Work with us

There’s a meeting that happens in many organisations. I've sat in many of them. It’s the third time this quarter the same issue has come up in subtly different ways. Everyone in the room is very capable. Everyone means well. Everyone is working hard. Someone takes an action – and everyone already knows the problem will be back next month, in a subtly different form.

Nobody in that room is the problem. That’s the maddening part. And the expensive part too. The effort is real. The people are good. The intent is sound. And the work still won’t move towards value.

When work isn't flowing, the instinct is usually to push harder: more focus, more hours, another reorganisation, a bigger target, more governance, more reporting.

But effort was never the missing ingredient. Trying to fix a stuck organisation with more effort is like pulling away with the handbrake on and deciding what you need is a bigger engine. The car doesn’t need more power. Someone needs to spot the handbrake.

That’s the work I do.

Find what’s in the way

A while ago, a thousand-person engineering function had spent four years trying to ship the same programme, trying to realise the same value. Four years. Talented people. No shortage of effort or investment budget.

Nine months after I came and sat inside the real work with the team, it shipped. The goal never changed. The conditions around the work did. The same people. Same investment budget. Same work. Same programme. Different climate. Different outcome.

That pattern has repeated throughout my work.

What slows good work is rarely a shortage of ability or ideas. It’s something in the conditions around the work: a communication problem that keeps changing the meaning from person to person, a structure that creates friction, a decision that doesn't get made, a climate that makes people cautious or fearful of raising concerns, or simply a way of working that has become too rigid for the work itself.

These things are difficult to see from the inside because you’re standing in them. I come in from the outside and look at the work as it actually happens. Not the version in the strategy deck. The real day to day version.

The meetings. The decisions. The hand-offs. The things people say — and the things they don’t. The behaviours and culture. Where energy is being misplaced. Where good ideas get diluted towards the value they once held. Where everyone agrees and nothing happens.

Finding them, and helping you resolve them, is the work.

A second pair of eyes

This isn’t a framework, a deck, or a programme with a logo. It’s a second pair of eyes — twenty years of them — placed inside your real work for a few weeks. I look at what is happening, get to know the people doing the work, work out why work isn't moving towards value or people aren't enjoying the process of making that happen, and help you decide what to do about it next.

That means you get more than a diagnosis. You get clear recommendations, an honest view of what I would do, and the benefit of having seen similar situations play out in other organisations. The aim isn’t to give you something interesting to think about. It’s to help the work move.

There’s a human element of this too, and it’s often the one that matters most. The best people are doing careful work that doesn't always land. After a while, they start to wonder if the problem is them. It almost never is.

Change the conditions that they work in, very often, you get both the result and the person back. I’ve come to think those are the same thing, not a trade.

How the work goes

This is clarity work, not implementation consulting. But it isn’t hands-off. I work inside your organisation, alongside your managers and teams, in the real work, because that’s where the conditions become visible. They don’t usually appear on a slide. They become obvious once you’re in the room where the work happens.

From there, I bring two decades of experience to bear on what we find. We identify what is getting in the way. I tell you what I see is happening, what I would do about it, and what I’ve seen work in situations like yours.

And then I stay with the work long enough to help you respond. Because understanding why something is stuck is useful. Getting it unstuck is the point.

What I don’t do is install frameworks, run change programmes, or hand over a playbook on a schedule. Those are real products, and there are good people who deliver them. This is the work that comes before you’d know whether you even need one.

Every engagement is designed and led by me. Where the situation needs expertise beyond one person, I draw on a trusted network of educators, facilitators and practitioners matched to the work. The thinking stays mine. The standard stays high. And the work stays focused on the thing that brought us into the room in the first place:

making good work easier to move.

The engagements

These are the shapes the work takes most often. Each gets scoped to the situation you're actually in — they're starting points, not fixed packages. Most clients find the right shape through the first conversation.

Who this is for

This work goes best with people who want to see their situation clearly before they act on it, who are open to seeing it differently, and who are willing to do the slightly uncomfortable work of changing how they act once they have.

I work with leaders, managers and teams who carry real responsibility for outcomes, and who can feel where the friction sits even when it's hard to name. The strongest clients tend to share three things: a real situation that matters, the authority to act on what comes out of the work, and the appetite to have their thinking challenged.

Who this isn't for

The honest version matters more than the marketing one, so here it is.

This isn't a fit if you want a specific framework installed — SAFe, LeSS, OKRs, a performance-management system, a governance model, a certification programme. I'll help you think about whether you need one. I won't install it for you. (The exception is Management Side-by-Side, where the coaching and I deliberately get hands-on with a manager's patch — hands-on, but still not a framework run to a schedule.)

And it isn't a fit if you want to be told you're right. Good clarity work will push back on how you're seeing things, offer readings you hadn't considered, and sometimes say "I think that's wrong, and here's why." That's not a bug in the work. It's the work.

If either of those is a deal-breaker, we'll say so in the first conversation and point you somewhere better suited.

If you want to understand how I think before booking a call, Mottainai and The Circles of Contribution are the two foundational essays. Reading them will tell you more about how the work actually operates than any pitch could.

One worked example

The work has run inside organisations of every size — from leadership teams of six, to startups, to functions of several thousand. The clearest example of what "different conditions" can do:

How the practice operates

The practice is small on purpose. Only a handful of engagements run at any time — partly because the work is better that way, and partly because a practice that drifts away from the thinking stops being useful. The writing keeps the work sharp; the work keeps the writing honest.

I take on engagements because the situation is genuinely interesting and the fit is right. The upside for you is simple: when your work starts, it has my full attention rather than a slice of it — which, for work that lives or dies on seeing clearly, is most of what matters. The practice works internationally where the fit is right. Fit matters more than scale.

About the practitioner

I help leaders and managers get better business results — by shrinking the gap between a good idea and the value it becomes — and keep their best people while they do it. I'm a writer, speaker, consultant and teacher, and the founder of Cultivated.

I started in journalism and media science — the study of how messages move, why they distort, and what happens between a meaning and the person receiving it — before senior roles as VP of Engineering, Head of Business Agility and Business Change, and VP of HR. Across every role and every building, the same thing kept showing up: good people, real effort, sound intent, and work still stalling — not for lack of ability, but because the conditions around the work were making full contribution harder than it needed to be.

Twenty years inside real organisations produced the way of working this page describes: pattern recognition from the inside, sharpened across enough different organisations to know what the patterns mean. My engagements are warm, direct and a little bit funny. Leaders come away with clearer thinking, a sharper view of what's actually going on, recommendations they can trust, and confidence about where to move next.

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