Making Better Systems

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Latest — 16 Jan 2026

Who Holds the Pen? Why AI Agents Need a Manager, Not Just a Manual

Today, in our rush to kill backlogs and modernize services, we are liquidating the human loop. We see a win when New Jersey uses AI to sign up 100,000 kids for summer benefits, or when an agency uses a chatbot to deflect thousands of calls. These are genuinely good

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What people get wrong about teambuilding

Culture builds teams, leadership with foresight manage organizations that support strong teams. Teams don't build themselves.

The risks of living in a snowglobe casino

Prediction markets let people place bets on real-world events, including geopolitical ones, often using knowledge most of us will never see.

Ambiguity as a product

Reading this story in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend about surrogacy & birth tourism, led me to thinking about how ambiguity skews incentives that might not otherwise be possible, whether we're talking about illegal hotels, non-local companies flooding streets with scooters, illegal cabs or grey-area sectors

What the National Design Studio Will Learn the Hard Way

Elizabeth Goodspeed's latest op-ed in the Architect's Newspaper about the White House's so-called national design studio gets one thing exactly right: the problem being solved here isn’t real. There is no unmet demand for government to feel like an Apple Store. What people

Delivery Is a Visibility Problem

I’ve been a Toronto Blue Jays fan since I was eleven, so the past few weeks watching them rise from last place in 2024 to the World Series finalist in 2025 has been a wild ride. As a sports fan, it’s so easy to critique the decisions of

Design As Repair

Remarks From IxDA Oslo, September 9, 2025 Note: These are the prepared remarks I wrote for my talk at IxDA Oslo. In the end, I spoke more extemporaneously, but I thought at least I could share my notes to give you something closer to what I was getting at in

On Public Mechanics (Or Why I’m Done Talking About “Civic Tech”)

I’ve spent the past decade mostly in the public sector, with one foot always planted in tech. I see both sides. But the thing that actually matters is delivery. You have to ship things that work for real people. Full stop. Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of

The Bureaucratic Banality of Andor

N.B. There are probably inadvertent spoilers in here if you’ve never seen the show, but this is written for people who might be wondering what all the hype is about and frankly, you’ll still need to watch it for any of that to make sense. So I

Windows Don't Reopen

In 2010, Portland's last professional baseball game looked like an intermission. Fifteen years later, the team is gone and the window never reopened. Delivery depends on recognizing when capability, mandate, and trust align—and acting before the pieces scatter.