Curt

What I don't know, I can't consider One pattern I've observed repeatedly: the most frustrated clients are those where great analysis dies in implementation because nobody mapped who actually makes decisions around here.

Deep analysis is often a winding road After two decades of strategic consulting, I've learned that the engagements producing breakthrough insights share one common element: a senior executive who stays actively involved throughout the process.

Meaningful analysis requires deep context The most valuable analyses I've produced addressed what executives actually worried about, not what industry frameworks suggested they should worry about.

What I can offer my clients I work with organizations that need independent, rigorous analysis on complex strategic questions. My engagements are designed to be focused, intensive, and time-bounded—delivering maximum analytical value while respecting both your resources and mine.

It's nice to meet you Hi. I'm Curt Mayers I’m a systems thinker with backgrounds in enterprise architecture, data modeling, and public policy analysis. I’ve led technical teams, designed large-scale data environments, and worked as a business strategist. My academic foundation is in policy design and analysis—which means I specialize in understanding how technical systems and human systems collide.

Look what happened to pharma and social media There is a difference between a tool and a product. Between something meant to be used, and something meant to be owned. And from the start, the dominant systems of AI have been designed to be owned.

An assertion without an assessment is just an opinion An AI will always try to answer your question (as it understands it). When it replies, its answer "feels" confident: a flat, bold assertion that yes, this is true, or option B is "likely." But how useful are these assertions? Hardly at all.

What you see depends on where you're looking from Remember the old fable of the blind men and the elephant? There are ways of looking at a thing that can somehow miss its essential nature. The best protection against this is looking from multiple angles.

Make assumptions explicit, and then refine them AI models don’t “think” in the human sense. But they do embed assumptions—lots and lots of them. Hidden priors, structural defaults, causal heuristics, statistical norms. Often, when you ask the AI a question and it responds with confidence, what it’s really doing is applying a stack of unspoken assumptions to your input.