Brian “Ponch” Rivera is the co-creator of the Toyota Flow System, a former F-14 instructor and demonstration team member and current Commander in the Navy Reserve. He is a Cynefin Foundations Trainer and often co-leads complexity workshops with the co-creator of the Cynefin framework, Dave Snowden. “Ponch” has worked with the co-creator of the Scrum framework, Jeff Sutherland, and the co-creator of Lean Kanban University, and has led several high-profile digital transformations. He is a 2018 World Agility Forum Award Recipient and often speaks at global Agile, Scrum and Performance conferences on the topics of High-Reliability, Leadership, Teamwork, and Complex Adaptive Systems.

Following the Navy’s 2017 incidents at sea, “Ponch” put his civilian career on hold and volunteered to be a member of the 2018 Strategic Readiness Review Industry Best Practices and Learning Culture team where he led engagements with academics and executives on the topics of complexity, leadership, teamwork, safety, and culture. As a result of his combined civilian and U.S. Navy expertise, in early 2019 he was asked by U.S. Navy leadership to help transform the Naval Safety Center using Safety Differently, Resilience Engineering, and Safety II—the same concepts propelling the DevOps movement.

He is currently co-authoring a book on the Toyota Flow System where he connects scalable methods and frameworks (i.e. Mission Command, OODA loop, the Cynefin framework, Human Factors, Red Teaming, Psychological Safety, Wardley Maps, etc.) to the Toyota Production System and the Toyota Way. Later this year he and Dave Snowden will facilitate a first workshop on the connection between the OODA loop and Cynefin Frameworks.