I had been meaning to sit down and write this for a while, but was only recently inspired to sit down and do so. The question I had been asking was one of how we might clearly and valuably communicate complexity to audiences with little to no know advanced knowledge of it.My goal was to sketch the beginnings of an approach to introducing complexity to others that went around methods that are terminology and theoretically focused. Instead, I wanted to situate complexity within the audience's context and communicate it experientially where complexity is experienced.The implications and experience of theory are used instead of theory itself to dispose an audience toward the world around them in complex ways through a lightweight approach.One of the opening paragraphs discusses the importance of searching for understandings and practices similar to complexity that might already exist in the community, practiced in culturally specific ways. Areas that evince an understanding close to complexity may serve as a foundation.

The book Design for Emergency Management, edited by Saskia M. van Manen, Claudine Jaenichen, Tingyi S. Lin, Klaus Kremer, and Rodrigo Ramírez, is on sale at Routledge. Paperbacks are priced at USD $45.59. from 56.99. It would be valuable to own for its new methods, tools, language, and understanding for operating in emergency management. 

Being one of the premier design-based wildfire consultancies in the United States is no small thing, which is why it started nine years ago. The consultancy's study of design, modelled initially after Carnegie Mellon University's design PhD program reading list, eventually began following its own path under occasional supervision. The findings of this dedicated read through the design literature have been shared in multiple conference talks, a chapter in a design textbook, a book on public safety, and a podcast. 

The limited release from May 2025, seen below, has been in the process of reformatting, editing, and a title change, and will receive more editing before its publication in 2026, possibly under the forthcoming Operational Coherence imprint. The goal of the book is to offer the means by which public safety may be advanced through a subtle invitation rather than persuasion. Topics include design, emergency operations, complexity and chaos, and the future. Many announcements to follow!

Preparing to deliver a lecture on Maturana's zero time and its later relationship with cultural time. The first slide is below.

Gregory Vigneaux is excited to return to the Colorado Wildland Fire Conference this year to talk about bringing form to strategy intended to build resilience.

Operational Coherence's Gregory Vigneaux prepares for his third conference held by the International Emergency Management Society. The first slide is below. 

A discussion-based lecture driven by theory mixed with real-world experience, exploring complexity during incident response operations. Now widespread, the term "incident" is used across communities. In fact, using a more subdued version of the word "crisis," French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin writes that using the term "merely allows someone to say that something is wrong." Viewed as a working definition of incidents, it is broadly applicable across fields. Morin's definition is part of the understanding of "incident" that is essential to this lecture.

This is a great blog post chronicling the process of being selected to create the original Systems Thinking Course housed at the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security way back in 2017-2018, before Operational Coherence. Vigneaux was hired as a subject matter expert on systems thinking and wrote a 180-page manuscript for the course developers. In late 2024, Vigneaux saw that Tyler had taken the course and asked him if he would answer some questions as an evaluation. His answers offered rare insight into the course, which is central to this post. Proud that the course is still out there!