How people experience an organization shapes how they think, make decisions, and work together. My work draws on a long-standing public research practice examining how aesthetic conditions influence these experiences.
Organizations can engage my work in two ways: Focus Labs and Aesthetic Advising.
Focus Labs
Organizations can benefit from brief, concentrated sessions addressing their pressing questions and recurring challenges. Focus Labs are tailored to the specific concerns of your organization, combining new ideas with discussion and practical exercises.
Each workshop stands on its own and can be taken independently. Together, they move from foundation to application:
- Aesthetics at Work introduces core ideas about aesthetics, why it matters, and how it shapes organizational life.
- Aesthetics and Trust and Aesthetic Leadership apply aesthetic thinking to two specific organizational challenges.
- Aesthetic Judgment and AI extends aesthetic thinking to an urgent question about the future of human judgment.
“I watched my team click together ideas that I’ve been trying to impart for years.” — Workshop Sponsor, Aesthetics & Trust
Each workshop is two hours and available in person or online. $4,000 per workshop.
Aesthetic Advising
Aesthetic advising brings research in aesthetics to bear on organizational life, helping teams understand how perception, form, and experience shape collective judgment.
Aesthetic conditions can influence engagement, alignment, and customer connection. But their greatest value isn’t captured by metrics alone. Aesthetics is a formative force in human judgment, shaping how people perceive, interpret, and respond to the world. Its value is not merely instrumental; it matters in itself. And because aesthetic experience shapes judgment before decisions are made, it offers organizations a way to examine the conditions from which their decisions emerge.
Why – Sense-Making Under Uncertainty
Organizations rely on frameworks, metrics, and established practices to guide decisions. But these cannot fully account for how people perceive a situation, what they take for granted, or why certain possibilities seem obvious while others remain difficult to imagine.
These blind spots matter. They can shape consequential decisions, sustain recurring tensions, and make organizational change harder to navigate.
Aesthetic advising helps leaders examine the underlying conditions shaping perception and judgment. Drawing on aesthetics and philosophy, I help leaders recognize influences that conventional analysis can overlook and bring them into reflection before they become embedded in decisions and organizational practices.
This approach is particularly valuable when:
- Consequential decisions require discernment beyond what available information can provide.
- Growth or change strains the coherence that allows people to work toward shared aims.
- Aesthetic and philosophical forces shape outcomes but remain difficult to recognize and articulate.
- Existing frameworks cannot adequately account for the complexity of a situation.
What – Enduring Principles for Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Decisions
Philosophical advising helps leaders, employees, and other stakeholders recognize and articulate the aesthetic conditions they already shape, opening up new possibilities for how those conditions might be understood and developed.
Principles such as coherence, proportion, integrity, and fittingness offer ways to assess how an organization’s parts relate to one another and to the whole. These principles do not prescribe uniform solutions; they help leaders discern what a particular situation calls for. Their value lies in making better judgment possible across changing circumstances, rather than supplying answers that work only once.
When – Human Discernment at Critical Junctures
1. Applying Aesthetic Research to Organizational Judgment
The situation: Leaders sense that culture, form, or meaning are influencing decisions, but struggle to see how. Patterns repeat, tensions persist, and certain options feel self-evident or off-limits without anyone quite knowing why.
What Michael does: Works directly with leadership to examine how aesthetic conditions—language, form, rhythm, and environment—shape perception before decisions are discussed. Rather than interpreting the organization for them, he sharpens leaders’ ability to recognize these forces and understand how they influence judgment.
What this enables: Greater discernment in moments where choices previously felt vague or constrained. A clearer understanding of the aesthetic pressures that may contribute to recurring tensions.
Long-term outlook: Leaders become more attentive to how aesthetic conditions shape their perceptions and judgments across decisions.
2. Clarifying Aesthetic Coherence across Culture and Experience
The situation: An organization is shaping its culture, environments, or brand, but risks remaining at the level of surface aesthetics. Decisions about form and experience are already shaping organizational life, yet the deeper aesthetic conditions guiding them remain uneven or in tension. Leaders sense a lack of coherence but lack language for what is misaligned.
What Michael does: Draws on ARL’s interdisciplinary research to assess aesthetic forces already working within the organization. He brings philosophical and aesthetic concepts into direct relation with specific cultural, spatial, and communicative conditions, helping leaders articulate how beauty functions as a formative force rather than decoration. The work results in a shared understanding of aesthetic coherence and tension that leaders can return to as they shape culture, brand, and experience over time.
What this enables: Greater coherence between internal experience and external expression. A culture and brand that feel authentic because the aesthetic conditions shaping them are understood rather than imposed. Environments and rituals that better reflect the organization’s stated values.
Long-term outlook: Coherence becomes something people recognize through experience, not something that needs to be announced.
3. Ethical and Philosophical Responsibility in Times of Change
The situation: Innovation, growth, or cultural change raises ethical and existential questions that existing tools and frameworks cannot adequately address. Decisions with long-term consequences are being made, yet the language available to describe responsibility, meaning, and orientation feels thin or inadequate.
What Michael does: Draws on the history of philosophy and contemporary aesthetic research to help leadership articulate the ethical conditions already shaping their decisions. Rather than moralizing or prescribing action, he clarifies underlying assumptions, tensions, and responsibilities, providing a philosophical orientation that leaders can return to as circumstances evolve.
What this enables: Language that can carry ethical tension without collapsing it. Greater confidence holding responsibility across time. Share orientation around limits, consequences, and obligation. Public and internal communication that reflects considered judgment rather than reactive positioning.
Long-term outlook: Stewardship without simplification.
How – Tailored Responses to Recurring Moments
Every aesthetic advisory engagement includes three core stages:
1. Interpretation and Assessment
Preparatory work centers on interpretive judgment. We draw meaning from organizational materials, rituals, products, and practices in light of real decisions.
2. Facilitated Intervention
A structured problem-solving session creates space for adaptation, allowing aesthetic conditions to be named and understood collectively.
3. Advisory Synthesis
The engagement concludes with an advisory synthesis: an articulation of aesthetic conditions and their consequences that leaders can return to as judgment continues to form across future decisions.
