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.
Meeting Notes
Essays that started life as a Meeting Notes newsletter.
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.
Let them eat PowerPoint
A field note on the deck that becomes the point. And brioche.
Is the CV Still the Best Way to Represent Professional Value?
The CV has survived decades of reinvention around it — and viewed as a communication tool with a purpose, an audience and a context, that survival makes sense. What's missing is something else entirely.
Good teaching is the creation of understanding
Good teaching is not the transfer of information.
It is the creation of understanding.
You are more than your job
It's 3pm on a Tuesday. The meeting isn't terrible. The job isn't terrible. But a small voice keeps appearing: is this really all of me?
The conditions behind great creative work
For creativity to emerge it typically needs a different question: how do we discover what might be possible? That requires different conditions. Less friction. More trust. More room for work that can't yet prove its value in a spreadsheet.
Hope, spirit and belief - Meeting Notes
Impact, Letters and Noise - Meeting Notes
The ratio, again - Meeting Notes
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.
When a good idea isn't enough
Most ideas don't stall because they're wrong. They stall because they never created value for the listener — and there's a small shift that changes how a room responds.