Writing
Systems and Empathy
Essays on structure, and on why organisations with everything going for them still fail to compound.
Seven questions we ask in the first fifteen minutes
Every leadership team believes it knows whether its problem is the structure or the people, and roughly half of them are wrong with total conviction. These are the seven questions we use to sort it. They do not settle anything. They are the fastest way we know to make the right argument start.
What happens when you leave?
Every engagement ends. Most end twice: once when the invoices stop, and again a few months later when the work quietly stops too. The second ending is the one nobody puts in the closing report. Here is how to design a handback that holds, and how to test it in week two rather than week twenty.
Why do most AI pilots fail?
Roughly 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots produce no measurable P&L impact, and almost none of them fail for technical reasons. They fail because they were demonstrations, not pilots, designed to prove a capability works rather than to change a decision that was going to be made anyway.
Is your problem structure, or is it people?
Two organisations can be failing for opposite reasons and look identical from the inside. One has systems and no empathy. One has empathy and no systems. They need opposite interventions, and getting the diagnosis wrong is what most transformation budgets are spent on.