The thread that connects everything is how humans perform.

I've been asking the same question for thirty years. I just didn't know it was the same question.

In 1999, on my first day as a government ergonomist, I was videotaping roofers in forty-degree heat at a manufacturing plant in New Brunswick. My job was to study how they worked and figure out where the system was failing them. Every week was a new industry, a new set of humans trying to get work done inside a system somebody else had designed. Sawmills. Fish plants. Nursing homes. Smelters.

The pattern was always the same. The system didn't fit the people using it. Not because the designers were careless. Because the designers weren't watching.

I went deep on that problem. Earned a CPE, the Board Certification in Professional Ergonomics, the credential that covers the full spectrum of human factors science, not just the physical layer. Wrote a Master's thesis on Participatory Ergonomics: what happens when you give workers a framework and the authority to solve their own problems. The finding was straightforward and, at the time, felt almost radical. Performance improves. Solutions stick. You don't need an expert in every room. You need a good framework in every hand.

I moved through a lot of chapters after that. Founded companies. Worked with Fortune 100 clients. Got an MBA in Strategic Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Built an innovation ecosystem at Cape Breton University out of a sandbox program and a venture fund. Got terminated for the first time in my career when one of those companies imploded. Went back to a government role I'd left fourteen years earlier, and found something that landed hard: the programs we had built were gone. Quietly abandoned. I re-introduced what we decided in 2005 and people thought I was a genius. I wasn't. I was just the person who remembered.

That's not a specific organization story. That's the story of every organization I've ever worked in.

The technology changes. The human doesn't. And the gap between how we design systems and how people actually perform inside them is where the expensive problems live.

AI is the newest version of that gap. Possibly the biggest one I've seen in thirty years. Most organizations are doing one of two things: throwing tools at their team and hoping something useful sticks, or waiting it out and treating this as a technology problem that IT will eventually solve. Both miss the actual problem. AI doesn't improve your thinking. You bring the thinking. The AI amplifies whatever you bring to it, the good judgment and the bad, the careful analysis and the lazy shortcut.

I've spent thirty years studying the fit between humans and systems. This is the same problem with better marketing.

The question is the same. The stakes are higher. And I've finally got the vocabulary to answer it properly.