Everything published, most recent first. Two a week: a standalone piece, and a reflection on that week's conversation.
337 essays
Some organisations do not merely fail to develop judgement in the people they appoint. They select against it—and in a culture where everyone first-names the chief executive, the selection is almost invisible.
An agent, in law and in the older political vocabulary, is someone who exercises judgement on another's behalf and answers for having exercised it. The systems we have agreed to call agents can do the first and not the second, and the evidence on what that costs has started to arrive.
Someone is promoted, moved sideways in a restructure, or hired in on the strength of a document. Within a quarter the gap is obvious and a fortnight's certification is bought to close it. The evidence says the first move was made on the wrong signal and the second is the weakest remedy available.
A certificate records that a person completed a defined process on a defined day. It does not record whether judgement was formed — and in most organisations, nobody is asking the second question, because the first one has tidied the file.
Pamela Wyatt says the outsider's job is to adapt, not impose. Then she describes overruling a seating convention, redesigning a room over its users' objections, and building a board pipeline where none existed. The exception is the argument.
The person who takes on eight things and ruins all eight is following a specification, not indulging a personality. Organisations grow the arms themselves, because busyness is legible and judgement is not.
The remedy has no dashboard, vests over years, and mostly benefits your successor—which is precisely why it is avoided. The final essay in the Prior Obligations series sets out what raising the general level of competence actually requires, and why no tool can be bought in its place.
I went into this conversation expecting to press a guest on whether universities are becoming trade schools. He declined the question and gave me a better one — about trust, regulation, and the difference between being consulted and having authorship.
The mandate travels downward and the exemption stays where it was written. The fourth essay in the Prior Obligations series examines organisations that require AI of the crew while the bridge quietly abstains, the consumption quota that enforces it, and the questions a director might ask.
Asked to choose between discipline and judgement, David Harvie had just spent an hour describing his disciplines. He chose judgement anyway. On a system that worked exactly as designed, what it cost the people it promoted, and why he has rebuilt a gentler version of it.
I can audit a model's output on leadership and must take its tax advice on faith. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and it is not psychological. The third essay in the Prior Obligations series argues that AI does not deskill the competent—it unmasks the fake.
Why 'human in the loop' means nothing if the human can no longer tell when the machine is wrong — on judgement, the medieval trivium, and what nine years of flat AI returns are actually measuring.
A score creates an owner, a dashboard, a target, and a budget—everything except an improvement in the condition it measures. The second essay in the Prior Obligations series examines what happens when 'psychological debt' becomes a number, and which way its arrows actually run.
Six new names for old wounds. The 'psychological debt' said to accompany AI is neither novel nor peculiar to the technology—it is the perennial business of managing people through change. The first of five essays on what the diagnosis gets right, and what it conveniently overlooks.
An executive search brief gets the diagnosis right: the constraint on value is not technical. Then it advertises a vacancy. The authority to prioritise, to fund, and to stop already sits with someone. Creating a post rather than confronting an incumbent is a governance evasion.