Product, Experience, & Communication Strategy
Consulting Services for:
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From Chasing Desire to Inspiring Belief
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From Passive Consumption to Active Engagement and Sustained Commitment
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From Meeting Needs, to Fulfilling Aspirations, to Making it Matter
Open the Aperture:
Frontier technologies are being deployed faster than people can make sense of them.
That creates risk and churn, internally and externally:
Mistrust and resistance when systems feel opaque, uncanny, or misaligned with expectations and mindsets
Misleading and empty narratives driven by ideology, hype, or internal wishful thinking
Fragmented teams with no shared picture of what “good” looks like
The answer isn’t simply more data. You need clarity about how humans actually understand, feel, and act and how that translates into experience design and product decisions.
What I provide:
Structured & Evidence-Based Discernment
Direction from Diverse Inputs
I help teams create a clear point of view from diverse inputs by rapidly synthesizing what they already know, identifying what’s missing, and bringing an outside lens that distinguishes what’s real from what’s noise. By mapping mental models, filling critical gaps, and clarifying what truly matters, I build frameworks that focus teams, align stakeholders, and point the way toward decisive next steps.
Revitalizing Leaders & Teams
I activate teams through immersive, evidence-based experiences that inspire and inform by using provocative human futures, live contexts, and sensory engagement to build shared intuition. Rather than just presenting insights, I create environments where teams can feel emerging realities, align around what matters, and develop the instincts needed to make fast, confident decisions. The goal isn’t inspiration for its own sake; it’s equipping teams with the strategic fluency, empathy, and embodied understanding required to build what comes next.
Defining Criteria
I translate abstract language and ambiguous intent into concrete, example-rich principles, roadmaps, and design criteria that teams can execute against. By turning capabilities, features, and strategic aspirations into lived experiences, supported by prototypes, concepts, and clear do’s and don'ts, I create direction that not only aligns stakeholders but drives engineering, design, and product decisions with confidence.
Solutions
Rapidly assess current knowledge and research, fill gaps with material culture analysis, creating the alignment framework, and collaboratively setting the course.
Rapid Assessment & Synthesis
Context, Culture & Cognition
Deeper dive into the contextual, cultural, and cognitive territories people inhabit, revealing the anchor beliefs, aspirations, behaviors, and interpretive schema.
Bring to life everyday human ecologies (people, products, and places) - synthetic future-oriented fictions based on fact and evidence - for team immersion, speculative concepting, and risk assessment.
Human Ecology Workshop
Lived Tensions & Experiences
Focused stakeholder immersions into the unique real-world cases exhibiting some aspect of the future today to illuminate the lived tensions and experiences people navigate.
Mapping the landscape of things, people, and ideas to generate distinctive innovation spaces defined by unique criteria, context, and conceptual territory.
Innovation Platforms
Principles, Playbooks & Prototypes
Translating and operationalizing from insight through to concrete and tangible criteria, dos and don’ts, example-rich guidelines, and experience prototypes.
Michael Thomas, PhD
My work sits at the intersection of cognition, design, and strategy. I bring over two decades of experience helping organizations and teams make sense of complex systems, where culture, technology, and human judgment meet.
As a cognitive anthropologist and design strategist, I translate human insight into organizational clarity. I lead and grow high-performing, interdisciplinary teams that connect philosophical depth with empirical rigor, integrating qualitative research, semiotics, data analytics, and design methods to clarify what is real, what is true, and what works.
Across roles spanning global corporations and consultancies, from leading research at Ford on autonomy and human-machine interaction to building Space Doctors North America to support clients as diverse as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Johnson & Johnson, my focus has been on grounding vision in reality while opening pathways for transformation.
I currently serve on the Executive Board of the Society for Anthropological Sciences and teach semiotics and anthropology at LTU and WSU, where I mentor the next generation of researchers and strategists.
