The three ways ideas change (or don't)
Progress isn't movement — it's seeing. What stop-motion animation reveals about how your ideas actually become valuable.
Idea & Value
How ideas move to value — the gap, the cost, the runway, and the learning. Essays in this layer explore the forces that determine whether our investments of money, time, energy and attention produces outcomes.
Organisations are not machines
We borrowed our language for organisations from the factory floor. But the parts that decide whether good work happens are the parts no machine can see.
How to lead with curiosity
The meeting moved on. Someone named the problem, proposed the solution, and the room agreed. Six months later, it turns out you were right. On developing curiosity as a practice — whether anyone listens or not.
AI, Interpretation, and the Widening Gap Between Idea and Value
Many organisations replacing people with AI aren't cutting costs — they're moving them, and often widening the gap between their ideas and the value those ideas should generate.
The shift from projects to products is real — and it's not just a renaming exercise
A senior leader stands in front of a slide titled "Our Product Operating Model" and describes, in fluent jargon, what is essentially a project plan with new vocabulary. The shift most enterprises are making from projects to products is real — and it is rarely the shift they think it is.
Six meetings to buy broadband
Ten executives spent six meetings deciding a thousand-pound broadband upgrade. On why debate without evidence is cost — and the smallest test is the fastest path forward.
The four types of value
The question is not whether something is a cost. Everything requires investment. The question is whether that investment moves the organisation closer to creating something valuable.
Turning around a struggling team — a six-stage approach
Most struggling teams are not suffering from a lack of activity. They are suffering from a lack of understanding. Before you change anything, you need to see it clearly. This is the approach I have used — and coached others in — for turning around struggling teams.
The Subtotal Button — What a Supermarket Checkout Taught Me About Metrics
In the summer of 1996, I discovered a button that paused the performance clock. Within weeks I was the fastest checkout operator in the West of Sheffield, then the company. Productivity, according to the numbers, had exploded. Cash in the bank had not.
Everything between idea and value is cost — the solo creator's central problem
Most people aren't short of ideas — they run out of runway before the idea pays back. A canonical Cultivated essay for solo creators, makers, and independent builders on the gap between idea and value, and why everything inside it is cost.
No More Cowboys
I spent the better part of a year planning "No More Cowboys" before Checkatrade beat me to it. On why planning feels safe, only doing reveals the truth, and the very good plan beats the best one.
A sartorial disaster
I'm a sartorial disaster. My friend wasn't — and when strangers asked him to make their clothes, he leapt without once weighing the problems that came with it. On the two sides of every coin, and when not to turn it over.