About the journal
Human Side
Human Side is Dr. Sarah Dyson’s journal on ethical AI leadership. The field notes stay with the people who still have to answer once an intelligent system is in the room.
Dr. Sarah Dyson is a psychologist and leadership scholar who works where intelligent systems meet the people who still have to answer for them. She is Program Lead and Assistant Professor in the Doctorate of Digital Enterprise Leadership at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, and Associate Professor at National University.
She has taught at Harrisburg since 2020: graduate capstone, research methods, emotional intelligence for project managers, and requirements analysis. Before that she spent more than a decade as an entrepreneur and chief executive in mental health, and as a research consultant in public and private organizations.
Her research follows how AI, media, emotion, and motivation change the skills, attitudes, and behaviors of project managers and leaders. The record is on the Research page. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology, with a specialization in social psychology, from Walden University, and an M.S. in Business Management and Information Management from Colorado Technical University. She is a member of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars.
Program Lead and Assistant Professor
Doctorate of Digital Enterprise Leadership, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology
Associate Professor
National University · Since 2022
Editor-in-Chief
Beyond the Project Horizon: Journal of the Center for Project Management Innovation · Harrisburg University of Science and Technology
Contact
For the journal, speaking, and questions about the work.
- [email protected]
- Sarah Dyson Ph.D.
- Faculty
- Harrisburg University
- Office
- 717-901-5100, ext. 1654
- Based in
- Jonesboro, Arkansas
Themes
These are the questions the journal returns to. New field notes move across them so the work does not collapse into a single subject.
Status / SCARF under AI
How status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness move when a team works beside a fluent agent.
Attachment and tool loss
What happens to identity and relatedness when a familiar agent is retired, swapped, or silently degraded.
Trust as capital
Treat trust as deposits, withdrawals, and calls — measurable, dated, and owned after a system recommends.
Explainability as a leadership skill
What a non-technical leader actually needs to stand behind an opaque path — translation, not transparency theater.
Fairness in the loop
Who gets seen when a shortlist, score, or routing path is touched by a model — quiet bias in fluent output.
Human overhead of agents
The review load, exception handling, and unpaid vigilance that never appears in the vendor deck.
Named override
An agentic path that can proceed without asking is unclaimed authority until a person, role, and channel are named.
Governance that fits in a week
Controls people actually use this week, not a policy PDF. Measures that detect trust withdrawal and agency loss.
Rituals after the model moves
Handoffs, reviews, and stand-ups still required when automation runs — keeping a person on the hook.
Near-miss and rollback
Pilot failure, scale-back, rehire, or the miss that never entered the log — what the metrics missed.
ADHD / neurodivergent scaffolding
AI as executive-function support in project management and leadership — strengths-based use, evaluation bias, load.
EI under AI load
Self-awareness, regulation, and empathy when tools accelerate work — priorities leaders still under-build while buying software.
Retiring an agent without retiring the team
How to take a system out of production without taking the team's competence with it.
For the portable pause before a system starts to sound like a colleague, see the Toolkit.