Ideas with deeper roots
Essays
Longer notes exploring delivery, leadership, attention, mastery and how work actually moves.
Will It Be Alright on the Night?
The title comes from Denis Norden's It'll Be Alright on the Night, decades of blooper-reel television built on the reassuring idea that however much goes wrong backstage, the show somehow…
Two Kinds of Who Not How
Who Not How (Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy) argues for finding the right person rather than figuring everything out yourself. Living through a real week of it, though, I think that's actu…
A Mirror That Argues Back
Every capability framework has the same weakness: it tells you what "good" looks like, but not how well you're actually doing against it. That gap gets filled by self-assessment, and self…
One Thing Is Never Enough
The Western productivity conversation has a single variable problem. It optimises for one thing at a time: find your passion, build your career capital, improve your habits, invest in you…
Attention as the Primary Resource
Five books from five disciplines — philosophy, Stoicism, psychology, behavioural economics, and relational science — reach the same conclusion: attention is not a productivity tool. It is…
Cognitive Biases in Delivery Leadership
Planning fallacy (Kahneman) Forecasts trend toward the best-case scenario by default. People focus on their specific plan and ignore how similar plans have turned out in the past. The fix…
Deliberate Practice — How to Actually Get Better
Most people plateau. Not because they lack intelligence or effort — but because they confuse activity with practice, and comfort with competence.
Social Fitness
The Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked 724 men from 1938, and over 1,300 of their descendants, across their entire lives. The single strongest predictor of long-term wellbeing, he…
The Arrival Fallacy
The arrival fallacy is the belief that reaching a specific goal, milestone, or life threshold will deliver lasting satisfaction. It won't — and five decades of psychology, 85 years of lon…
The Passion Myth
The passion hypothesis goes: identify what you're passionate about → find a job that matches it → enjoy a fulfilling career.
Delegated does not mean done
Delegation is not the end of ownership. It is the transfer of execution, not the disappearance of accountability.
Further reading on delegation, visibility, and scale
Not because I need more theory for the sake of it, but because there is a genuine operating question underneath it: how do I keep grip on outcomes as the number of teams grows without sli…
Kanban, feedback loops, and waiting on
The useful thing here is not "do more Kanban". It is understanding that weak feedback loops make waiting time look harmless until it is too late.
Team Topologies and the cost of distance
As delivery scales, the problem is not just "more teams". It is more dependencies, more coordination paths, and more chances for work to become nobody's immediate problem.