Christopher Burns has been a media executive and information industry consultant for 30 years, working with governments, industries and the private sector to explore the opportunities of the emerging Information Age. His newest book, Deadly Decisions, searches through the details of a dozen well-known information disasters—the sinking of the Titanic, the explosion of the Shuttle Challenger, the near meltdown of Three Mile Island, the failure to heed warnings of the 9/11 attack—to find out how so many well funded and leading-edge organizations could turn out to be so dead wrong. What is it about the biology of the brain, the behavior of groups and the structure of organizations that keeps getting us into trouble? How can we learn to live and work together safely when the information we depend upon is so vulnerable to error?

With early training in publishing and advanced technology, Burns started out on the staff at Arthur D. Little, the Boston-based research and consulting company, where he was instrumental in the development of several pioneer information services for business and consumers, including news management systems for the largest US publications, the five-language documentation for UN headquarters, and office information systems for some of the world’s largest corporations. He joined the Washington Post Company in 1978 as Vice President for Planning, and moved to the Minneapolis Star and Tribune as Senior Vice President and Associate Publisher. In 1983, he began his own consulting practice to focus on the long range information management issues that were arising from dramatically new computer and communications tools. While most of the world’s attention was directed to the technologies involved, he began to work on the social, economic and cognitive problems that were boiling up around these new systems. He helped clients design new electronic publishing services, new internal news management organizations, as well as new digital standards and systems for industries including music, healthcare, engineering and publishing itself.

Everyone was asking how startups, big corporations, industries and government can be more agile and well-informed, and the answer usually involved more technology. But in his own reading, and in a few lofty client assignments, he began to look at the human side of what was going on: most of the catastrophic mistakes seemed to be caused by our failure to grapple effectively with—and this was the leap—truth.  Technology had nothing to do with it. He started to explore the dimensions of this problem by studying the neurology, philosophy and sociology of truth systems until the articles, speeches and white papers shoe-horned into his consulting work could no longer contain what he was finding. A book seemed to be the only legal remedy.

Burns graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and took graduate courses at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard. He served as an Army information officer in Vietnam in 1969, and took a year off from consulting in 1995 to work as Executive Editor of UPI, the worldwide wire service. In 1996, he published the Seashell Anthology of Poetry, the great English and American poems of the last five hundred years, and in 2005, Island Wilderness, an historical novel about the early years of Martha's Vineyard. He served on several national commissions on information and communications technology, economics and public policy, and on the board of the Information Industry Association for eight years. He lives with his wife in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Mr. Burns is a frequent speaker at planning meetings, project kickoffs and management seminars.
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