The Quiet System: Why Your Lessons Learned Aren’t Sticking

It’s incredibly frustrating when your team faces the same exact problems over and over again. You spend months untangling a complex project issue, only to discover someone two cubicles down solved the exact same thing three years ago.

This continuous cycle of rediscovery isn’t happening because your team is careless. It’s happening because most organizational systems are accidentally built to be reactive and protective—focusing on stopping the bleeding rather than preventing the next injury.

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Stop Being a Witness to Decisions That You Should be Helping to Shape

You’ve been there. You walk into a design review, a planning session, or a phase gate meeting. You’re ready to contribute, to challenge, to solve. But within minutes, you realize: the decision was already made. The room is a stage, the discussion a script, and you’re just an audience member.

This isn’t just frustrating. It’s a sign of a deeper systemic issue.

In this episode, Dianna shares a powerful personal story from attending a state-level congressional hearing that mirrored the exact same dynamic she’s seen in product development: a performance, not a process. She reveals why these “formal” meetings often fail, not because of bad people, but because of broken incentives and poor timing.

The real solution? Influence doesn’t happen in the meeting. It happens before it. By shifting your focus to early, intentional conversations with cross-functional teams, you can stop being a witness and start shaping the outcome. This isn’t about being louder. It’s about being earlier for upstream influence in product development.

Learn how to build credibility, surface risks, and align on problems before solutions are locked in. The result? Less rework, better decisions, and teams that actually move forward together.

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Karli Auble THRIVEs: Positive Psychology Meets Engineering Rigor (A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts)

In our latest episode of our interview series, “A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts,” we delve into the human aspect of engineering with Karli Auble. Karli is a leader from the defense industry whose unique perspective integrates systems engineering with positive psychology.

With a decade of experience under her belt, Karli introduces us to her THRIVE Framework, a holistic approach for engineers to balance technical and human elements effectively.

About Karli

Karli Auble is an Engineering Leader in the defense industry who has over a decade of experience leading high-pressure teams. She is also a Speaker, Author, and Coach. With her combination master’s in systems engineering and positive psychology, she created THRIVE: a six‑pillar framework whose name stands for Thoughts, Habits, Relationships, Instincts, Values, and Environments. Karli contributed a chapter to the book Beyond the Pipeline, where she shares how engineers can embed THRIVE into their everyday lives.

What makes Karli’s perspective especially valuable for you (whether you lead a design team, drive R&D strategy, or advise high‑tech organizations) is that she translates human behavior into more reliable engineering design.

Karli’s Insights

1. Engineering with Human Error Codes in Mind: Karli emphasizes the need for engineers to recognize the ‘error codes’ in their own bodies, akin to the ones in technical systems. By paying attention to physical responses like stress or anxiety in high-pressure meetings, engineers can mitigate burnout and enhance decision-making.

2. Instincts and Environments: Two pillars of the THRIVE Framework discussed extensively by Karli are Instincts and Environments. She shares personal anecdotes and practical tools like ‘box breathing’ to manage stress and avoid ‘fight or flight’ responses during critical moments.

3. Improving Communication and Coordination: Karli touches on the necessity of fine-tuning communication, whether addressing team dynamics or engaging in conflict resolution. She shares strategies such as meeting follow-ups and environment adjustments (both physical and virtual) to foster healthier interactions.

Karli Auble’s approach, which seamlessly blends positive psychology with engineering principles, provides a refreshing perspective for professionals seeking sustainable success. By addressing both the tangible and intangible aspects of work, engineers can not only solve technical problems but thrive personally and professionally.
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Constraints Unlock Creativity: Why Frameworks Beat Blank Slates in Product Concept Design

Too many product teams spend months chasing ideas that feel safe, generic, or simply “meh.” They brainstorm with no direction, leaving a blank canvas that overwhelms participants. Or they wait until a prototype is already built, causing “fixedness” where people can’t unsee the existing design. The result? Stagnant concepts, wasted time, and missed market opportunities.

In this episode, Dianna shows how the right frameworks act like a drum‑less track for a drummer: they provide structure, genre cues, and sections to focus on, yet leave the creative freedom to craft something new.

By applying the Goldilocks principle (neither too little nor too much guardrails) and using the Concept Space Model (inputs, process, outputs), teams can hit the sweet spot after business approval but before detailed design to generate high‑impact ideas that are both feasible and market‑loving.

You’ll walk away with a clear method to set up constrained‑creative sessions, concrete examples of how to map customer experiences into design inputs, and actionable steps to run your own framework‑driven brainstorming without it feeling like another status meeting.

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Cut Through the Design Fog

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The Design Fog is Derailing Your Project

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Define Kill Criteria to Avoid Zombie Projects

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Confidence Is A Dial: Turn It With Evidence, Not Guesswork

We turn late-stage design surprises into a strategic plan by assigning explicit confidence levels, stacking evidence, and using the three-dial model of time, cost, and confidence boost. We show how to work backward from a system test to cheaper steps that drive faster, clearer decisions.

• applying the three dials of time, cost, confidence
• sequencing with the work-backwards strategy
• avoiding overtesting, undertesting, wrong testing
• turning confidence into a team communication tool
• practical next steps to build the confidence muscle

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