The Emotional Architect

Engineering the human variable for technical excellence

You can engineer the perfect process, the flawless design, the elegant system. But if you ignore the human variable, your system will fail.

  • High-capacity leaders absorbing everyone else’s dysfunction.

  • Emotional labor disguised as “collaboration.”

  • Brilliant people burning out while fragile egos steer the ship.

The Emotional Architect offers a new framework for technical leaders: treat the human system with the same rigor, precision, and accountability as the technical one. This book equips leaders to:

  • Make invisible work visible through boundary design.

  • Stop carrying broken systems that should be redesigned.

  • Refuse emotional labor dumps while still leading effectively.

  • Create sustainable excellence without sacrificing themselves.

Drawing on three decades as Chief Engineer in aerospace — including leadership on NASA’s Orion Program — I’ve learned that the difference between failure and mission success is not just technical design, but human system architecture.

This isn’t a book about “soft skills.” It’s about engineering leadership differently: systematic, unapologetic, and built to scale.

If you’ve ever felt like the shock absorber for your team’s dysfunction, this book will give you the tools to stop being the hidden system and start building systems that work.

Coming Early 2026

What leaders are saying

  • ✽

    It was really cool for me to read this and know how literally close to home it is- how I work in those same high bays, perform similar tasks, encounter very similar challenges, and know a lot of the same people you do (though your artistic license worked, I have no clue who the real identities are of the people you talk about).

    I’ve read many leadership and self-help type books, and this work is very much on par with the best of them in terms of content, style, and impact.

    - R. Welch

  • ✽

    The way you conduct yourself and desire growth is so evident in the way you have approached your entire life, but how incredible it was to read the pages on the way you excel in the workforce and how bring others along side you to do the same. The theme/phrases that kept coming up when I was reading your book was: “That was incredible humility”, “The reader will find such value in this story she shared”, “That was vulnerable, and wow can I relate.” 

    - E. Prescott

  • ✽

    I was reading this and kept having to stop and reflect on how Lisa’s stories show up in my own experience. The “Playbooks” in each chapter are so helpful for thinking through how I might handle human interactions in my own technical leadership.

    - C. Partridge