Where Meditations on Management Came From: On unfinished ideas, wintering, and the discipline of attention

Meditations on Management didn’t begin as a book.

It began as fragments.

Half-written articles. Scrap notes. Notes made between meetings. Observations that felt good enough to keep, but not yet clear enough to finish. Thoughts that didn’t fit neatly into a framework or a slide deck, but also refused to be discarded.

For a long time, these pieces lived in my digital cabinet — a place where unfinished ideas go to rest rather than be rushed or deleted.

The digital cabinet and the idea of wintering

We’re not particularly good at letting ideas remain unfinished.

In work especially, there’s pressure to tidy things up quickly. To turn rough thinking into something presentable. To move from idea to outcome as efficiently as possible, even if we actually then don't achieve any value from the outcome.

But some ideas don’t want efficiency.
They want time. And space.

The cabinet became a form of wintering — a place where ideas could sit without expectation. Not abandoned, but protected. Allowed to cool. Allowed to live.

Nothing was optimised there.
Nothing was forced into coherence.

And that turned out to matter.

Returning without urgency

When I eventually came back to those fragments — not with a deadline, but with curiosity — something changed.

What had once felt like a messy collection of unrelated thoughts began to reveal a pattern. Not because I tried to impose one, but because certain ideas had survived time.

They were still alive.

They still felt relevant.
Still slightly unresolved.
Still worth paying attention to.

That’s often the signal.

Three themes that kept repeating

Looking back, three threads kept quietly reappearing through these notes - and eventually made it into the book. I didn’t plan them. They weren’t headings at the time. They were simply persistent.

Most problems at work are human, not technical

Again and again, the writing circled the same frustration.

Organisations are constantly redesigned. Processes refined. Tools upgraded. The "System" people talk about seems separate to the people in it. And yet the same problems remain.

Misunderstanding.
Silence.
Mistrust.
People not saying the thing that needs to be said.

Rarely was the issue a lack of ability. More often, it was communication, relationship, or courage. Not because people don’t care — but because the environment makes honesty expensive on a personal level.

Clarity is not a document — it’s a shared state

Another recurring thread was clarity.

Not clarity as a strategy deck or a well-written email. But clarity as a felt sense — the moment when people genuinely understand what matters, what doesn’t, and how their work connects to something real.

Many of the fragments were really about the cost of missing clarity. How quickly energy leaks away when people are left guessing. How confusion is often mistaken for complexity.

Clarity, it turns out, is less about information and more about the seeds for alignment.

Good work requires conditions, not control

The third theme surprised me, because it appeared before I had language for it.

Over and over, I was writing about atmosphere. About the feeling in the room. About the conditions many of us work in. About whether it was safe to speak, to question, to slow down, to challenge problems.

Long before I ever said creativity is a climate problem, the idea was already there.

You don’t get better work by tightening the grip.
You get it by shaping the conditions in which people can think, care, and contribute.

What the book actually became

Meditations on Management wasn’t written in one go.

It emerged slowly — by noticing what kept repeating, what refused to be deleted, and what still felt alive after time had passed.

It isn’t a framework.
It isn’t a system.
It isn’t a manual.

It’s a record of attention.

A collection of observations about work, people, and the quiet tension between how organisations are designed and how humans actually experience them.

A note to the reader

Most of us have a cabinet of our own.

Unfinished notes. Half-formed ideas. Questions we don’t yet have language for. Things we’ve been meaning to come back to.

Unfinished doesn’t mean failed.
Often, it just means alive. Living. Breathing.

If something keeps returning to you — if it survives time — it’s probably worth listening to.

Listen: the story behind the book

I talk through this story in the podcast episode below, reflecting on how the book emerged and what it taught me about patience, attention, and letting ideas mature.

Attention as a leadership discipline

We spend a lot of time trying to have better ideas.
And, less time creating the conditions in which the right ones can emerge.

But in work — and in life — most of the work happens upstream of action. In what we notice. In what we allow to linger. In what we choose not to rush.

Leadership, at its quietest, is a discipline of attention and noticing.