The wrong thing, beautifully done
Be effective first at achieving your purpose. Then be efficient — because there's little joy in making the wrong thing faster. All you've done is reach the wrong place a little sooner.
Most gates open
A story about an old gate in Lancashire, workplace assumptions, and how easily we accept rules, norms and ways of working without checking whether they're actually locked.
Nobody warns you about life after the startup : startup is a story
I left a company I'd helped carry from barely making payroll to an exit — and standing at the bus stop in the rain, I felt strangely bereft. This is about the emotional arc of a startup, the messy middle that turns out to matter most, and why so many founders feel restless and lost after the exit.
The Danish Beer Debrief
A flopped afternoon workshop in Copenhagen turned into the best lesson in teaching I've had in years — given to me, generously, by the person at the front. On what actually holds a room, and the craft of helping people learn.
How to Get Your Talk Accepted (Not Just Submitted)
Reviewers spend their evenings wading through submissions that read like a form got filled in because a form needed filling in. This is how to avoid being one of them.
In Praise of Badly Formatted Word Documents
My early career was in software testing – and a useful thing the craft gave me had nothing to do with testing software. On what your work leaves behind, and why writing things down is how you find the thread.
How I Manage What I Learn
Collecting isn't learning. A personal knowledge system — Capture, Curate, Crunch, Contribute — for turning what you read into what you do.
Let them eat PowerPoint
A field note on the deck that becomes the point. And brioche.
The Skills You Learn on a Market Stall
What trade skills, commercial awareness and practical judgement can teach us about turning ideas into value.
The talk that ate the afternoon
Here's how to structure a talk with a two-pound stack of index cards - plus the full step-by-step method, free to read in a complimentary edition of The Department of Interesting Things.
What We're Really Managing
Most organisations think they're managing projects, products or people. But what if the thing being managed is the idea — and everything else is infrastructure?
The analogue recommendation engine
A hot Sunday, a stand full of tat, and my 12-year-old turning into a formidable negotiator.