The record
Classically trained.
Deliberately unattached.
Lean, Six Sigma, process engineering, strategy planning and deployment - I am trained in all of it. What has actually produced results is remembering that tools and frameworks are exactly that. The human element and the willingness to bend the framework are what make operational excellence work.
The work has been hands-on, and at scale: one of the world's largest asset managers, a top-ten US bank, the biggest personal-lines insurer in the country, a global climate-control manufacturer, a major independent wealth manager and a global payments platform. Over $100 million in cost savings and cost avoidance, hundreds of thousands of efficiency hours, and meaningful improvements to how the work feels for the people doing it. Alongside that: more than 2,000 people trained and close to 500 coached through to certification.
We are here to solve people's problems. Everything else is a means to that.
That conviction has a shape. I built HEAR - Human Experience Architecture and Research - as the human-centric flavor of the Six Sigma methodologies, and presented it as the Four Phases of HEARing in a MoreSteam webcast. It is also where ashy wins comes from: the small early result that buys you the credibility to attempt the large one.
Where AI fits
Same discipline. New leverage.
AI does not replace process work - it exposes it. Point a model at a broken process and you get a faster broken process. The mapping, the measurement and the honest conversation about what the work is actually for all still have to happen first.
I spoke on this at Financial Executives International's AI Case Studies Conference in 2025, and I write about it in an ongoing series. The most recent piece argues that AI has compressed the timeline for trying things, which mostly means we are failing faster, because the human dynamics underneath have not changed at all.
Doesn't AI replace what you do? No. I was never solving a process problem. I was solving a human problem.
What I keep writing up is the unglamorous half: what I build, what breaks, and what turns out to be hype. The places AI genuinely removes toil, and the places it quietly adds rework.
Six Sigma Songs
The part nobody else does.
I write the concepts as songs. Eight to ten of them sit inside MoreSteam's Six Sigma curriculum, where people studying for their belts learn the material from them. These are the previews.
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Gemba Walk0:42 · MoreSteam preview -
Standard Work0:49 · MoreSteam preview -
Value Added Flowchart0:44 · MoreSteam preview
Full versions are part of MoreSteam's Yellow and Green Belt training.
Ways to work together
Three doors.
Rates depend on scope. Tell me what you are trying to change and I will come back with the most honest estimate I can.
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Speaking
Conferences, webinars, lunch & learns.
- 2024 keynote - UC Santa Barbara's first Process Paradise
- Featured speaker - Best Practices in Operational Excellence 2024, on a program with the Lean Enterprise Institute, GM and Medtronic
- Speaker - AI Case Studies Conference 2025, Financial Executives International
- Webcasts - Trust Equity: The Human Side of OE; AI in Process Improvement
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Content & training
Educational content creation and custom training programs.
- Higher-ed Six Sigma Yellow Belt - Wabash College
- E-learning music and video - MoreSteam Yellow & Green Belt
- Podcast - Quality Time (Gemba Walk)
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Consulting
Project support, strategy development, company mapping.
- Closed to new engagements right now
- Ask anyway if the problem is unusual
- Scoped case by case, never by the hour
Booking
Tell me what you need.
Rates and estimates depend on the type of engagement. I will reply with the best estimate I can, based on the scope you describe.
Elsewhere
The rest of the work.
The same process brain shows up in the music, on the track, and in a rap album you can actually play.