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Remaining Relevant in a Changing Job Market

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.

Why You Shouldn't Compare Teams Using Metrics

In the right hands, a team's metrics are a mirror. In the wrong hands, the same numbers become a lever. An essay on why team-level metrics should never be used to compare teams — and what actually goes wrong when leaders reach down for the numbers.

Why Financial Value Is the Only Type That Gets Tested

There is a shift that happens when you see this clearly. Financial value does not live inside your organisation. It arrives from the outside — from a customer who decides your work was worth paying for. Everything else is cost. And most organisations stop one step before value even begins.

Turning around a struggling team — a six-stage approach

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.

Mottainai — stop wasting human time, energy, and attention

There is a Japanese word I can't shake. Mottainai. It roughly translates as the regret of waste — but that translation doesn't quite land. It is not just waste. It is the feeling that something valuable has been carelessly lost.

The Subtotal Button — What a Supermarket Checkout Taught Me About Metrics

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.

How Continuity Builds Trust, Knowledge, and Momentum

A group assembles. A team accumulates. The difference between the two is one of the most expensive things most organisations never measure — and one of the most overlooked drivers of performance.

Why Improving Process Can Make Things Worse

Better processes don’t guarantee better outcomes. This piece explores why improving the wrong system can accelerate failure — and why direction must come first.

Why Methods Don’t Create Value (Learning Does)

There is no single correct way to work. Methods help, but they're not the point. Why feedback and learning matter more than frameworks in turning ideas into value.

Creativity Is a Climate Problem - Why Leadership Isn't About Ideas

Creativity isn't a talent problem. It's a climate problem. Five conditions consistently show up in environments where creativity actually flows — not as theory, but as reality.

Everything Between Idea and Value Is Cost

Most people aren't short of ideas — they run out of runway before the idea pays back. A canonical Cultivated essay for solo creators, makers, and independent builders on the gap between idea and value, and why everything inside it is cost.

Is This the Team to Get It Done?

Most leaders know they don't have the team to get it done. Very few do anything about it. The three honest axes — ability, behaviour, environment — and what it takes to close each one.

Action Turns Plans Into Reality

Planning feels safe. Action feels risky. Both feelings are wrong. Why plans are never proven on paper, why maps are not the territory, and how acting early is the only way to find out what is actually true.

How Work Connects to Value (From Investment to Outcome)

Work becomes heavy when it loses its reason. This piece explores why connecting investment to value — a core idea in portfolio thinking — brings clarity, learning, and better decisions.