WELCOME “Engineering Better Outcomes”

Every business has a mission. From exploring the stars to providing healthcare here on Earth, from making the best chicken curry in town, to helping build homes in an impoverished land, every organization has a mission. There are thousands of businesses that can help you fulfill your mission. That is not our task.

We, instead, help you prevent those things you never intended to do. The aircraft accident, the injured patient, the dissatisfied customer: these are the things we help you manage, particularly as they relate to our shared human fallibility.

Systems engineering, human factors, law – these are our core competencies. We work, quite simply, to help keep our clients from inadvertently harming their customers. We do our work in recognition of three unequivocal constraints.

First, we live in a complex world with many overlapping values. A healthcare provider, for example, faces competing values of access, safety, privacy and dignity to name only a few. No one value supersedes the other – they instead act in tension. Safety can be noble, but it cannot overly impinge on access. Privacy is important, but it cannot overly impinge on safety.

Second, we live in a resource constrained world. The duty of management is to be good stewards and spend resources that minimize the risk of harm, across many held values.

Third, the components of socio-technical systems, namely humans, are inherently fallible. They will predictably make mistakes and predictably drift into risky behavioral choices.

Perfect human beings are not in the cards. We must design around our inescapable human fallibility. We chase the good outcomes, trying to avoid the bad – in a world of competing values, resource limitations, and fallible human beings. Perfection at the system cannot be the expectation – we are sometimes going to fail. That said, we can all generally do much better than we do today. That’s our mission – to help our customers minimize the risk of inadvertently harming their customers. Whether a regulator, a commercial entity, or a not-for-profit – all can do better. It is our mission to help: from the single client to public policy, we exist to help make the world a better place to live.