Welcome to Insights — my space for publishing ideas, research, and reflections on technical leadership and the human systems that make or break it.
Here you’ll find:
Publications — peer-reviewed papers and conference presentations that form the foundation of The Emotional Architect.
Fresh perspectives — monthly reflections that expand on themes from my mentoring, book development, and speaking work.
Event recaps and updates — highlights from IEEE Aerospace Conference, WE Local, Women in Manufacturing, and other conferences where I share this framework in action.
I publish here to do what I ask of technical leaders: make the invisible visible. Human-systems failures often hide beneath the surface until they derail the mission. My goal is to surface the patterns, name them, and show you how to engineer better ones.
The Lizard on the Launchpad: What to do When the Call Goes the Other Way
You made your case, and the decision went the other way. The hard part is what happens the next morning, when committing to a call you disagreed with slides quietly into carrying its cost yourself. This is the story of a staffing argument that went against me early on Orion, and what it taught me about the difference between supporting a decision and disappearing into it.
The Lizard on the Launchpad: Why Technical Disagreement Feels Like an Existential Threat
"Technical leadership isn't about winning an argument; it’s about completing a data set."
We often view business decisions that accept technical risk as a defeat. But business leaders are looking at a map that includes variables—burn rates, customer trust, and strategic survival—that don't have an answer section in an appendix.
Once you place your technical truth on the table, your role changes. You move from the gatekeeper who stops the car to the navigator who helps the driver avoid the potholes.
The real thing
I've been away for a while.
Artemis II has consumed most of my bandwidth for the last several months — the simulated mission events, the long days, the kind of focus that doesn't leave much room for anything else. My website went stale. LinkedIn went quiet. Publishing my book slipped down the priority list. I've also been rehabbing a long-time knee and shoulder injury as I ramp up my weightlifting, and working hard to protect my sleep. Something had to give, and I made a deliberate choice about what it would be. This isn’t an apology for that (I think emotionally strong leaders apologize too often, but that’s a different post. I'm mentioning it because it's relevant to what I want to talk about.
The Evolution of a Book Cover: When Art Meets Marketing
I have four versions of my book cover sitting in a folder on my desktop. Every time I open it, I feel this little pang - not quite regret, but something adjacent to it. Maybe it's nostalgia for versions that felt more me, or maybe it's just the sting of learning that publishing a book means making your deeply personal work palatable for public consumption.
Enabling Awesome: A Study of Technical Leadership
Paper published at the 2024 IEEE Aerospace Conference in Big Sky, MT
Beyond Technical Excellence: Engineering the Human Variable
Paper published at the upcoming 2026 IEEE Aerospace Conference in Big Sky, MT