Derrick Bransby is a PhD candidate at Harvard Business School, where he studies how teams accomplish complex work in novel contexts, highlighting the everyday acts they use to organize on the fly. Combining quantitative and qualitative field data, he explains how people in organizations collaborate to solve problems, manage creative work, and take, make, and experience risk while attempting to break ground in new territory. His dissertation advances the concept of disciplined flexibility - a strategy teams use to navigate uncertainty by building flexible yet stable structures that guide execution and learning in tandem. His field sites span diverse work settings, including concert touring and live event production, civil aviation, health care delivery, and life sciences. His insights appear in  Academy of Management Discoveries, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, and Harvard Business Review. 

Before enrolling at Harvard, Derrick earned an MBA from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and a BS from the University of Pittsburgh in Industrial Engineering. He brings more than eight years of professional consulting experience to his work. He is a Research Affiliate in the Center for Innovative Leadership at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.