Orientation & Direction (Map)
Direction and orientation — where the organisation is going and where it is now. Articles in this layer explore vision, strategy, painted pictures, and the leadership work of establishing a clear direction.
A field note on exploration, uncertainty, and finding unexpected things.
On a family trip round Europe's museums, a pattern kept surfacing: the best ones curate your attention as carefully as their objects. Here's what that has to teach the places we work — and why the most useful skill might be learning to see the room you're already in.
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.
At a conference, a senior engineer told me he couldn't find a good job. Twenty minutes later, a hiring manager told me she couldn't find good people. They were both right, and they were describing the same problem from opposite sides.
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.
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.
Lost in the Leeds suburbs, I asked a man the way to Horsforth. "I wouldn't start from here," he said. On why knowing where you actually stand is the hardest, bravest step toward where you want to go.
Career advancement follows quieter mechanics than most people expect — patterns of behaviour, systemic contribution, and clarity of intent. A practical exploration of the structural forces that actually move people forward.
In 1944, the OSS published a manual on how to quietly sabotage organisations. Eighty years later, many of its tactics have become standard corporate practice. Read it and you'll recognise your own workplace.