I am taking stock of what I have learned and practiced throughout my organizational development/program manager/product manager career (1988: HP, Unisys, DuPont, IBM, DuPont Consumer Health, Phena Partners, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Oracle, 2023--35 years of consulting and process work at the intersection of human tasks and system/process support of those tasks). I had the great good fortune to be exposed to Charlie Krone and Carol Sanford's work with DuPont business while I was a consultant in DuPont Corporate Plans and Corporate Marketing supporting leaders in several business units. I also had the experience (several times) of working with businesses and teams that chose not to work in a developmental way. My focus now is to understand what I need to unlearn and relearn--what and how I need to evolve with both the understanding of my history/path and my ongoing exploration of current business and organization conditions and situations. To that end, I have retired from a product management leadership role at Oracle as of March 2023 and have enrolled at the University of Delaware Biden School's Disaster Science and Management graduate program, where I am exploring business continuity and business opportunity in the face of the onslaught of natural and technological disasters we face in the world due to climate change and our estrangement from nature.

The role I aspire to play in my academic work is to be a theory/praxis resource for disaster planning and mitigation frameworks that include regenerative development processes, planetary boundary science/data, and modern economic frameworks (aka, donut economic models) for use in community comprehensive planning that is inclusive of hazard risk assessment, hazard mitigation, and disaster planning needs in the places that communities plan for and with.

A personal goal/aim is to have a lived sense of how to involve all community members in the planning described above, and to resource the ongoing development of those community members, working with places that are at risk for hazards and disasters.

Be willing to fully expose and address gaps in my development.

I need to get hands on, instead of studying and simulating and theorizing.

35 years of working to build business organizations, with several decades of seeing that building efficiency and access to knowledge/know-how does not bring success in business metrics or employee satisfaction. The work, instead, is to build agency, self-awareness, and self-confidence.

David Bohm-dialogue; Karl Wiig, Max Boisot, Dave Snowden-Knowledge Management; Russ Ackoff-decision-making/planning; Peter Block--community building; Carol Sanford--each book in her canon has been developmental for me; Kate Raworth, EF Schumacher-economics; Bill Reed-regenerative design; Terry Irwin, transition design; Arie DeGeus, The Living Company; the Batesons (Gregory, Mary Catherine, Nora), for Batesonian thinking/process; Joanna Macy-engaged buddhism; Aldo Leopold, land ethic; Tyson Yunkaporta and the Deakin Indigenous Knowledge Lab-an invitation to explore Indigenous process and thought; Donella Meadows-The Limits to Growth, Beyond the Limits; The Stockholm Resilience Centre, an introduction to planetary boundaries and overshoot.

I would tap Lovelock's Gaia framework to describe the planet as a complex living system of which we, humans, are a part, a mere part, not the apex part, and perhaps the keystone part of the living system in some nooks and crannies. Humans are part of the fabric of the planetary living system; they aren't running the show and they are currently exerting more negative, extractive influence than perhaps they should.