Stewardship of Operational Knowledge – On Finally Documenting What I Know A personal reflection on the transition from hiding to documenting. The Silence For 20 years, I kept quiet about what I knew. I had the knowledge. I saw the patterns. I understood things that only emerge from sustained operational exposure in federal disaster response,…
Why Mislabeling Group Types Breaks Decisions People use “team” and “committee” as if they mean the same thing. They do not. A team is built for shared outcomes. A committee is built to manage competing interests. Confusing them creates conflict, delays, and sometimes failure. I learned this during a trip to the Hubbard Brook Experimental…
Field Note: We moved into a 230-year-old farmhouse. I’m still learning what that means. The house keeps teaching me things about systems, maintenance, and what it means to be responsible for infrastructure you didn’t build but are expected to pass forward. This is what I’ve learned so far about stewardship, mostly from making mistakes and…
Stop Presenting, Start Guiding: How To Use Story Patterns To Drive Behavior Change When I started doing more video and training work inside government, I realized something important. The hardest part was not cameras.It was not editing.It was not even nervous talent. It was this: I could give people accurate information and they still would…
Why Amateurs Need A Safe Container To Perform Under Pressure, aka Psychological Safety Is A Production Asset. Before AI clipping tools, before everyone had a 4K camera in their pocket, the hardest part of government video was not gear. It was people. Executives were worried about looking foolish.Staff were worried about saying the wrong thing.Both…
Context:I wrote the original version of this right after coming back from Hurricane Florence, working inside a very mixed group of agencies, contractors, and mission partners. On the org chart, everyone lived in neat vertical silos.In the room, we were a temporary coalition that had to act like a single team under time pressure. That…
Before AI, before everyone had a 4K camera in their pocket, video inside government felt risky and mysterious. Executives worried about looking foolish.Scientists worried about oversimplifying their work.Comms teams worried about policy, branding, and accessibility. And everybody avoided the camera. That was the environment at the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 when I decided to…
“Proudly Maintained By Mike E.” On a site visit of Hoover Dam, I noticed a small plaque on one of the alternators that said “Proudly Maintained By Mike E.” It has been living in my head as a systems principle ever since. The plaque that explained the whole systemthe Hoover Dam is an easy place…
In late 2005, in places like Bay St. Louis on the Mississippi coast, I learned the hard way that trust and sovereignty mattered more than any federal logo on a badge. The backdrop: a coast that had already paid Hurricane Katrina did not hit every community the same way. New Orleans dominated the headlines, and…
A field note on responsibility outrunning authority when the system breaks and the mission does not. In April 2010, the Iceland ash cloud grounded flights across Europe. It also turned a routine civil-military engagement into a test of whether I could actually deliver when the system fell apart. The backdrop: former Warsaw Pact, new realities…
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Anthony Veltri · Enterprise Architect (Interoperability + Governance) · Designing decision infrastructure for cross-boundary ecosystems. · Introductions