essays
A Fallow Season
A childhood cornfield explains a grown-up need: seasons of rebuilding. Career, relationships, information, body, each has its own soil, and each can be restored.
Systems and Soul
essays
KPI Kingdoms and How They Fall
From social platforms to public companies to universities, portable KPIs shape what leaders choose to build. Portable KPIs travel through institutions like a mental map. Over time, the map becomes policy, and the institution begins to confuse the dashboard for reality. That is legibility capture.
Systems and Soul
When AI Safety Becomes a Supply Chain
Calls for AI safety are rarely answered with system engineering. They are translated into procurement, vendors, and compliance layers—moves that increase fragility instead of care.
Systems and Soul
Flow Diagrams
Compressed system maps showing how incentives, signals, and structures actually move. Curated as they emerged.
Systems and Soul
When Incentives Break the System
A child’s drawing revealed something most systems obscure. Misaligned incentives quietly reshape work, culture, and infrastructure until drift becomes make-work and make-work becomes instability, not from malice, but from obedience to the wrong signals.
Systems and Soul
When the Wheel Turns Itself
Driving is one of the last places where strangers cooperate in real time. As autonomous cars rise, we risk losing the daily practice of attention, generosity, and shared responsibility that once shaped civic life.
Systems and Soul
When the Factories Left
When Michigan’s factories left, something else moved in. This essay traces how industrial collapse, policy incentives, and institutional drift reshaped entire communities—and why incarceration became the default replacement industry in parts of the Midwest.
Systems and Soul
Children Play · The First Compass
Children follow delight long before adults learn to override their inner compass. This essay explores how early orientation is lost through fear, incentives, and noise — and how relearning delight can restore coherence in work, identity, and life.
Systems and Soul
Integrating Demir’s Step 0 With Coleman’s Reconciliation Ladder: Pre-Contact Interventions in Family Estrangement for Clinicians
Most estrangement frameworks begin too late, assuming both sides can manage emotional contact. Shame and reactivity can block even skilled attempts. Demir Step 0 supplies the missing on-ramp sequence prior to use of Coleman’s reconciliation ladder.
Systems and Soul
The Broken Clock
A childhood lesson becomes a systems lesson: even unreliable sources contain truth if you know how to detect it. In a world of noise and low-signal systems, leadership depends on recognizing the moment something is right.
Systems and Soul
The Path Back
A missing teammate. A brittle room. A way back that was narrow, but real. A story about what it takes to return when standards have been broken.
Systems and Soul
Frontline Decides Everything
The frontline is the brand. One rude voice can cost churches trust, clinics patients, and companies millions. In modern systems, receptionists, schedulers, and agents quietly decide access, trust, and outcomes.