Leadership: Founder, Gregory Vigneaux, M.S.

Gregory Vigneaux is the Founder, Chief Consultant, and Design Officer at Operational Coherence. He holds a B.S. in Wildland Fire Management and an M.S. in Emergency Services Administration. He has worked on Hotshot Crews for the National Park Service and the United States Forest Service, as well as a National Park Service Type II Initial Attack Crew. The Type II Initial Attack Crew had a heavy focus on fuels management in the region and local unit through mechanical thinning, pile burning, and prescribed burning in the region and home unit. He earned the coveted Rookie of the Year Award on the United States Forest Service's Big Bear Hotshots and the Fuels & Ecology Award: Promoting Fire-Adapted Human Communities, National Park Service for work in Acadia National Park while working for the Cape Cod National Seashore Fire Crew. 

He has fought high-priority fires as a highly trained and conditioned firefighter working in remote locations with little logistical support in an arduous environment in twelve states from coast to coast, including Alaska and a heavy concentration in California, including wind-driven fires, wildland-urban interface fires, while the majority were in the backcountry. He primarily worked on chainsaw teams, which was his initial goal. Fires Gregory has fought have been integrated into textbooks for teaching subsequent generations of wildland firefighters. He has and continues to inspire and coach emerging wildland firefighters physically and as students of fire.

After working in wildfire, Gregory finished a Master of Science after earning the Woodrow Wilson Award, honors and was awarded the dean's list, summa cum laude.  Upon completion, he entered consulting and academia. During this time, Gregory has consulted for a wildfire innovation startup as well as an emergency management AI project and served as a graduate learning mentor, teaching, and research assistant in emergency management programs in the U.S. and New Zealand. He is the author of "A Design Philosophy for Emergency Management" in the Design for Emergency Management textbook. Gregory co-founded an emergency management startup, the Adapt Institute, based on work he completed on the "Next Generation Core Competencies for Emergency Management" project for FEMA.  Gregory led the startup using his keen and educated design approach to web, graphic, and content creation. He leveraged his versatile skill set, knowledge, and abilities to locate the write technologies for product creation and give presentations on the company to potential federal, private, and local partners.

A key accomplishment of Gregory's was being independently consulted for FEMA as an applied systems thinking expert, researcher, and course designer. He completed a 170-page research project offering a multi-perspective view of systems thinking and related complexity concepts from leading voices in the field. This document served as the basis for Gregory's important work as the original developer of the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The founding document included Gregory's novel visualizations of emergency management and homeland security problems through systems thinking modeling tools. Gregory worked closely with course designers to animate his models to show the dynamic flow of risk in different scenarios. This course is still in use.

Gregory worked collaboratively with others on a Save the Children global policy implementation process. He emerged as the lead designer who created a visual tool embedded with the expansive study of design and complex systems. The tool was designed to benefit practitioners by integrating all of the literature into the tool and allowing it to guide the policy implementation process without practitioners having to study the material. It was designed as an "artifact that knows." This tool was intended to greatly support policymaking and implementation by eliminating the need for time-consuming training while still supporting an evidence-based process.

To share and progress his research and understanding, Gregory has delivered nearly twenty unique conference lectures on his research. He is currently working on a book and establishing a new narrative on naturalizing community resilience-building in biology science, which will be published this Spring.

Academic Publications 

• Vigneaux, G. J. (Forthcoming). In search of the brighter edge of darkness: Essays and tools for public safety. Lulu.com.
• Vigneaux, G. J. (Forthcoming, 2025). Transitioning From Biological Networks To Participation In Social Networks. Journal of Emergency Management.
• Vigneaux, G. J. (2023). A design philosophy for emergency management. In S. M. van Manen, C. Jaenichen, T. S. Lin, K. Kremer, & R. Ramírez (Eds.), Design for emergency management (pp. 13-30). New York: Routledge.
• Feldmann-Jensen, S., Jensen, S., Sandy, M., & Vigneaux, G. (2019). The Next Generation Core Competencies for Emergency Management. Journal of Emergency Management, 17(1), 17-25. doi:10.5055/jem.2019.0393
• Vigneaux, G. J. (2017a). Emergency management/homeland security education regional academic collaborative Region I. FEMA. Retrieved from https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/docs/region_i_ higher_educational_academic_collaboration_508compliant.pdf
• Vigneaux, G. J. (2017b). Emergency management/homeland security education regional academic collaborative Region IX. FEMA. Retrieved from https://training.fema.gov/hiedu/docs/region_ix_ collaborative_engagement_508compliant.pdf
• Paci-Green, R., Vigneaux, G., Jensen, S., & Petal, M. (2016). Developing and Implementing Comprehensive School Safety Policy: GADRRRES Research-into-Practice Brief.

Relevant Academic and Industry Presentations

Incident Operational Complexity

Operational Coherence, July 20205

Are you Transitioning or Refining the Present?

Operational Coherence, April 2025

The Biology of Community Resilience: A dynamic architecture of mood and social-relational processes

The International Emergency Management Society Conference, 2024

Shadow Theater: A look at time

Colorado Wildland Fire Conference, 2024

Meeting the Moment: Using every moment to drive design

Colorado Wildland Fire Conference, 2024

Fire Service and Academic Research Collaboration

Public Center for Safety Excellence Conference, 2024

Gregory Vigneaux & Vince Anderson

Dynamic Entanglements: Complex Systems in Emergency Management

Colorado Emergency Management Conference, 2024

Designing Ethics for Emergency Management Consultants

Colorado Emergency Management Conference, 2024

Managing Uncertainty in Emergency Management Through Explanation

The International Emergency Management Society Conference, 2023

Who we are and who we want to be: A look at organizational change

Colorado Emergency Management Conference, 2022

Wildfire and the need to Explain Yourself

Colorado Wildland Fire Conference, 2021

Autopoietic Socio-Technical Systems: A new lens for understanding anticipation

Northern European Emergency and Disaster Studies Conference, 2021

Design Thinking for the End of the World, Colorado Emergency Management Conference, 2020

Risk Adaptation as World-Making: A look at human dimensions, Colorado Wildland Fire Conference, 2018

Complex Adaptive Systems in Emergency Management, Joint Centre for Disaster Research, Massey University, NZ, 2017