Releasing Business Agility
Releasing Agility is not a framework — it’s a sense-making lens for leaders. Learn how meaning, reality, and people connect to execution through Idea → Value.
The Pillars of Life
Life cannot be balanced — only oriented. This essay explores the Pillars of Life: a way of looking at the tensions across the pillars that make us who we are.
The white van man with the biscuits
The M25 is not designed to run at maximum capacity. Neither is a work system. Why slack isn't wasted capacity — and how to protect the space where human creativity happens.
Capable vs capability — building people who can deliver value
Most organisations misunderstand “capability.” This guide explains the difference between capable and capability—and how to develop people who can deliver value now and in the future.
Field Notes about coaching — and building a coaching function
Field notes from doing it - coaching people, and building and running the internal teams that coach for a living. A few notes that I've found matter.
What you made when nobody was paying you
A childhood spent making scrappy films taught me more about my career than any appraisal ever did. Not a five-year plan or a ladder to climb — a small compass built from three questions: how you naturally operate, where you add something, and what keeps you well.
Oslo, with no plan
Four days in Oslo, one day of work, a lot of wandering, a trip out onto the fjord and four films made. On flânerie, attention and what happens when you stop asking a walk to be useful.
Louder isn't righter
A room full of very sure people, a client caught in the crossfire, and a line I'd once heard about opinionated people annoying each other. On working with strong opinions — without becoming another one.
Attention Is the Microphone
A trip to Zurich to give a keynote, and what happened when I carried a microphone around the city instead of just my usual camera. On church bells, a man eating a kebab on a bicycle, and why the most productive afternoon of the trip looked, on paper, like doing almost nothing.
"This is a fast-paced environment"
We treat hiring as though we're buying a spare part — someone left, there's a hole, find a replacement roughly the same shape. But you're not filling a vacancy. You're deciding what your organisation becomes, and what happens to every idea that travels through it after them.
The Warm and Fluffy Test
On hard and soft communication, and why rigidity is the real problem.
The twelve people behind me
A job interview, a British roadworks joke, and a question: in any organisation, how many people make the thing of value — and how many are there to arrange, watch and manage the making of it?