Four decades. Four countries. One common denominator.

I work on the structure behind human performance at the four scales I have both lived in and worked with: the individual, the group, the organization and society. I have done this for more than four decades — mostly inside large corporations in Europe and the Americas, and most recently in road safety research spanning nine world regions.

The position

The common denominator

To add one third and one quarter, you first need a common denominator. Twelfths. Only then can you operate.

Psychology, sociology, economics, systems theory, existential analysis, neuroscience, pedagogy — each studies systems that seek balance, act with some degree of agency, and respond to their environment. They rarely talk to each other.

My work starts where they meet. I am not a specialist in communication, burnout or leadership. I am a specialist in what those fields have in common, and in building tools that work across all of them.

The common denominator is the structural pattern, not the discipline it came from.

The method

How I work

Four operations, always in this order.

The filter — to keep it from becoming “anything goes”: if I cannot say in one sentence what pattern a model shares with another at a different scale — individual, group, organization, society — it does not go in.

The lineage

Where the thinking comes from

My lineage is phenomenological and existential. Around that core sit complex thought, systems theory and cybernetics, and military doctrine on deciding under uncertainty.

I did not read that last one first. I lived it, and read it afterwards.

The path

The path

1. 1963
   Born in the United States; grew up moving between Mexico, Germany and the United States. German, Spanish and English are not languages I learned. They are languages I live in, and they taught me early to tell what is human everywhere from what is merely local.
2. 1984–1990
   U.S. Marine Corps, reconnaissance — with the 26th Marine Amphibious Unit, the first unit certified Special Operations Capable, in 1985. Where I learned decision under pressure, attention under fear, and responsibility for others — not as concepts.
3. Studies
   Socioeconomics at the University of Augsburg — economics and the social sciences read together, the ground for seeing organizations and institutions as systems. Then a Master’s in Counseling in Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, in Frankl’s tradition, and more than thirty further postgraduate programs.
4. 2000
   Spain, where I have lived since.
5. 2024–2026
   Road safety across the life course, from children to seniors: the research, storyboards and technical course documents for a global training programme of 55 topics, across nine world regions. Not exporting benchmark practice, but separating what holds everywhere, what must adapt locally, and what fails when imposed unchanged.
6. Four decades
   Advisory, counseling, coaching, mentoring and executive training — designing the structures, and the communication and learning environments built on them, in which organizations, teams and individuals diagnose and resolve their structural and communication problems.

The engagement

What this is — and what it is not

“Purpose precedes Structure. Structure sustains action. Action provides Results.”