The short version

I study how organizations build complex products — and what stops them from doing it well.

My career started at Ford Motor Company in the UK in 1976 — designing, developing, and delivering cars and trucks. In the early 1980s I left England, first to South Africa, then to the United States, and eventually to Australia, working in automotive engineering across four continents. For those first fifteen years, my focus was the product itself: structures, durability, vehicle safety.

That shifted in the early 1990s. Back at Ford in the US, my attention moved from building the product to finding better ways to build it — process improvement, systems thinking, organizational learning. I had the rare opportunity in Ford Process Leadership Group to work with W. Edwards Deming and learn systems thinking from Peter Senge's circle. Some Ford Leaders moved to Sloane School to continue the work with Senge at MIT. That foundation in statistical process control, learning organizations, and systems dynamics still underpins everything I do.

I'm an engineer by training. So I got to do work resulting in innovative solutions like my US Patent 5,752,737 for structural vehicle safety design. We were recognized for our work with quality awards at Ford like process innovation in CAE integration and structural durability. I learned Lean from Peter Gaa (Shingo lineage), Scrum directly from Ken Rubin. In those Agile framework scaling years, I consumed their approach's by getting trained up through their self-declared layered certification system to an SPCT.

For me credentials are just proof that you showed up. What really matters is what you learned or Deming would say to us "what profound knowledge have you gained?". And what I've learned across nearly five decades — spanning automotive, aerospace, medical devices, high-tech and clean energy — is that the same patterns recur everywhere. Organizations get stuck between capability plateaus. The blockers are almost always organizational, rarely technical. And flow — the unimpeded movement of value through a development system — is the single best indicator of health.

Since my years at Accenture, I have had the opportunity to work on a diverse range of engagements with clients at massive global enterprise scale. I've come to recognize that these principles aren't confined to any one industry or to any organization of any given size. The craft of flow applies to any complex system — automotive, aerospace, medical devices, technology, defense, energy. The physics of how work moves through organizations is universal. The specifics change. The patterns don't.

Today I work in regulated product development, helping organizations navigate the intersection of systems engineering, compliance standards (for automotive that's standards such as ASPICE, ISO 26262, ISO 21434), and the transformation to software-defined products.

I'm based in Naples, Florida and travel the world taking on new challenges with new clients to fix their FLOW.