The thesis
Capability is a system parameter
Systems don't fail because the technology breaks. They fail because someone couldn't do what the system required.
Every complex system depends on what people can do inside it. That dependency is measurable, designable, and too important to leave to chance. Capability lives at the interface between what a system requires of its operators and the impact the system has to deliver — and when that interface is wrong, the gap may originate in human development, in system design, in organizational performance, or in the interaction among them. Telling those apart is itself a measurement and engineering problem.
Casebook, First Edition, August 2026
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Working paper — draft
Show Your Work
A curve can turn a 40 into a B. A transcript can certify a degree. A benchmark can certify a model. None can tell you whether the learner, the clinician, or the operator can actually do the thing when the stakes are real — only a demonstration can.
The argument that professional competence has to be measured by functional behavior — a work sample scored against a real task — not inferred from a grade, a credit hour, or a test score. The same standard doubles as a fairer gate: let the demonstration, not the pedigree, decide.
Draft, August 2026, with James Diamond
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Position paper
Capability, Not Content
"More training" is the answer we reach for when we have not asked what capability is actually missing, or where in the system it lives.
You cannot lecture a pilot out of a single-sensor design, audit a hospital into safety with a metric staff have learned to game, or brief a crew past a manning shortfall. When the diagnosis is wrong, the intervention is theater.
Commentary — in press
Calibrate the Scientists, Not Just the Microscopes
Measurement discipline belongs on the people running an experiment as much as on the instruments they run it with.
BRAIN CONNECTS, in press
Method
When a negative result is the result
"Not like this, not yet" is a result a capability engineer must be able to deliver.
Reading a constraint space accurately enough to recognize that external, non-technical factors have narrowed it past the point where a capability goal is realistic is itself a valid project outcome — documented, defended, and used to guide the work. It is not a failure.
Method
Agency as a design constraint
Capability without agency is automation.
The goal is not operators who comply with a system specification but operators who can perform, adapt, and lead when the system encounters conditions it was not designed for.