The Human Futures Design Lab is a research and practice platform I founded because I couldn't find the container I needed for the work I actually wanted to do.

I've spent most of my career in organizational systems — studying them, designing them, trying to fix them when they broke in interesting ways. My Ph.D. is in Organizational Systems. My research, going back to work with the International Systems Institute in the early 2000s, has focused on small group design conversations and the conditions that make human systems viable. Then I spent a couple of decades inside organizations, watching those conditions be systematically dismantled by speed, hierarchy, and the delusion that alignment is the same thing as agreement.

Human Futures Design Lab is where I'm putting that down on (digital) paper — and developing methodologies that other practitioners can use.

What we work on:

The lab's work sits at the intersection of three domains: human systems design, values systems architecture (in collaboration with 3C-Labs and Brian C. Jones), and Structured Dialogic Design. The thread running through all of it is agency — not as a buzzword, but as a design problem. What structural conditions allow individuals and groups to act with genuine autonomy and coherence, even under pressure? What has to be true about the quality of conversation before values-based decisions become possible?

These aren't rhetorical questions. They have answers, and those answers are what HFDL exists to develop and test.

Current work:

The Lab's current focus at the moment is the Community Futures Conversation (CFC) — a structured, four-session community design process developed in collaboration with practitioners of VEMaT™ and the Science of Dialogic Design. It's designed for organizations and communities facing decisions that require real participation, not performed consultation.

I also publish on these ideas at The Human Futures Design Lab Substack — which is, honestly, where the freshest thinking lives between the more formal work.

A note on what this is: Human Futures Design Lab is not a large organization. It's a focused research and practice platform — meaning the work is rigorous, the methodology is grounded in 50+ years of systems science, and I'm the one doing it. If that sounds like what you need, let's talk.