United States
Dr. Johnson’s leadership in building and completing multidiscipline, multi-institutional projects started as a PostDoc at Los Alamos and continues to the present. Many of the projects he led received awards for their achievements – some cited as the most successful project in the institution's history, as measured by the breadth of utility, return on investment, and customer satisfaction. For Referentia, LANL, National Academies of Science, the Dept of Homeland Security, and volunteer services, Dr. Johnson’s approach is to serve the Nation and public, utilizing system-wide and sustainable solutions that integrate the best approaches assembled in a transparent and defensible manner, inclusive of all stakeholders. His technical research and applications span many areas: the origin of consciousness - particularly in AI systems, data-driven cybersecurity, quantitative risk assessment methods, agent-based modeling (ABM), numerical methods in fluid dynamics, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, modeling of hydrogen combustion, and multiphase flow simulations. His "non-physics" research in the last 30 years focuses on mechanisms of performance and situational awareness in collective systems and models for behavior and decision-making in collective systems, particularly from bottom-up, emergent processes. He is a sought-after public speaker on the importance of diversity in governments, universities, financial markets, and cultures and as a group facilitator for public and academic decision-making. He is currently an officer on two nonprofit boards serving New Mexico. The figure in the paper below "The Where-How of Leadership Emergence (WHOLE) Landscape: Charting Emergent Collective Leadership" shows how the traditional approaches to leadership (left side) can be expanded to include new collective forms of leadership (right side) that radically change business and society.
Referentia is a high-tech company based in Hawaii with staff located internationally. They team with strategic partners in industry, government and academic worldwide to combine basic research with proven commercialization capabilities, focusing on cybersecurity. Dr. Johnson as Chief Scientist provides leadership in Referentia’s strategic planning and development of new technology areas. As Principal Investigator (PI) he led two projects for developing disruptive technologies for human and malware threats for DARPA and ONR. He was also PI on the planning and analysis of the cyber experiments for PACOM J-85 (Terminal Fury), arguably the first repeatable, quantitative, and scientific performance studies of network and host sensors on realistic network configurations, traffic, and threats. He also supports the non-profit organization Cyber Collaboration Center, with a focus on education and training to help achieve a cyber-safe community. See more at https://cybercollaborationcenter.org//
Having been active in pure and applied research and gotten dirty in messy applied programs nationally and internationally, Norman seeks to understand for the greater good: the interplay between top-down centralized structures and bottom-up distributed processes – across all types of social structures from extended families to organizations to societies to natural systems. He sees collective organization through the lenses of social identity (awareness of us-versus-other), the tradeoffs between structure and options in evolving systems, and the power of emergent problem solving of diverse collectives – particularly as the source of all deep social change. See his publication on "Charting Emergent Collective Leadership." http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1516618
The major conclusion (and quite unexpected) of Norman's 1998 research on collective intelligence was the importance of diversity to collective performance - where diversity is the uniqueness of the contribution to the collective. In fact, the collective performance was found to be proportional to the group diversity, and any filtering of the diversity, such as the selection of the best performers, lowered the diversity and collective performance. Scott Page and colleagues found identical results. As a consequence, Norman became a champion of diversity, not for moral reasons, but for performance of the organization. He has given talks on diversity (often titled "Diversity: the weapon of mass construction" or "The fall of the house of Experts") to many organizations, including Santa Fe Institute - Public lecture, National Institute of Health, Los Alamos National Laboratory, DOE's national leadership training program, National Society for Black Engineers, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, University of California - San Francisco Medical School, and Sandia National Laboratory.
Planning, Organization, Execution, and Facilitation.
Dr. Johnson retained involvement in a variety of Los Alamos projects that he led – serving the Nation on pandemic influenza modeling-planning-response, on environmental surveillance of biothreats and on biodefense, including Co-Chair for the National Academy of Sciences study with Dr. David Franz, former Commander of USAMRIID, on facility protection from biological threats. He also served on a treaty delegation for Dept. of Homeland Security to Australia.