What Is a Behavioral Operations Strategist?

A behavioral operations strategist studies the operation people are actually living inside, not simply the one leadership believes it built.

That distinction is the center of my work.

I pay attention to the workaround, the spreadsheet nobody admits runs the department, the person everybody calls before making a decision, the manager who has become an unofficial escalation desk, the meeting after the meeting, the process people technically know but quietly avoid, and the leader who says, “I have a team,” while still carrying every consequential decision themselves.

Behavioral operations sits between psychology and operating design

I came to operations through psychology, not through a fascination with process maps.

My graduate training is in experimental psychology. That training taught me to look at behavior as evidence: what people do, what conditions change what they do, what happens under uncertainty, and how trust changes decision-making. Later, working inside institutions and businesses, I kept seeing the same thing at a different scale. Organizations also create conditions. People respond to those conditions. Then leadership often labels the response as a people problem.

That is where I disagree.

If one person misses a handoff, I may have an individual performance issue. If eight capable people keep missing the same handoff, I am looking at the handoff. If managers keep escalating decisions upward, I do not immediately assume they lack confidence. I look for unclear authority, an absent threshold, a history of punishment for getting it wrong, or information that only exists at the top.

Behavioral operations asks a different question: what operating condition makes this behavior make sense?

The work started long before I gave it a name

I have spent more than a decade working at the intersection of operations, organizational design, leadership, behavior, and execution. The title “behavioral operations strategist” came later. The work did not.

Over that period I have helped build, stabilize, and operate organizations across education, public institutions, nonprofits, corporations, and founder-led businesses. I have worked inside multiple successful companies, held senior operating responsibility, managed complex client delivery, designed programs, built internal systems, and spent years seeing what happens when growth outruns infrastructure.

Across that body of work, I kept seeing the same operating patterns in different settings. Repetition made it possible to separate an isolated problem from a structural condition.

DEEP was one of the places where the lens became unmistakable

For roughly five years, I worked with the Disruptive Equity Education Project (DEEP), now DEEP Corporate Consulting Partners, in an operating environment that included school districts, nonprofits, professional learning, coaching, webinars, leadership development, and institutional change work.

That work put me close to district leaders and administrators, but it also put me close to the machinery required to make ambitious work real: contracting, scheduling, client delivery, facilitation logistics, invoicing, staffing, handoffs, follow-through, program architecture, and the thousand invisible decisions between “we should do this” and “this actually happened.”

It is one reason I say workplace culture does not live only in HR. Culture lives in operations. It lives in who is allowed to decide, who has to ask permission, what gets funded, what gets delayed, what gets documented, what gets ignored, what happens after somebody raises a concern, and whether accountability is supported by structure or left to personality.

The scaffolding of accountability

At DEEP, one of the ideas that became central to how I think was what I call a scaffolding of accountability. Accountability cannot simply mean telling people to “own it.” People need a structure that makes ownership possible.

That means the role has to be clear. The decision rights have to be clear. The standard has to be visible. The handoff has to have an owner. Escalation needs a threshold. Feedback has to arrive soon enough to change the next decision. And leadership has to resist the temptation to quietly rescue the system every time the scaffolding is tested.

Without that structure, “accountability” often becomes a personality judgment applied after the organization has already made success unnecessarily difficult.

That insight followed me out of DEEP and into every audit I designed afterward.

School systems taught me to respect complexity without worshipping it

Education systems are useful teachers because complexity is impossible to pretend away. A district can have central-office strategy, building-level leadership, teachers, specialists, families, students, vendors, grants, compliance requirements, labor constraints, and community expectations all moving at once.

In those environments, a beautifully written strategy can fail because one approval has no owner. A professional-development initiative can fail because the implementation calendar contradicts the actual school calendar. A leader can appear resistant when the real issue is that three departments have given three different directions.

I learned to look for the friction between levels of the system. That is still how I audit today.

My corporate career taught me what scale looks like from inside the machine

I have also worked in large enterprise environments, including financial services, where process, compliance, risk, talent, data, and executive decision-making intersect. I eventually moved into Managing Director-level leadership and built operating structures that had to work across more than one team, stakeholder group, and geography.

Enterprise work taught me a different lesson: large organizations can have enormous amounts of documentation and still depend on informal knowledge. They can have sophisticated technology and still route decisions through the wrong people. They can have an org chart, a governance model, and a project plan while the actual operating system remains a handful of people translating between all three.

That is why I am not impressed by the existence of a process. I want to know whether the process survives contact with the work.

Why my audits are designed the way they are

My audits are intentionally sequenced around observation before prescription.

I do not sell the fix before I have seen the system that produced the symptom. Leadership tells me one version of the operation. The team may tell me another. The documents may tell me a third. The gaps between those versions are not an inconvenience to the audit. They are the audit.

That logic now appears in the way NJW Operations and Bikomeye structure diagnostic work: first see what is happening, then name the operating condition, then decide what should be released to structure. A handbook cannot transfer decision authority. An SOP cannot repair a trust problem by itself. Software cannot solve an ownership gap simply because the workflow has been automated.

The goal is not to leave a client with more documents. The goal is to give leadership a defensible answer to a harder question: what is this operation currently asking people to compensate for?

Dr. Angelo M. DiBello helped pressure-test the methodology

As the work became more formalized, I did something I think founders do too rarely: I let someone qualified look closely at the methodology.

Dr. Angelo M. DiBello, an Associate Professor at Rutgers University with expertise in organizational data and systems, reviewed the methodology behind the Operational Trust Index. His role matters to me not because I wanted an academic name attached to the work, but because I wanted the assumptions challenged.

Dr. DiBello has described my approach as one that handles ambiguity through clear decision frameworks, clarifies ownership and operational flow, and designs systems that can remain stable under pressure while adapting as complexity increases.

That is exactly the standard I want the work held to. Behavioral operations should not become a clever label for intuition. The models have to become clearer when somebody smart pushes on them.

Marie Deveaux helped me turn the thinking into teachable architecture

There is another difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to teach someone else to do it.

Marie Deveaux, founder and CEO of High Tides Consulting, became an important thought partner in the curriculum architecture around Operational Zen. The work with Marie forced a useful discipline: if we say a program creates clarity, how will we know? What is the baseline? What changes by the end? What should remain messy in a beta? What should be systematized? What is the leanest curriculum that can still produce evidence of movement?

That collaboration strengthened the measurement architecture around the program: baseline questions, pre/post comparisons, decision-fatigue measures, delegation confidence, operational bottleneck identification, and concrete participant outcomes.

Marie did not create the behavioral operations lens. Her contribution helped me make the lens more teachable, testable, and measurable.

Bikomeye is where the individual experience meets the operating system

Bikomeye is an important part of this story because it gave me a direct line into how people experience systems from the inside.

Through She Don't Work Like That No More, founder conversations, discovery calls, workplace storytelling, and the Operational Zen research process, I have been able to listen to people describe pressure in their own language before translating it into an operational category.

That matters. I do not want to build a framework and then search for people who fit it. I want to observe, identify repeated contradictions, extract the language people actually use, build from the pattern, test the intervention, and refine it from real-world implementation.

That research loop became part of the design of Operational Zen: observe → identify → extract → build → test → refine.

The podcast and the public-facing work are not separate from the operations practice. They help reveal what pressure feels like before it becomes a dashboard metric.

Operational Zen was designed from observed pressure, not content trends

Operational Zen emerged from repeated conversations with founders who had reached an uncomfortable stage of growth. They had revenue. They had clients. Some had teams. Many had purchased software, hired support, taken courses, built funnels, or documented processes.

And yet the work had not gotten lighter.

The team still escalated decisions. The founder still carried the context. Technology created new maintenance. Hiring created new management. The business was “bigger,” but the founder was still infrastructure.

So the program was designed around a smaller, more consequential decision: what should be automated, what should be delegated, what should stop, and what still requires the founder to lead?

That is behavioral operations in practice. The intervention is not “be more productive.” The intervention is to change the operating condition producing the pressure.

Why I do not separate people from systems

I have spent enough time around workplace culture, equity work, leadership development, operations, and founder burnout to be suspicious of explanations that locate every problem inside an individual.

People absolutely make poor decisions. Leaders avoid accountability. Employees miss expectations. Founders overcontrol. Teams can become dependent.

But behavior occurs inside conditions.

If the person who delegates gets punished when the work is imperfect, delegation will shrink. If the manager has responsibility without authority, escalation will increase. If leadership rescues every missed handoff, the organization will learn that the handoff does not need to become reliable. If only one person has the context required to make a decision, everyone else will appear indecisive.

A behavioral operations strategist looks at both sides of that equation.

What I am actually looking for when I enter an organization

I am usually tracking five things at once:

• Where work actually moves. Not the official workflow. The real one.
• Where decisions actually live. Who can decide, who believes they can decide, and who gets called anyway.
• Where pressure accumulates. The person, role, tool, or handoff absorbing what structure has not resolved.
• What behavior is compensating for the gap. Chasing, rescuing, remembering, translating, checking behind people, or keeping knowledge privately.
• Whether the operation can carry more. More clients, more people, another site, a major contract, or a franchise model.

That is also why my work often starts with an audit. Before a company hires another person, buys another system, opens another location, or tries to franchise, I want to know what the current operation is already struggling to hold.

The point is not to make organizations dependent on me

I have been a COO. I know the value of strong operating leadership. I also know how easy it is for a strong operator to become the human middleware connecting every broken part of the organization.

I do not consider that success.

The strongest operating architecture makes good judgment more distributable. It gives people enough clarity to act without requiring constant rescue. It creates a threshold for escalation. It makes standards inspectable. It turns important knowledge into organizational knowledge. And it makes leadership intervention more intentional instead of automatic.

So, what is a behavioral operations strategist?

A behavioral operations strategist is someone who studies the relationship between human behavior and operating structure in order to understand why work is producing the outcomes it is producing.

The strategist does not stop at, “the process is broken,” and does not stop at, “the people need training.” They examine the interaction: the process, authority, incentives, trust, handoffs, information, escalation, leadership behavior, and the workarounds people have built to survive all of it.

For me, the title describes a body of work that has been developing for more than a decade through psychology, enterprise operations, school systems, DEEP, corporate leadership, audit work, Bikomeye, Operational Zen, curriculum design, and the repeated privilege of being invited inside organizations when something important is not working the way leadership expected.

The question underneath all of my work

After the frameworks, the audits, the programs, the scores, the diagrams, and the recommendations, I keep coming back to one question:

What is this organization asking people to compensate for, and what would have to change so they no longer have to?

That is the question underneath NJW Operations. It is underneath the audit work. It is underneath Operational Zen. It is underneath the public education work at Bikomeye.

And it is the question I will keep asking before I recommend another hire, another tool, another process, another site, or another layer of complexity.