Talk Inventory & Abstracts

Talk Ideas: Systems, Diagnostics, and Seeing What Others Miss

A working catalogue of talk ideas you can propose to tech conferences, leadership events, and meetups. Each session is grounded in your real experience across software, systems, construction forensics, medical advocacy, and a lifetime of obsessive reading.

Signature / Keynote Track
Keynote Systems Thinking

01. The Diagnostic Mindset: How to See What Others Miss

Most teams treat problems as isolated events. Diagnostic thinkers treat them as symptoms of deeper system behavior. This keynote explores a cross-domain approach—software, construction, medicine— showing how to consistently see patterns other people miss.

  • Shift from event-thinking to system-thinking
  • Turn failures into structured signal
  • Become the “person people call when it’s on fire”
Keynote Failure

02. Failure Has a Pattern: What Engineering, Medicine, and Construction Taught Me About Systems

After enough outages, medical misdiagnoses, and structural failures, you notice something uncanny: everything fails the same way. This talk extracts shared failure patterns across wildly different domains and demonstrates how to spot them early.

  • Recognize universal failure signatures
  • Detect early system drift
  • Implement proactive pattern guards
Keynote Org Design

03. How Systems Drift: The Silent Forces That Break Software, Teams, and Organizations

Most systems don’t explode—they drift. Quietly. Predictably. This talk explains systemic drift and shows how it mirrors the patterns documented by Perrow, Dekker, Taleb… and your own real world chaos.

  • Understand drift as inevitable
  • Map forces pushing systems toward degradation
  • Install drift-resistant processes
Keynote Problem-Solving

04. Seeing the Invisible: How to Diagnose a System You Don’t Understand Yet

Inherit a system you didn’t build? A codebase with no docs? A vendor whose explanation makes no sense? This talk teaches you how to rapidly build an accurate mental model using constraints, contradictions, and forensic reasoning.

  • Use invariants when everything else is unclear
  • Apply a “first 30 days” diagnostic framework
  • Communicate uncertainty with clarity
Keynote Cognitive Design

05. Your Brain Has Firmware: The Cognitive Architecture Behind Better Decisions

Tools and methods matter—but the “mental firmware” running the operator matters more. This talk unpacks cognitive architecture (Analytical, Input, Learner, Adaptability, Intellection) and how it shapes decision-making under pressure.

  • Understand your cognitive defaults
  • Adapt decisions to your strengths
  • Build complementary cognitive teams
Engineering & Architecture
Engineering Codebases

06. How to Read a Codebase Like a Detective

Don’t read code like documentation. Read it like a crime scene. This talk reveals how naming, folder structures, commit history, and tests expose the culture and risks behind the code.

  • Build a repeatable forensic reading strategy
  • Infer hidden risks through structure
  • Turn findings into refactoring that matters
Architecture Constraints

07. Architecture as a System of Constraints: Why Structure Beats Talent

Great architecture makes average developers consistently successful. This talk reframes architecture through constraints (like in modernist cooking and manufacturing).

  • Define architecture by constraints, not diagrams
  • Use constraints to eliminate entire categories of failure
  • Create systems where “mediocre choices” still lead to safety
Engineering Tech Debt

08. Tech Debt as a Signal: What Hidden Structures Tell You About Your Team

Tech debt is not laziness—it’s a fossil record of decisions, incentives, fear, and communication. Learn to read tech debt as behavioral evidence.

  • Separate strategic debt from pathological debt
  • Use debt to diagnose team dynamics
  • Transform debt conversations into learning
Systems Behavior

09. Why Your System Isn’t Broken—It’s Behaving Exactly As Designed

Incidents aren’t aberrations—they’re emergent behavior from constraints, incentives, and coupling. This talk shows how to redesign those forces.

  • Identify true systemic causes
  • Map emergent behavior
  • Create environments where the right outcome is the default
Cognitive Load Human Factors

10. Cognitive Load, Complexity, and the Human Limits of Engineering

Our systems evolved faster than the human brain. This talk blends cognitive science with engineering reality to show why overload happens—and how to fix it.

  • Decode cognitive load in real work
  • Spot hidden overload patterns
  • Adopt humane engineering practices
DevOps, SRE & Incidents
SRE Postmortems

11. Postmortems Are Autopsies: How to Actually Learn From Failure

Most postmortems are performance art. This talk restores them to their true function: truth-finding and systemic correction.

  • Run non-theatrical postmortems
  • Surface systemic contributors
  • Create permanent learning loops
DevOps Incentives

12. Why Systems Fail at 2 A.M.: The Hidden Incentives Behind Outages

Most outages are not technical—they’re incentive-driven. This talk unpacks the organizational threads behind 2 A.M. failures.

  • Identify incentive-driven incidents
  • Spot 2 A.M. risk factors early
  • Realign incentives for resilience
Leadership Crisis

13. Chaos, Uncertainty, and Adaptability: What Crises Teach About Engineering Leadership

Crisis doesn’t build character—it reveals architecture. This talk explores how leaders operate under pressure and incomplete information.

  • Recognize crisis-patterns in yourself
  • Use decision frameworks for uncertainty
  • Turn chaos into capability
Leadership & Teams
Leadership Patterns

14. Pattern Recognition for Leaders: How to See Problems Before They Manifest

This talk provides leaders with methods for detecting problems in culture, delivery, incentives, and team dynamics long before they surface.

  • Train early-warning perception
  • Differentiate signal from noise
  • Anticipate issues with less reactivity
Leadership Craft

15. The Culinary Engineer: What Cooking Teaches Us About Craft, Process, and Teamwork

From mise en place to brigade systems, professional kitchens offer profound lessons for engineering craft and team alignment.

  • Apply kitchen disciplines to software execution
  • Use mise en place as a metaphor for observability
  • Reframe engineering craft as practice, not talent
Leadership Decisions

16. Decision-Making Under Pressure: Lessons From Technology, Medicine, and Life

This talk blends real personal and professional crises to teach a grounded, practical approach to making decisions when stakes are high.

  • Use two-way vs. one-way door thinking correctly
  • Make decisions with incomplete information
  • Stabilize yourself under pressure
Data, AI & Reasoning
Data Causality

17. Causality for Engineers: What Judea Pearl Wanted You To Know

A distilled, practical walkthrough of Pearl’s causal diagrams and reasoning—applied directly to debugging, analytics, and experiments.

  • Understand causal graphs without jargon
  • Avoid common causal fallacies
  • Ask sharper questions about data
AI Uncertainty

18. From Noise to Signal: How to Reason in Uncertain, Messy Systems

Most real-world systems produce messy, ambiguous data. This talk combines Taleb, Pearl, and engineering reality into a usable mental model for reasoning under uncertainty.

  • Distinguish noise from real change
  • Use heuristics that stay honest about uncertainty
  • Communicate uncertainty confidently
Product Tooling

19. How to Build Tools That Reduce Cognitive Overload

Tools should lighten cognitive burdens—not add more interfaces and noise. This talk defines principles for building diagnostic, low-friction internal tools.

  • See tooling as cognitive infrastructure
  • Eliminate dashboard anti-patterns
  • Design tools people can actually use during stress
Story-Driven & Personal Arc
Story Systems

20. How a Broken Pool, a Medical Mystery, and 2,000 Books Taught Me to See Patterns

A narrative keynote connecting three parallel crises and showing how pattern recognition becomes a survival skill.

  • See cross-domain lessons from real life
  • Recognize your own pattern history
  • Understand complexity without fear
Books Thinking

21. My Whole Operating System Is Built Out of Books: A Personal Theory of Thinking

A hybrid talk about intellectual development—how a lifetime of reading across philosophy, science, systems, fiction, and cooking reshaped your mental architecture.

  • Design your own cognitive architecture
  • Identify “keystone books”
  • Upgrade your thinking, not your tasks
Leadership Failure

22. The Real Reason People Fail: What I Learned From 30 Years of Fixing Systems

Most failures aren’t caused by incompetence but by missing structure. This talk blends real stories with systems insights to show how people can be set up to succeed or doomed to fail.

  • Decode failure as structural, not personal
  • Identify structural gaps around you
  • Use small structural changes to fuel big outcomes
Specialty & Positioning
Complexity Mindset

23. Complexity Without Arrogance: A Framework for Thinking Clearly When Everything Is On Fire

Complexity attracts ego—but clarity requires humility. This talk provides a balanced, non-theatrical approach to reasoning in complex environments.

  • Avoid performative complexity
  • Build clear models without oversimplifying
  • Stay grounded when stakes are high
Leadership CTO

24. The Diagnostic CTO: Why You Need One (Even If You Hire Someone Else)

Some CTOs oversee technology. Some oversee teams. A diagnostic CTO sees failure patterns, alignment gaps, and systemic risk long before they appear. This talk defines the role.

  • Understand the diagnostic CTO archetype
  • Ask better questions across your org
  • Position yourself—or someone—to fill the role
Truth Reality Testing

25. How to See Through Excuses, Confusion, and Contradiction: A Practical Guide to Reality-Testing Claims

Everyone has a story—contractors, doctors, engineers, sales. Some are true. Some are sincere but wrong. This talk teaches you how to test reality gracefully.

  • Challenge explanations respectfully
  • Spot missing information and contradictions
  • Protect yourself from costly misdirection
Systems Incentives

26. Hidden Incentives: The Root Cause of Almost Every Failure

Follow the incentives and the failure becomes obvious. This talk synthesizes Taleb, Barnett, and your own diagnostic work to reveal the unseen forces shaping outcomes.

  • Read incentives like configuration files
  • Spot misalignment early
  • Design environments where success becomes natural