Idea to Value (Physics)
Many organisations replacing people with AI aren't cutting costs — they're moving them, and often widening the gap between their ideas and the value those ideas should generate.
Idea to Value (Physics)
A senior leader stands in front of a slide titled "Our Product Operating Model" and describes, in fluent jargon, what is essentially a project plan with new vocabulary. The shift most enterprises are making from projects to products is real — and it is rarely the shift they think it is.
Communication (Wiring)
Most ideas don't stall because they're wrong. They stall because they never created value for the listener — and there's a small shift that changes how a room responds.
meeting notes
Meeting Notes is Cultivated's weekly letter — This week: Thinking about the gap between action and knowing. Sent Sunday. This is the members only archive version.
Idea to Value (Physics)
Ten executives spent six meetings deciding a thousand-pound broadband upgrade. On why debate without evidence is cost — and the smallest test is the fastest path forward.
Orientation & Direction (Map)
At a conference, a senior engineer told me he couldn't find a good job. Twenty minutes later, a hiring manager told me she couldn't find good people. They were both right, and they were describing the same problem from opposite sides.
Communication (Wiring)
A leader once ended a call saying she wanted "a stick to hit them with." On ranking teams, gaming the numbers, and why a team's metrics are a mirror — not a lever.
Idea to Value (Physics)
The question is not whether something is a cost. Everything requires investment. The question is whether that investment moves the organisation closer to creating something valuable.
Orientation & Direction (Map)
Most struggling teams are not suffering from a lack of activity. They are suffering from a lack of understanding. Before you change anything, you need to see it clearly. This is the approach I have used — and coached others in — for turning around struggling teams.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Usually read as the regret of waste, mottainai points somewhere more hopeful: the time, energy and attention we bring to work were never a cost — they're potential, backed.
Idea to Value (Physics)
In the summer of 1996, I discovered a button that paused the performance clock. Within weeks I was the fastest checkout operator in the West of Sheffield, then the company. Productivity, according to the numbers, had exploded. Cash in the bank had not.
Creativity & Climate (Engine)
Every new player slows the poker game while everyone re-explains the rules. Plenty of workplaces run the same way — on why stable teams compound, and why you flow work to teams, not teams to work.