About
John Sambrook
Practical, focused, effective. I help organizations find the real constraint, fix it, and keep the improvement going. Sometimes that means advice. Sometimes it means hands-on work. Often it means both.
I founded Common Sense Systems in 1996. I am a systems engineer who spent decades building safety-critical embedded software for medical devices before turning that same discipline toward the organizations and businesses that need it most. Based in Kirkland, Washington, I help organizations figure out what is actually stuck and make progress, whether the problem is operational, structural, strategic, or technical.
My engineering career includes significant work at SonoSite, where I developed software for portable ultrasound systems, and at Verasonics, working on research ultrasound platforms. Earlier roles involved defibrillators and other Class C medical devices, with deep expertise in real-time operating systems, device drivers, and QA/regulatory affairs. That background means I do not just advise from the sidelines; I know how to build, test, and ship real systems. If the job needs implementation, I am comfortable doing that too.
In the 1990s, I studied Theory of Constraints extensively under Eli Goldratt, attending his conferences and participating in TOC for Education. I completed my formal Jonah training later, in 2006, at Washington State University (more on that below). That training shaped my core method: find the constraint, understand the conflict that sustains it, and design a solution that resolves the conflict without compromise. It is a rigorous, logical approach that cuts through the political fog that often surrounds operational problems in any organization. I am drawn to the problems that everyone else has written off as unsolvable or accepted as just the way things are.
Today, I work with executives, leadership teams, and boards on problems that span departmental boundaries: complex discharge bottlenecks in hospitals, sales process breakdowns, workforce allocation conflicts, regulatory compliance challenges, and the structural policy contradictions that keep these problems stuck. My approach combines AI-assisted analysis of operational data and policy documents with the kind of structured reasoning that surfaces root causes rather than symptoms. I have also built cross-platform build and release systems, licensing tools, workflow automation, and proof-of-concept tooling that reduce manual work and speed delivery. In the past year, I have been doing real operational work with AI coding workflows, including moving this website from a React SPA to Astro with AI help and using Claude Code, Codex, and Grok to get through practical problems like taxes and other business tasks. I am comfortable doing the consulting, the technical implementation, or both together when that is what creates the right result.
I try to show up well in meetings — asking the questions that reframe stalled conversations, and recognizing good work when I see it, praising people for what they actually accomplished rather than offering empty flattery. I believe the work should leave clients more capable, not more dependent, and that a no-losers result is the right result.
I serve organizations that need practical improvement work, whether they are local, regional, or remote. Engagements range from focused constraint analyses and process automation projects to implementation help and ongoing advisory relationships. I also build small self-serve diagnostics when a quick first answer is the right thing to offer. Most run two to six weeks with fixed fees and explicit deliverables.
Professional Credentials
Issued by TOCICO, the international certification body for Theory of Constraints.
TOC Fundamentals Certified (TOCFC)
Mastery of the core TOC body of knowledge: the Five Focusing Steps, throughput accounting, and constraint identification.
Thinking Processes Practitioner (TOCPC)
Practitioner-level proficiency in the TOC logical tools: Evaporating Cloud, Current Reality Tree, Future Reality Tree, and Prerequisite/Transition Trees.
Critical Chain Project Management Practitioner (TOCPC)
Practitioner-level proficiency in Critical Chain scheduling, buffer management, and multi-project resource contention.
TOC Strategic Thinking Process Program "Jonah"
Completion of the Jonah program — the flagship TOC education in strategic thinking, constraint identification, and the full suite of Thinking Process tools for driving organizational change.
I completed my Jonah training in 2006, as a student in Dr. James Holt's EM-526 class at the WSU Graduate School. The dates above are the dates TOCICO issued each digital credential, which is why the Jonah credential carries a later issue date than the coursework.
In their own words
I brought John Sambrook onto a risky and highly political project that had far-reaching consequences within our company. As the second software engineer on the team, me being the first, John found solutions to difficult problems, problems I could not have solved without him, thwarting doom over and over again. He produced documentation and code at a professional level I have rarely seen elsewhere in my thirty years of software engineering. The project was so successful, the team was spun off as its own company, which now employs 700 people.
I've run enough companies to know the difference between "competitive" and unfair. At Applied Microsystems, we had an unfair advantage—and one of the clearest examples came from John Sambrook and the outstanding engineers he assembled and led. John's group built our symbolic debugger and intelligent trace disassembler. Other tools could show you pieces—addresses, disassembly, maybe a shaky stack trace. John's team built a reconstruction engine that turned raw trace data into a coherent, source-correlated story of what the target processor actually did, even with interrupts, optimized code, and messy control flow. Hewlett-Packard was a giant competitor—great people, huge resources—but that kind of deep, reality-faithful tooling is hard for big organizations to justify and harder to execute. HP could sell tools. We could deliver the truth. And customers felt that immediately when they hit the hard bugs.
Want to learn more?
Let us know what you are trying to solve and we will propose a path forward.