Starting The Change Energy Series
Why does important change take more energy than it should? A body of thought cannot be written into existence alone. The ideas need rooms to be wrong in. I am starting a monthly gathering in Lincoln for senior leaders of established organizations who are trying to move something meaningful without burning out their people or […]
The Platform Was Not the Bottleneck
A leadership team I sat with had spent two years convinced their platform was the problem. The platform was old. The platform was slow. The platform required workarounds. The roadmap to replace it had been drawn up and redrawn. The case for replacement was internally accepted as obvious. When we looked at what was actually […]
The Process Everyone Knows Is Broken
I have lost count of the meetings where every person in the room agreed the process was broken, and then walked out of the room and did the thing the broken process required them to do. The agreement was real. The complaint was real. The understanding of the cost was real. And the next day, […]
Evidence Without Permission
The evidence was available, but no one had permission to act on it. This is one of the patterns I see most often in organizations that have invested in good data, good analytics, and good reporting, and yet seem unable to move on what those investments produce. The dashboards are there. The numbers are clear. […]
The Love Test
For years I have watched founders, intrapreneurs, and senior leaders pitch ideas. The patterns are familiar. Uber for X. eBay for X. Computer vision to X. AI to X. I have given up trying to guess which ideas are good. I cannot do it reliably. Nobody can. What I have learned to listen for instead […]
Funding the Idea Nobody Could Defend
I watched a team continue funding an idea nobody could defend. The work had been going for a year. The original sponsor had moved on. The data, when anyone looked at it, said the idea was not producing what it had promised. The customer signal said it was not what they had asked for. The […]
A Standard of Care
I keep coming back to a story I’m not sure is true. The story is that Roman engineers were required to live under the bridges they built, with their families, until the structures had proven safe. Apocryphal or not, the story has the right shape. It says: the people who design the work are personally […]