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 purely on 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, use of digital technology. I had the rare opportunity in the Ford Process Leadership Group to work with W. Edwards Deming and learn systems thinking from Peter Senge's circle. Some Ford Leaders even moved to Sloane School to continue this organizational learning work with Senge at MIT. Those foundations in statistical process control, learning organizations, and systems dynamics still underpin everything I do.

I'm an engineer by training. So, I was fortunate to do cutting edge work resulting in innovative solutions like my US Patent 5,752,737 for structural vehicle safety design. We were often recognized for our work with quality awards at Ford like process innovation in CAE integration and structural durability. My Scrum indoctrination really came directly from Ken Rubin when I asked him to train our software teams in team level agile. In those Agile framework scaling years, I needed to get into deep methods-analysis mode — I consumed their approaches by getting trained up through their self-declared certification layers such as the SAFe SPCT program, and trainings in LeSS and Nexus. In 2017 I even felt the urge to go re-study the nuances of Lean, when the opportunity to train again with one of the greats — Peter Gaa, Shingo lineage — crossed my path.

Certifications and credentials are often useful, but for me really just proof that you showed up. What I think matters most 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 in big consulting, I have had the opportunity to work on a diverse range of engagements with clients at massive global enterprise scale on a much broader range of industries. Through these experiences I've come to recognize that the principles that enable improvement 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 continue my 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 get to do two things I love — travel the world and take on new challenges with new people at new clients to help fix their FLOW.