The Proper Names for Things

Many of the things we think we “just figured out” already have formal names, frameworks, and disciplines attached to them in the business world.

You spend years learning how to:

• navigate ambiguity
• coordinate teams
• spot operational friction
• translate between technical and non-technical groups
• stabilize chaos
• improve systems under pressure

Then one day you realize there are entire disciplines built around those capabilities.

Operations management. Information technology management. Organizational behavior. Governance. Systems strategy.

That realization is part of why I’m returning to school at 52.

I still love the work itself. After 30 years in user experience design, systems strategy, and enterprise technology, I still find organizational complexity, decision-making, operations, and human behavior genuinely fascinating. That part never changed.

What has changed is my understanding of where I sit inside it.

For most of my career, I was less of a discipline specialist and more of a competence lead. I moved between UX, systems thinking, operations, governance, communication, organizational behavior, and decision-making because real-world problems rarely stay inside clean boundaries.

Part of why Cal State East Bay appeals to me is that, at this stage of my life, I am less interested in institutional performance and more interested in actual learning, growth, and completion.

I’ve spent much of my professional life around Stanford, MIT, and Silicon Valley’s culture of constant optimization. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was no longer looking for prestige as proof of seriousness.

Cal State East Bay’s strong population of older, working, and returning students appeals to me for that reason. The decision feels connected to the actual purpose of learning rather than the performance surrounding it.

The degree feels less like reinvention and more like consolidation. A way to formalize, strengthen, and contextualize decades of accumulated experience while continuing to evolve alongside the field itself.

At 52, I’m not showing up asking:

“Teach me who to become.”

I’m showing up asking:

“Help me better understand the architecture surrounding things I already know how to do.”