Map — Orientation
Direction and orientation — where the organisation is going and where it is now. Articles in this layer explore vision, strategy, painted pictures, and the leadership work of establishing a clear direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Career advancement follows quieter mechanics than most people expect — patterns of behaviour, systemic contribution, and clarity of intent. A practical exploration of the structural forces that actually move people forward.
In 1944, the OSS published a manual on how to quietly sabotage organisations. Eighty years later, many of its tactics have become standard corporate practice. Read it and you'll recognise your own workplace.
When everything is urgent, urgency loses meaning. A practical exploration of the hidden human cost of competing priorities — how misalignment converts effort into exhaustion, and why clarity is an act of care rather than a management technique.
Plans, roadmaps, org charts — these are necessary objects. But the object is not the work. A thoughtful exploration of why leadership means staying close to reality rather than defending the model.
In 1927, Fuller stood by Lake Michigan in crisis — and made a private decision that changed everything. A reflection on how individual choices propagate through systems, and why we are shaping more than we can see.