Insights

Notes from the room where decisions are made.

Perspectives on operating systems, AI delivery, and commercial outcomes.

Why your best people are doing your worst work

There is a task sitting with someone in your business right now that should not be there. It arrived because they are reliable and it stayed because nobody else picked it up. It is consuming somewhere between two and five hours of their week, it does not require their judgment, and they have stopped raising it because raising it never changed anything. This is not a staffing problem or a management problem but an infrastructure problem, and it is far more expensive than it appears because the c

5 July 20264 min read

What good implementation actually looks like

Most businesses that have tried to introduce new technology into their operations can describe what happened next with reasonable accuracy. The system was selected, a vendor was engaged, some staff were trained, it was celebrated as progress in a board meeting, and a few months later the technology was being used by some people some of the time, in ways that roughly resembled the original intention. The problem the business set out to solve was still present, just slightly less acute. This is n

28 June 20264 min read

Where to start: identifying the highest-value areas to systemise first

The question most businesses ask when they decide to address their operations is a reasonable one: where do we begin. The answer that seems obvious, start with whatever is most painful, is also in most cases wrong. The most painful processes are not always the most valuable to fix first, because they are the processes that generate the most complaints, consume the most management attention, and produce the most visible frustration, and while those qualities make them memorable they do not make

23 June 20265 min read

What your operations are actually costing you

Most businesses have a reasonable grasp of their direct costs. Staff wages, rent, software subscriptions, professional services: the numbers that appear on a profit and loss statement and can be defended in a board meeting. What they rarely have is an accurate picture of what their operations cost them, because most of that cost never appears anywhere. The cost accumulates in the hours a senior person spends producing a report that could have been generated automatically, in the lag between a c

17 June 20264 min read

Your best people are your biggest operational risk - the cost of key-person dependency

Every leadership team knows the feeling. A senior person resigns, takes a holiday, or goes quiet for a week, and something significant either stalls or lands on the desk of whoever is available. The moment passes. But what it exposes does not. The businesses most affected by key-person dependency rarely experience it as a crisis. They experience it as friction: decisions that slow down because one person is at capacity, opportunities that stall because one relationship is unavailable, growth th

9 June 20265 min read

The model that grew without being updated

Most businesses are running on infrastructure built for an earlier version of themselves. A professional services firm that has grown from a boutique practice to a national operation still runs conflict checks through a shared inbox, because nobody ever had the time to replace a process that technically worked. A financial services group with hundreds of staff still produces weekly performance reports by having analysts manually extract figures from four separate systems, because the systems we

4 June 20264 min read