Insights & cases
Notes from inside organisations working hard to change.
Here I share patterns I encounter repeatedly, anonymised cases, and the occasional diagram that explains a point more clearly than the preceding paragraph could.
Writing
Three pieces are currently available. New articles are published roughly every two weeks and also shared on LinkedIn.
The years I read as my own failure were data
Four assignments that could not have worked, what they had in common, and the point at which I stopped seeing the pattern as a personal failure.
Read the piece →
Your change will stall exactly where the leader stops
Organisations improve to the level of the person leading them, then plateau. Why that ceiling is so consistent, and what actually raises it.
Read the piece →
The six things I look at before I have an opinion
Every diagnostic I conduct examines the same six dimensions. It is not a maturity score, but a description of how work moves, where it stalls and what that costs.
Read the piece →In preparation
A report from two dozen teams and several years of data
Quarter-by-quarter measurements from around two dozen teams in one organisation, spanning several years of transformation: what improved, what plateaued and what turned out to predict which teams sustained their gains.
Anonymised, free and written for people who need to make the case internally. Leave a note on the contact page if you would like to receive it when it is published.
Cases
The cases are written from the perspective of what changed for the organisation. Names are removed, and details are confirmed with the client before publication.
The queue behind the queue
A delivery organisation in which every request queued behind every other request. We did not add capacity. We changed which work was started and when problems became visible.
One team, two competing suppliers
Two vendors that competed everywhere else were asked to deliver as one team for a head office on another continent. The solution was not a process. It was creating the conditions for disagreements to be voiced.
The manager who stopped putting out fires
A technical lead promoted into a people-management role, with no support and one operating model: do it yourself, faster. The first thing that changed was not his calendar, but who owned the problems.
Do you recognise your organisation in any of these cases?
That is usually the point when a thirty-minute conversation is worth more than another article.