Wesley Winkler studied strategic intelligence at Liberty University. At the time, it was one of only three schools outside the service academies where you could study it.
He came out of college wanting to work for the FBI. Applied for a position at a new center being built in Winchester, Virginia. He got a provisional acceptance, but the bureau told him to sit tight while his clearance worked its way through.
But he had gotten married and had a kid on the way. The FBI needed another year to finish the paperwork. So in a moment of what he calls sheer economic desperation, he walked into a recruiting station and enlisted in the Army.
The plan was to join the reserves and come back to the FBI job after training. He had planned to commission as an officer, but his recruiting station forgot to send in the paperwork. The selection boards only met quarterly, and with a wife and a baby on the way, he couldn’t afford to wait.
“I was like, hey, you know what, I don’t care, just enlist me,” he says.
He went to infantry school at Fort Benning, then airborne school, and eventually tried out for Psychological Operations at assessment and selection.
Military service ran in the family. Grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the Navy. His father in the Air Force. Uncles in the Army. September 11 happened while he was growing up, and that weighed on the decision too, as it did for many people.
One of the lessons he took from the military was about organizational performance.
“If you wanna raise organizational performance, you can’t just focus on your top performers,” he says. “You’ve gotta bring up the baseline. You’ve gotta find your lagging lines, your lagging indicators, and you’ve gotta bring that up to a standard. And that raises the overall performance of the organization more.”
He carried that thinking with him when he left.
“The way that work culture has evolved in the United States is such that if you want to be anything and you want to make it anything, you’ve got to put in all that extra work anyways and all that extra time,” Winkler says. “But it’s on someone else’s terms.”
He wanted the flexibility to be present for his family while still putting in the hours. Starting a business still took serious time and effort, but on a schedule he controlled.
The other piece was the problem he kept seeing and nobody seemed to be solving. Defense conversations kept circling around lethality and mobility, around building better weapons and faster platforms. But the thing being defended, the people and communities on the other side of all that hardware, was getting less attention.
“We keep talking about the military as the first line of defense, but the first line of defense is actually our people and our communities and the humans involved in everyday life,” he says. “And there’s not a lot of people focused on that.”
He started Metanoia Systems to work in that space.
The company works in what Winkler calls human systems engineering. That means looking at how an organization’s automations, processes, tools, and people fit together, then modeling those systems and designing interventions to change how they perform.
One recent client engagement involved building a platform to help preempt child sexual assault by mapping all the variables in a system and finding the places where you can intervene, teaching and training parents and kids to prevent harm before it happens. Other work has included propaganda analysis and looking at distribution mechanisms.
“Wherever there’s a hard problem that’s really squishy and hard to define and difficult to put in a one-liner, that’s where we like to hang out,” Winkler says.
Metanoia has two wings. The commercial side operates under the Metanoia Systems name. The federal side runs through Cogent Gray, which started as Winkler’s consulting business and was rolled up under Metanoia to maintain the separate infrastructure required for government cybersecurity compliance. The federal side slowed down earlier this year while DOGE was shaking things up and SBIR funding was frozen, but proposals and teaming arrangements have started picking back up.
Metanoia is preparing to launch an enterprise software platform called HSynth, short for Human and Synthetic Interactions. It covers work and process management and tacit knowledge capture, with a particular focus on cognitive load management. The target is small and medium enterprises.
The problem it addresses is skill atrophy.
Everyone who has served has done land navigation with a map, a compass, and a pencil. In a denied environment, when you don’t have GPS, what are you going to do? He sees the same thing happening inside organizations adopting AI.
“You basically set your timer,” he says. “How long do you have in your organization before that capability is completely gone from the humans that are inside of it, and now you’re stuck lassoed to an AI capability?”
His research centers on a concept called cognitive extension. Humans form tight couplings with their tools, from a pencil to an AI system, and develop the sensory and neural pathways to integrate feedback from those tools into their decisions. But AI, Winkler says, disrupts that.
“It is a facade of cognitive extension,” he says. “It makes you feel like you have extended into your sensory environment more than you have. But actually, what you’ve done is you’ve cut yourself off from all the sensory input that you need to make expert decisions.”
Some implementation patterns lead to genuine cognitive extension with AI. Others start the clock on losing the skill entirely. And leaders, he says, are some of the worst offenders.
“They’ll plug everything into ChatGPT, or they’ll be like, well, I don’t trust what my junior is saying, so I’m gonna go run it through this algorithm,” he says. “And he who controls the algorithm controls everything at the top.”
Metanoia’s answer to this sounds counterintuitive. They help clients figure out where to build friction back into their processes.
“There’s a real rush to optimize, optimize, optimize,” Winkler says. “But knowing where to have intentional friction” is the real work. “Friction and pain and distress and discomfort are the cues to tune in, to go deeper and to really dig into what’s going on.”
Placing friction at specific points in a process prevents larger problems later. It tips people back toward their own expert judgment instead of letting them defer to an algorithm.
The company has adapted NASA’s Task Load Index into a seven-point scale for measuring cognitive load across tasks. They track factors like working memory chunks, how many things a person is holding in their head at one time, and use that data to redistribute work along the lines of cognitive and performance load rather than just hours in the day.
The research behind it is specific. Most people have about four hours of creative problem-solving capacity per day. After that threshold, output quality drops. If an organization knows when someone has hit that ceiling, it can set up checks and balances for the work produced after that point, rather than pretending every hour is equal.
Engagements typically start small. Many clients come in with a defined problem, and the team solves it in a week or two. The company offers a flat-rate, two-week research package at ten thousand dollars for organizations that want to test the relationship. From there, work can grow into longer partnerships or platform licensing through the SaaS model.
“We don’t do AI for AI’s sake,” Winkler says. “If we do AI, it’s because it has some sort of tangible impact on the human system you’re trying to influence.”
About once a quarter, Metanoia runs a two-day, in-person course called Systems Thinking for AI Leaders and Executives. Small cohorts, typically gathered in a cabin overlooking a lake or a similar setting designed to pull people out of their daily routines. The course walks participants through hands-on labs with AI, but this is not a prompt engineering class or a vibe coding class.
“This is a, hey, can you understand the technology, and can you understand when someone, particularly a vendor, is bullshitting you about their AI capability,” Winkler says.
Beyond the labs, the course covers how to manage the people doing the actual engineering and how to ask intelligent questions. It focuses on building organizational resilience against what Winkler calls AI bubble traps. Tuition is twenty-five hundred dollars with food and programming included. Nonprofits get a twenty-five percent discount.
The course is in person, not online. That’s deliberate.
“There’s some really interesting research on things like green space exposure and decision making,” he says. “Something that sounds so disconnected from AI, like, hey, we recommend that before you make a big decision, you take a walk where there’s some trees. Remarkably, that radically impacts your decision-making calculus and you make better decisions after it.”
People can only take in and process so much information, he points out. The more they can step away from daily operations, the more deeply they can sit with new material.
When asked what question he wished he’d been asked, Winkler brought up community development, and why an Army PSYOP veteran cares about it.
“Community development is all about your interpersonal relationships,” he says. “Every person is in a time and a space and a place with different layers of connection and different layers of beliefs and everything in history that’s kind of led up to that point. And community is where real life happens.”
With how divisive things have gotten, he says, getting out and being in the friction of real human interaction is where answers start. You can’t heal a division where there’s no interaction. As digital communities become more separate, finding ways to develop community where people interact in a healthy way is the first condition for addressing everything else.
His elevator pitch comes from the special operations community, from a set of principles called the SOF Truths. Truth number one: humans are more important than hardware.
“You can have the best hardware in the world, but if you don’t take care of your humans, you’re still gonna lose the war,” he says. “You might win some battles, but you’re gonna lose the war.”
Winkler lives in Huntsville, Alabama, in the middle of the defense tech and additive manufacturing boom. He came from a PSYOP background, studied intelligence, tried to join the FBI, got enlisted instead, and built a company around a problem he kept seeing and nobody seemed to be working on.
“If you allow us to be your development partner,” he says, “you have our guarantee that we’re gonna give it our absolute best effort to put the human over and above all the technology, because it’s people that we build things for, not machines.”
Wesley Winkler is the Founder of Metanoia Systems, based in Huntsville, Alabama. A U.S. Army veteran with a background in Psychological Operations, Winkler studied strategic intelligence at Liberty University. Metanoia Systems works at the intersection of complex adaptive system science, cognitive behavioral psychology, and technological integration, helping organizations solve problems in human systems engineering. The company’s federal wing, Cogent Gray, serves government clients. Metanoia also runs a quarterly in-person course, Systems Thinking for AI Leaders and Executives, for senior leaders working with AI.