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.
Work in Practice
Work in Practice - practical, tactical, super usable.
"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?
I simply don't trust them
A manager once asked what it would cost to keep the office open all night so she could watch a team she didn't trust. On micromanagement, the hidden cost of not trusting your people — and how that distrust travels, unchanged, all the way to the customer.
The Honest Clock
Cycle time is the hidden distance between having an idea and anyone feeling its value. On flow rather than speed, variation as the real signal, and why the clock measures honesty more than efficiency — the lens on the Idea to Value system.
The man who knew everyone
A friend who worked a conference like his own front room taught me the most underrated skill in any organisation. We don't build relationships with companies — we build them with people, and that's what work actually runs on.
Coffee with Konstantinas
A forgotten bottle of suncream, an hour to kill in a Greek taverna, and a retired schoolteacher who never stopped learning. On how to actually study — and why most of what we call studying isn't learning at all.
Berlin: Field Notes on Noticing
Noticing is a wonderful and valuable human skill - it's also a reflection of ourselves.
The vending machine
An executive came back from active-listening training and turned, overnight, into something out of a horror film. On the ear, the brain and the heart — and the one part of listening no course on earth can install.
The story I hadn't written yet
Adrift and driving cheap sports cars I couldn't afford, I wrote down the future I wanted after my first son was born. It wasn't manifestation. It was orientation — and everything downstream changed. The same thing works in work.
Compete with yourself
I love competition — in sport, on a go-kart track, against myself. But between people inside a team it does something quietly disastrous: it makes everyone go quiet. Why internal competition kills communication, and what to do instead.