Here’s something most people don’t know about curling: if the ice were perfectly smooth, the stone wouldn’t glide. It would stop dead. A curling stone has a concave bottom. Place it on a flat, polished surface and it creates a vacuum — a suction effect that kills all momentum. A 20kg granite stone, going nowhere. … Read more
Twelve weeks ago, I released Thriving in Turbulence on Leanpub and Kindle. The subtitle read: “Diagnose conditions. Apply the right lever. Build capability.” Accurate. Structural. Forgettable. The book sold. Readers engaged. Feedback arrived. And somewhere in that feedback loop, a pattern emerged that I should have spotted earlier. The Feedback That Changed Everything Three themes … Read more
Originally written in 2023, never published, see Note below. I was sitting in a room with about forty people. A large organisation, several hundred developers across multiple teams, running a Scrum of Scrums-style event to surface their biggest impediments. The usual suspects came up — dependencies, unclear requirements, technical debt. But the issue that kept … Read more
The question isn’t whether you’re changing. It’s whether you’re changing fast enough. The manuscript hit 150,000 words before I stopped counting. Too big. A motivated leader doesn’t have time for a 600-page read. They need something they can finish in a single sitting and apply on Monday. So I cut it. Ruthlessly. Down to around … Read more
Your work spans three spaces—doing deep design, leading design teams, and amplifying design thinking. But they all collide on the same problem: the system around you is becoming more turbulent, not less capable. You’re being asked to hold outcomes steady while the organisation becomes more political, more interdependent, more contradictory. Priorities that contradict each other … Read more
Why This Framework Works the Way It Does Most business books assume you’ll read Chapter 1, then Chapter 2, holding concepts in memory as you build toward mastery. They assume sustained attention. Linear progression. Quiet focus. That’s not how transformation leaders actually work. You’re grabbing ten minutes between crisis meetings. Scanning for something applicable to … Read more