AJ Maddeny MBA, MS

AJ Maddeny is a Strategic Conflict Advisor. He works with leadership teams when complex decisions stall, not because information is missing, but because negative leadership dynamics turn decision making into a political contest. Competing incentives, role confusion, and untested assumptions quietly derail performance, block execution, and drag mission and strategy off course.

With graduate degrees in Conflict Analysis, Decision Science, and business, AJ builds decision frameworks for complex organizations. For more than twenty five years he has worked on high stakes problems where politics, incentives, and narrative collide. His experience includes consulting assignments with the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, SAIC, the Associated Press, UPI, and other global organizations.

Most organizations are trained to treat a single currency as the scoreboard: revenue, power, budget, title. Under pressure, every concern gets translated into that metric and leaders reach for the same familiar moves, pushing harder and calling it grit or determination. In reality they are balancing time, reputation, autonomy, stability, exposure, and meaning, with personal and institutional survival in the same frame. When all of that is forced through one lens, even very capable people can get locked into reactive positions that protect the metric instead of the outcome they actually care about.

AJ’s work is to separate tools from outcomes and put the full map of interests back in view. He applies decision science that integrates both qualitative judgment and quantitative reality, showing leadership teams which currencies are actually in play and how their choices affect each of them. Conflict analysis exposes the structures that keep those interests colliding. Once the real trade offs are visible, executives can stop arguing over proxies and start making clear, defensible decisions they are prepared to own.

Today AJ focuses on mid market companies, PE portfolio firms, and boutique consulting partners that need a disciplined way to move from protracted disagreement to aligned execution. He also develops the Cognitore Briefs, a series of frameworks on conflict architecture, power mapping, and decision logic that underpin his advisory work.

Across all of these settings, his through line is simple: read the system clearly, name the real interests, and design decisions that are mission affirming, defensible before boards and investors, and broadly supported as fair and workable by the leadership team, rather than leaving strategy at the mercy of unresolved leadership dynamics.