Competent Enough to Know What to Learn Next The Photo Distribution Problem There’s a GoPro time lapse somewhere in my files showing (found it!) three hours of work compressed into ninety seconds. My wife and I are standing over a drafting table that used to belong to Princeton University (still has the brass plate), spreading…
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…
Most organizations are very good at delivering projects. They are much less good at deciding which projects should exist in the first place. You can hit the holy trinity of project managementon time, on budget, in scopeand still ship something that does not move the needle for your customers or your mission. In medicine, prescribing…
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…
Fair To Who: How Panel Interviews Miss The People You Need Most (Field note context) Field note context When I say ‘best operators,’ I mean people whose value shows up once they are inside complex, stakeholder-heavy systems, not people who are necessarily the best talkers in a one-way audition. Panels are quite good at finding…
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…
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…
High tempo systems live or die on one simple question: “Which data do we treat as the truth when opinions differ?” If everyone has their own private truth, you do not have a system. You have a debate club with better screens. In my world, that has shown up as: In an air picture context,…
If you are responsible for a high-tempo mission system, especially one that spans nations and organizations, what are you actually hiring for when you put someone in charge of the technology stack You are not hiring a gadget person. You are hiring someone who can live with incomplete pictures, uneven partners and unforgiving timelines, and…
Staging areas are where you execute, not where you invent trust.
When partners first meet in the parking lot of a disaster, they bring trucks, supplies, clipboards and logos. What they usually do not bring is a shared playbook.
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Anthony Veltri · Enterprise Architect (Interoperability + Governance) · Designing decision infrastructure for cross-boundary ecosystems. · Introductions