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Ideas / working positions
The work beneath the work.
Notes on organisations, technology and human agency — and on the conditions that make change real rather than merely well described.
Most of the interesting problems are not waiting for a new tool. They are hiding inside the relationship between a system and the people asked to live in it.
I’m interested in what organisations make visible, what they make difficult to say and how technology changes the room people have to think and act. These positions are provisional, but they are not neutral. They are the questions I use to decide what is worth building.
The organisation is the experience of its systems.
An organisation is not its org chart, process map or declared values. It is the pattern people encounter while trying to do something together.
That pattern is made from permissions and pressures, incentives and silences, decisions that are explicit and work that has simply accumulated. A system can look coherent from above while asking the people inside it to improvise their way around its contradictions.
The practical question is not whether the design is elegant. It is who can act, who has to wait, what becomes invisible and where the cost lands. Making those conditions legible is often the beginning of useful organisational change.
Related: how I work →
AI should return judgement to people.
The strongest use of an intelligent system is not to remove people from a process. It is to give them better evidence, wider attention and clearer boundaries.
There is a temptation to treat automation as an escape from judgement. But judgement does not disappear when a system makes a recommendation; it becomes harder to see. Someone still decides what counts, what is safe to ignore and what the organisation is prepared to do about the result.
Useful AI therefore needs more than fluency. It needs traceability, restraint and a visible distinction between what the system knows, what it infers and where it should stop. The point is not to make people decorative. It is to make their judgement better informed.
Related work: Kanban Board Steward →
Transformation is not the same as assimilation.
Systems are very good at absorbing the language of care, creativity, autonomy and participation without being changed by any of them.
A new process can borrow the vocabulary of empowerment while leaving the old distribution of power untouched. A tool can sound human while narrowing what people are allowed to notice. A programme can celebrate curiosity while punishing the uncertainty that curiosity requires.
The test of transformation is not whether the new language has spread. It is whether people can see more clearly, decide with more confidence and do something that was previously difficult or impossible. Change has happened when the surrounding conditions have changed with them.
Related work: Alignment Lab →
Building is a way of thinking.
A prototype is an argument placed in someone’s hands. It allows an idea to meet reality before the story around it becomes too comfortable.
Making something tangible changes the quality of the conversation. People can respond to the actual friction rather than the imagined version. Assumptions become visible. The edges of the problem stop being theoretical.
This is why I build before every question has been resolved. Not because speed is inherently virtuous, but because contact with reality is a better source of learning than another round of confident agreement.
See the work →
The territory
Technology, organisation and the space people have to act.
I want to keep working where those three things meet: close enough to understand the system, curious enough to question its assumptions and practical enough to change what people can do next.