Jabe Bloom

Dr. Jabe Bloom is a design researcher, organisational consultant, and one of the most original thinkers working at the intersection of complexity science, design theory, and software engineering. He works with technology organisations that are tired of being forced to choose between innovation and efficiency and need the frameworks to stop making that false choice.

He studied Photography and Philosophy at Bard College before spending more than twenty years in the technology industry as a Chief Architect, Principal Technical Director, Chief Technical Officer, and Chief SocioTechnical Officer. Those roles (across startups, scale-ups, and global enterprises) gave him a practitioner’s understanding of where architectural decisions collide with organisational reality: when strategy meets structure, and efficiency starts fighting with differentiation.

In 2014, Jabe co-founded PraxisFlow with Kevin Behr, a consultancy dedicated to helping organisations take a systemic view of their work. From 2019 to 2022 he served as Senior Director at Red Hat’s Global Transformation Office, working alongside DevOps pioneers Andrew Clay Shafer, John Willis, and Kevin Behr to help large enterprises adopt cloud-native practices at scale. In 2023 he co-founded Ergonautic with Andrew Clay Shafer and Sasha Czarkowski, continuing that work with a focus on the fitness of work systems in complex organisations.

Running through all of this is a central theoretical contribution that Jabe has spent years developing, teaching, and refining: The Three Economies. Most technology organisations are trapped in a false binary: you can either be a cost centre (drive efficiency at scale) or a value centre (differentiate and innovate). Jabe’s framework exposes this as a category error. The two economic logics, an Economy of Differentiation and an Economy of Scale, don’t trade off against each other; they grind because a third logic is missing. The Economy of Scope, expressed through well-designed platforms, acts as the clutch between them: translating efficiency into the capacity for difference. The framework draws on Ashby’s Law, complexity theory, diffusion theory, and the economics of the commons and has been applied in boardrooms, engineering teams, and product organisations around the world.

That theoretical work underpins his 2024 PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design, where his dissertation (Temporally Informed Design) investigated how integrating temporality and complexity into design practice can enable more sustainable presents and futures. It is a critique of design-as-problem-solving in a market-driven economy, and an argument for design as an ongoing, complex interaction between intervention and context, one that shapes not just products, but the conditions in which people work and live.

Jabe has keynoted and run workshops at conferences across the international circuit (GOTO, Lean Kanban, LeanUX, DevOpsCon, DDD Europe) on Design Thinking, Lean Systems, Complexity Theory, Management as Design, and sociotechnical architecture.
Jabe Bloom is also the trainer of Complexity-Informed Platform Design: a training course grounded in the Three Economies, covering Wardley Mapping, Maturity Mapping, Throughput Accounting, and Strategy Deployment.

Articles & Talks

• The Three Economies: An Introduction – Jabe Bloom’s blog
• Complexity is a pharmakon – Pronovix conversation, part 1
• API-soup into API Platform – Pronovix conversation, part 2

Videos

• Whole Work: Sociotechnicity & DevOps – YouTube
• Decision Economies – LKSE14 – YouTube
• Permanence, Plasticity, and Ephemerality – LeanUX 2015 – Vimeo
• Decisions and Futures: On Designing Boundaries, Systems, and Distributed Cognition – Vimeo
• Temporal Design and Digital Transformation – Profound Podcast, Season 4 Episode 12
• Platforming Inside and Between Organisations – Boundaryless Podcast

Contact Jabe

Get in touch if you’d like to arrange a conversation with Jabe Bloom and explore together how we can support your project and your team.