Long-form notes on decision architecture, institutional clarity, and non-predictive intelligence design.
Google's Project Aristotle produced a finding that became one of the most widely cited in modern organisational life: psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness. The finding is real. The research is rigorous. And the industry that has grown up around it has, with r
The values exercise is a fixture of organisational life. The offsite produces the list. The agency designs the language. The slides go up in the office and the careers page. The onboarding deck opens with them. The performance review framework asks people to rate themselves against them.
AI increases speed. It does not increase clarity.
The founder who built the first team remembers the moment they came together. The early hires — the people who believed in the idea before there was evidence, who stayed when everything was uncertain, who brought energy and commitment that no compensation package could have purchased. The first team
The research on organisational change has produced a finding that the change management industry has not adequately absorbed. Seventy-four percent of leaders report that they involved employees in creating the change strategy. Forty-two percent of employees feel included. The gap is thirty-two perce
Every organisation has two hierarchies. The first is the one on the chart — the formal lines of reporting, authority, and accountability that the organisation designed and manages and holds itself accountable to. The second is the one that actually determines how decisions get made, how information
There is a piece of conventional wisdom about people and organisations under pressure that deserves more scrutiny than it receives: the idea that people "aren't themselves" when things are hard. That the version of a person who emerges in a crisis is somehow not the real version — that they are dist
The research on new hire failure is consistent enough to be alarming. Depending on the level of the role, between twenty and fifty percent of new hires fail to meet performance expectations within their first eighteen months. The cost of each failure — recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, team
The board-founder relationship is one of the most consequential and least well-understood relationships in organisational life. It is consequential because it shapes the operating freedom of the person most responsible for the company's direction and the oversight of the people most responsible for
