FAQ

Yep, well, showed up years ago in a party dress. Party hasn't started yet.

The work on this site is built on decades of research in Naturalistic Decision Making, the field that studies how skilled professionals think and decide in complex conditions, with incomplete information, and the usual rules don't fit. That research is rigorous, well-established, and largely unknown outside the communities that produced it. The argument here is conditions those researchers studied in specific high-pressure contexts now describe a Tuesday afternoon for most people. Parents navigating their teenager's digital life. Workers reskilling as automation reshapes their industry. Leaders making consequential decisions with incomplete information under time pressure. The research exists. The tools exist. Most people have never been offered them, and don’t know they can ask.

That's the party. It's coming. Some people are already asking the right questions, which may be why you're here. I’m doing the happy dance.

One of my pet peeves in instructional design is the dancing hotdog that creates the feeling of meaning without adding any. I've spent enough time studying how people learn to be genuinely annoyed by that. I’ve also spent time studying metaphor and how people use it to make sense of experiences. Humans think in metaphor. It's cognitive infrastructure. Each piece of art on the main pages is a publicly available classical painting, picked to correspond with a process in this framework. The design team has given each piece a contemporary treatment, but no dancing hotdogs.

Thinking. Exploring. Sensemaking. Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog — Caspar David Friedrich, 1818 (About page)

Friedrich painted this at the height of German Romanticism, when artists were wrestling seriously with what it means to stand at the edge of what can be known. This guy isn't lost and he’s on solid ground. What's ahead is just obscured, and he's chosen to stay and look rather than turn back. That's sensemaking. The moment just before clarity, when the fog is still the fog and you're willing to stand there.

Insight. Breakthrough. Archimedes — Domenico Fetti, 1620 (Contact page)

Everyone knows the eureka. The workbench is what’s important. Fetti painted Archimedes mid-problem, bent over his diagrams, deeply concentrating. The insight was sudden. This preparation was difficult. If you're reaching out, something has probably been sitting with you for a while. Good. That's usually where the real work starts.

Enlightenment. Truth Seeking. Disciplined Doubt. Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man — Jacob Jordaens (Services page)

Diogenes of Sinope was, by most accounts, difficult. He slept in a large ceramic jar, said exactly what he thought to anyone who would listen, and once walked through Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lamp while looking, he explained, for an honest man. The stunt was provocative. Diogenes believed virtue had to be lived. Philosophy was something you demonstrated in how you moved through the world. Rigorously. Inconveniently. Without flattering anyone. His ideas passed to his student Crates, then to Zeno, who formalized them into what became Stoicism. Carrying a lamp in daylight was absurd. It was also the most honest way he knew to say this should be easier to find than it is.

A moat is what makes a position defensible. Credentials are a price of entry for a position. The Career Moat is built from ten competencies that develop through intentional practice and compound across a career: sensemaking, critical thinking, complex problem solving, strategic thinking, collaboration, communication, coaching and development, learning agility, professional agency, and technology and AI fluency. These are person-level capabilities. They travel with you. They also sit squarely in the negative space of AI, which is the human shape that becomes visible precisely where the machine runs out. That's the moat.

Read More about the Career Moat >

Most leadership development programs address symptoms: communication workshops for what may be a framing problem, time management class for what is actually a competing-priorities problem, team-building offsite for what is actually a shared sensemaking failure. This work goes to the mechanism of what is really happening cognitively when someone freezes under pressure, misreads a situation, or can't coordinate across perspectives. The intervention fits the actual problem instead of the presenting label.

The framework is grounded in Naturalistic Decision Making, the research field that studies how skilled professionals really think and decide under pressure in real-world conditions. In the wild, not in laboratories. In burning buildings, power control rooms, operating theaters, combat situations. Researchers spent decades in those environments figuring out what separates expert judgment from everyone else's.

What they found is experts don't deliberate through lists of options. They read situations, recognize patterns from experience, run a quick mental simulation of what might happen, and act on the first workable idea. They reframe when something doesn't fit. They name trade-offs. They commit to action before all the information is in, because waiting for certainty is itself a decision.

For a long time, that kind of thinking has been studied in specialists with years of training, institutional support, and environments with known risks. But the conditions that once defined those high-stakes settings of incomplete information, competing pressures, rapid change, decisions that ripple in unpredictable directions now describe any afternoon for most people.

The argument in this work, developed with colleague Michael Legatt and presented at the 2026 International Conference on Naturalistic Decision Making, is those expert thinking patterns are learnable. The five habits of Framing, Thinking Ahead, Thinking Together, Juggling Trade-Offs, and Deciding in the Wild are plain-language translations of the cognitive functions NDM researchers identified in high performers. They are grounded in five converging theoretical traditions: NDM itself, situated cognition, macrocognition, constructive-developmental theory, and systems thinking. The research case is rigorous. 

Some people are. They just aren't talking to each other yet.

The research behind this framework has been building for decades across fields that rarely cross-reference. Naturalistic Decision Making researchers have studied expert judgment under pressure since the 1980s. Cognitive scientists have been mapping how expertise develops. Economists have been distinguishing durable human capital from skills that depreciate. Organizational researchers have been documenting what psychological safety, sensemaking, and coordination failure really look like in practice. Each field has part of the answer. None of them has been talking to the career ecosystem of the students, parents, employers, and educators who need it most.

Meanwhile, the problems this work addresses keep getting mislabeled. The employee who freezes under pressure gets sent to compliance training. The leader who can't navigate competing priorities gets a time management class. The team that can't coordinate under pressure gets a team-building offsite. When the problem doesn't have a name, it doesn't get the right solution. It just keeps happening, reframed as something else.

The conversation is catching up. Zack Kass, who built the commercial case for large language models from inside OpenAI, is publicly arguing that the most important career question right now is what the machine can't do, and that the answer looks a lot like this. Neal Katyal won a case that legal scholars called impossible, and went on TED to explain that what won wasn't AI; it was reframing, listening, and stillness. Seth Godin is drawing the distinction between problems, which have solutions, and situations, which require a different kind of thinking entirely. The World Economic Forum has been publishing the employer data for years. NACE tracks the gap between what employers need and what graduates can do. It's a 30-point gap on critical thinking. The party is starting. Some people are already asking the right questions, which may be why you're here.

People can't ask for what they don't know they're missing. The problems this work addresses are real, chronic, and exhausting; poor decisions under pressure, coordination breakdowns, leaders who can't navigate competing priorities, teams that freeze when the situation changes faster than the procedure. But none of those problems have the right label. They show up as communication problems, compliance gaps, time management issues, team dynamics. The presenting symptom gets the intervention. The underlying deficit keeps producing symptoms.

The deeper problem isn't resistance. Resistance would at least be a conversation. It's that the question itself doesn't register as askable. You can't demand something you don't know exists.

There's also a structural reason the tools stayed out of reach. The research behind this framework developed inside specialist communities; scientists studying how firefighters read burning buildings, how military commanders act on incomplete intelligence, how intensive care nurses catch deterioration before the monitors show it. The findings stayed where the funding was. They were never translated into something a working professional, a parent, a student, or a community leader could use. The research is rigorous and the gap it describes is significant. Most of the people living inside that gap have never heard of it.

What's changed is that the conditions those researchers were studying in high-stakes specialist environments now describe ordinary professional life. Incomplete information, competing pressures, rapid change, decisions that ripple in unpredictable directions is not a crisis scenario. It’s everyday now. The tools exist. The translation is what's been missing.

Both are true, and which one you need depends on where you are.

The framework is designed to be transparent. The five habits are named and described. The ten competencies have observable indicators that are behavioral descriptions of what each one looks like in practice at different levels of development. The learning units are real resources you can find, read, and apply. Nothing here is proprietary magic that only works if administered by a credentialed practitioner. That's intentional. The argument of this work is that these capabilities are learnable by anyone willing to do the work. A framework that requires a guide to interpret defeats that purpose.

But the hardest part of building better judgment is accurately seeing your own clearly. The Dreyfus model that underpins this work describes a well-documented phenomenon: at the early stages of skill development, people often can't see what they can't yet do. The novice doesn't know what the expert is noticing, which makes self-assessment at that stage genuinely unreliable. A guide can compress this timeline.

There's also the problem of searching under the streetlight because the light is better there. Left to our own devices, we tend to practice the things we're already good at. We reach for familiar explanations. People love to build on strengths, but that is limiting. We don't naturally seek the disconfirming evidence, the harder reframe, the situation that exposes the gap. A guide creates productive difficulty and should be able to give constructive feedback.

So, you can start alone. The resources here are designed to be used. My first recommendation is to build and use more mental models and become best friends with systems thinking. But if something important is at stake like a leadership role, career transition, an organization that needs to perform differently a guide can target and streamline the process aligned with your needs and priorities.