About

I write about the gap between how organisations actually work and how we pretend they work.

The useful context: I’m not an outside observer. I work inside a ninety-four-thousand-person technology consulting firm at VP level, which means I spend a significant portion of my professional life advising large organisations on exactly the kinds of things I write about here — the transformation programmes, the systematic approaches applied to fundamentally human problems, the frameworks that promise to make the messy predictable. The proximity is deliberate. The tension is the point.

The writing here is what happens when there’s no client in the room.

Most of what gets published about technology and organisations is either promotional or academic. The promotional version tells you what’s possible. The academic version tells you what was measurable. Neither of them tends to engage with what it’s actually like to watch these things from the inside — when the consultant has left, the post-its are peeling off the wall, and the organisation is doing what it was always going to do anyway.

I’ve been watching that for twenty-five years. I have some thoughts.

The subjects range — artificial intelligence, leadership, professional pathology, consciousness, the civilisational-scale questions that start to accumulate once you spend long enough looking at how humans build systems to contain other humans. The underlying question is always the same: what actually works for people, and why do we keep designing as though it didn’t matter?

Some of these conclusions are uncomfortable. That’s intentional.

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