful — David Espindola
- Sources of Power — Gary Klein
- Stolen Focus — Johann Hari
- Subliminal — Leonard Mlodinow
- Sync — Steven Strogatz
- Taming Text — Grant Ingersoll
- The Art of Rest — Claudia Hammond
- The Atomic Human — Neil D. Lawrence
- The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- The C Programming Language — Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
- The Cold Start Problem — Andrew Chen
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs
- The Elegant Solution — Matthew E. May
- The Element — Ken Robinson
- The First Shots — Brendan Borrell
- The Great Mental Models — Shane Parrish
- The Ideological Brain — Leor Zmigrod
- The Intelligent Organization — Megan C. Starkey
- The Master Algorithm — Pedro Domingos
- The Serengeti Rules — Sean B. Carroll
- The Shark's Paintbrush — Jay Harman
- The Talent Code — Daniel Coyle
- The Usefulness of the Useless — Nuccio Ordine
- Think Like a Commoner — David Bollier
- Thrive — Ravi Bapna and Anindya Ghose
- Tiny Experiments — Anne-Laure Le Cunff
- Upshift — Ben Ramalingam
- Upstream — Dan Heath
- User Story Mapping — Jeff Patton
- Willful Blindness — Margaret Heffernan
Bring me something ambitious
I take on a small number of engagements, and each one draws on all of this.