Publications

• David Kantor’s Four-Player Model of Communication. One-page summary handout used when forming teams or projects. Defines the values, intent, and appearance for mover, follower, opposer, bystander roles, and how to avoid complications.
• The Drifting Goals of Product Excellence. An analytic view into how project goals can drift in a way that lowers product quality, hurting a firm's reputation, a team's motivation, and a customer's experience of the product (link).
• Tragedy of the Communications Commons. A simple illustration of how two departments of one firm can accidentally end up working against the firm's customers, and against the firm's own interest. The article uses outbound email as an example, but the same story can be applied to many areas – for example, internal management communications, or banner ads online (link).
• Writing Professional Services Proposals. 2-page summary memo, with two redacted proposal examples (one 4-pages, one 6-pages), for private client.
• What is High-Resolution Market Research? A two-page explainer describing an approach to in-depth qualitative market research for customer-centric products and services. tl;dr - "N(1-(1-L)^n)" where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered while testing a single user.
• Wintergreen Software Cooperative, Business Model. 18-page private memo outlining a worker-based software cooperative. (August 2006)
• The Cynefin Sense-Making Framework. One-page summary handout used to contextualize a situation. Used in sales conversations, project requirements, and facilitations to improve decision-making.
• Predator Prey. One-page summary of a Cognitive-Edge ice-breaker facilitation method which demonstrates that simple rules give rise to complex phenomena.
• Agile Development for High-Performance Teams and Projects. One-page summary handout used primarily in sales conversations to describe my approach to projects by introducing Agile at a high level.
• Design the Structure Before the Surface. One-page design/build best practice handout showing the wireframe, iterate, enhance work cycle, using website development as an example.
• Design Websites From the Bottom Up. One-page design/build best practice handout showing where the project team should focus – on the pages that users view, not the home page.
• FastFeedback Design/Build. One-page explainer describing a design/build methodology which combines information architecture, wireframe design, and real-time content management to provide an integrated, parallelized, in-place review process.
• Proportional Budget Matrix. Two-page explainer with spreadsheet that intersects both the macro-phases and micro-tasks of a project, and allocates resources within the context of the whole. It's easier to use than describe, but in essence we engage the brains of the team members with ratios rather than absolute numbers, and decision-making improves dramatically.
• Peer Review Alignment. Two-page explainer with spreadsheet describes a method to conduct a group dialogue with the goal of setting and evaluating specic metrics to review peers, aspirants, or competitors. This method has the dual-advantage of producing data to support opinions, and helps align team members through dialogue around the scoring mechanism.
• Objective Apportionment. A spreadsheet that produces and maintains team alignment around varying proportional contributions toward, and rewards from, fixed-rate client contracts.
• Collaborating with Adobe Connect. 5-page training memo helping non-technical businesspeople set up, use, and troubleshoot Adobe Connect. (January 2012)
• Internet Success Strategies. 4-page whitepaper. (February 2000)
• Reading Web Server Logs with Analog. 4-page whitepaper for business clients. (May 1998)
• Why Email Should Be Personal. 5-page whitepaper, written when business clients were still sharing one email account. (February 1998)
• How the Web is Different, A Brief Discussion of Web Design Limitations. 2-page whitepaper distinguishing web design from print design. (January 1998)
• Multichannel audio reproduction system. US Patent #4612663. Describes Tri-Ambience and the Tri-Ambient Synthesis electro-acoustic mechanism to create it. Describes the psychoacoustic experimental design and results from test subjects. (1982/1986)