The Saturday Debrief: Volume 1

March 14, 2026

This week I turned 53, drove to Halifax, and had my worldview confirmed three times.

First, the numbers. A LinkedIn post about my 53rd birthday and the Applied Ergonomics Conference hit 2,272 impressions in a few hours. Senior leaders at large organizations were reading it. One click went straight to this newsletter. Small number. Right people.

That tells me something.

What I’ve been reading

A former colleague, Blake McGowan CPE, wrote what may be the most honest assessment of the ergonomics profession I’ve read in years. Twenty-five years of wins. Twenty-five years of missed opportunity. His core argument: ergonomics proved its value but never elevated its position. While cybersecurity became a board-level concern, ergonomics stayed buried in EHS and HR.

He’s right. And it stings a little.

The profession won the argument. Then forgot to tell anyone.

That gap, between what the science proves and what the C-suite acts on, is exactly why this newsletter exists. Someone has to translate this stuff into language that moves budgets and changes decisions. That’s the work.

What I’ve been listening to

Four hours to Halifax with StoryBrand 2.0 in my ears. Donald Miller’s core argument hasn’t changed since the first edition: the hero’s journey is still the most powerful communication framework humans have ever built. Your customer is the hero. You are the guide.

What hit me this time: most ergonomics professionals, myself included at times, have been positioning themselves as the hero. The expert who arrives with the answers. Miller would say that’s exactly backwards. The worker is the hero. The organization is the hero. We are the guide.

That reframe changes everything about how I write, how I consult, and how I talk about this work.

What I’ve been thinking about

A conversation with a colleague this week about wearable technology in the workplace. The platform is impressive. The problem it’s trying to solve is real. Workers wear a device. It collects movement data in real time. The dashboard lights up with numbers.

And then the employer looks at it and says: now what?

That’s the wall. Every time. Better and better tools generating richer and richer data, with thinner and thinner expertise available to make sense of what it’s actually telling you. The interpretation layer is missing and nobody wants to talk about that part.

This is the pattern I keep seeing across the industry right now. Technology is moving faster than the human capacity to act on what it produces.

AI makes smart people more powerful. It doesn’t replace the judgment that comes from thirty years on the floor. And until organizations close that gap, between data collection and meaningful action, the technology is just expensive wallpaper.

One thing worth your time

Blake McGowan’s full LinkedIn post, Ergonomics at a Crossroads: 25 Years of Progress, 25 Years of Missed Opportunity. Read it slowly. Then ask yourself what your organization has done with the last 25 years of evidence.