About

Ken Wake studies how institutions produce understanding and how that understanding shapes the systems people live inside.

His work sits at the intersection of design, systems thinking, and the study of understanding itself: how organizations decide what they know, how they mistake artifacts of analysis for comprehension, and how those mistakes become structural.

Much of his work has taken place inside complex institutional environments—healthcare systems, startups, and governance structures—where the gap between theory and reality becomes visible.

That gap is the subject of his forthcoming book.

Artificial Understanding examines how modern institutions have built systems for producing the appearance of understanding (personas, dashboards, evaluations, journey maps) while systematically losing the contact with reality through which genuine understanding forms. Design is the most revealing case, because it is the discipline that explicitly promises that contact.

Ken is an Entrepreneur in Residence and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. He works in healthcare governance and writes regularly about systems, complexity, and how understanding forms under real-world conditions.

Tour de Ken is his weekly log. It documents a long-term project: training for the 2,700-mile Tour Divide while rebuilding a body constrained by a congenital ankle deformity. The journal treats cycling as a physical system under constraint, and the observations that follow from it.