Brian "Ponch" Rivera is decorated former Navy TOPGUN, published author, speaker and co-creator of The Flow System.
To become one of today's leading experts in business agility, safety, and resilience, Brian combined his experiences in complex air, space, and cyber operations, and leadership and teamwork lessons from elite military teams with lessons he learned during a period of deep immersion within the Agile and Lean communities where he was mentored by the creators of Scrum, Flawless Execution, the Cynefin framework, Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum in Hardware, and Lean-Kanban University.
From Agile to Safety. Following the 2017 mishaps at sea involving the U.S.S. McCain and U.S.S. Fitzgerald, Brian was hand selected to a U.S. Navy team responsible for engaging with thought leaders in industry and academia to understand how to create a safety culture, build high-performing teams, develop leaders, and capture leading indicators. During this period Brian was mentored by and engaged with safety experts on the topics of Adaptive Safety, Resilience Engineering, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), Safety II, and Safety Differently.
Brian is the CEO and founder of AGLX Consulting, the creator of ZONEFIVE (an objective approach to measuring team effectiveness), and is a member and co-founder of The Flow Consortium.
He earned his MBA, MA, and PMP while serving on active duty, is a Joint Qualified Officer in the U.S. Navy Selective Reserve, and holds multiple certifications and credentials in Scrum, Lean, Agile, data analytics, and more.
Brian often speaks at conferences on the topics of Scrum, Agile, Resilience, High-Reliability Theory, Flow, teamwork, psychological safety, leadership, complex systems, planning, debriefing and more.
