On how organisations are built, changed, and quietly undone by their own structure.
130 essays
Durable advantage is built less on intensity than on cadence, habit, and protected attention. If you want to design routines that stick, reduce attention residue, limit false work, and turn standards into rhythms—read on.
Hard work isn’t one thing. In part one of this series I map three forms leaders confuse—Outthinking, Pure Effort, and Opportunistic positioning—and shows when each helps (and harms). Part two tackles Consistency and Focus, and how to make them compound.
Flat organisations are usually presented as a philosophy. More often they are a headcount. The literature on networked teams and post-hierarchical work is written, almost without exception, from firms
The Scribbler The Case for Friction0:00/615.7681× Good evening, and welcome to this edition of The Scribbler—a newsletter that circles one organisational problem until it shows itself.
In an age of cheap text and AI-generated plausibility, leaders are not misled by too little information but by too much of the wrong kind. In this piece I explore why attention has become a governance risk—and why learning what to ignore now matters as much as what to know.
Metacognition is the discipline of noticing—and revising—your thinking in real time. It sharpens judgement, steadies emotion, and turns debriefs and assumption checks into a practical system for better decisions.
Bad news rarely breaks trust; bad delivery does. Too often managers turn necessary cuts into needless cruelty. Yet, predictability, clear reasons, real control, and concrete compassion can preserve dignity and actually build trust even when decisions hurt.
A 2025 review of authority, trust, coherence and attention—plus a strategic outlook for 2026 on AI governance, provenance, regulation and decision quality. What to prioritise, what to ignore, and why clarity beats theatre.
A practical playbook for human-centred AI: redesigning workflows, building capability, governing judgment, and sustaining talent pipelines so AI amplifies human agency rather than hollowing out the organisation.
Most companies use AI, but few achieve real impact. In part I of this series I explore why people—not tools—determine AI maturity, and why the next serious organisations will dominate the space between pilots and profit.
A practical guide for managers who need candid teams and consistent delivery. Six disciplined moves that sharpen judgment, normalise challenge, and build the structures that keep work honest, focused, and on track.
Psychological safety is often miscast as comfort. It's time to restore a harder edge: as a discipline that lets teams surface error early, challenge authority safely, and keep standards sharp—especially in hybrid work, where voice is fragile and candour is the real performance engine.
AI's fluency enchants, eroding the old signals of competence and authority. The danger is that trust becomes a machine illusion. Leaders must refuse the managerial shortcut and practise noble language—reasoned, responsible speech—to keep trust a human achievement.
AI is said to be reshaping organisational forms, rendering pyramids obsolete and obelisks ascendant. Yet the deeper truth is distortion rather than stability. The “Rhomboid Organisation” captures this skew—unstable, off-balance, authority flattened.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s “mediocre” appointment in Leipzig offers a sharp lesson for today’s hiring. Organisations often chase unicorns, mistaking signals for substance. True value lies in suitability—clarity of purpose, openness to varied forms of competence, and sound judgment—rather than surface c