We weren't lost. We just hadn't found this river yet.
A field note on exploration, uncertainty, and finding unexpected things.
Orientation & Direction
Direction and orientation — where we're is going and where we are now. Essays in this layer explore vision, strategy, painted pictures, and the work of establishing a clear direction.
The case for a Chief Curation Officer
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.
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.
Remaining Relevant in a Changing Job Market
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.
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.
I wouldn't start from here
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.
How To Climb the Career Ladder Thoughtfully
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.
Competing Priorities: The Hidden Cost of Misalignment at Work
When everything is urgent, urgency loses meaning. A practical exploration of the hidden human cost of competing priorities — how misalignment converts effort into exhaustion, and why clarity is an act of care rather than a management technique.
Objects and Models: Why Work Never Matches the Diagram
Plans, roadmaps, org charts — these are necessary objects. But the object is not the work. A thoughtful exploration of why leadership means staying close to reality rather than defending the model.
Buckminster Fuller and the Impact We Don’t See
In 1927, Fuller stood by Lake Michigan in crisis — and made a private decision that changed everything. A reflection on how individual choices propagate through systems, and why we are shaping more than we can see.
The Rule of 150: Why Growing Organisations Lose Their Story
The Rule of 150 is not really about headcount. It is about the moment when shared meaning stops travelling naturally — when the story that once held everything together begins to thin. A practical exploration of what organisations lose as they grow, and how to protect it.