Where these ideas came from.

Non-Profit

"That's where I want it."

A client had waited almost two years to fund a glossy five-year technology roadmap. But starting where I always start — with the business rather than the systems — there was no strategic agenda for technology to serve. The real problem was visibility: operational information had been extracted, analysed and filed away as documents until leadership could no longer answer basic questions about its own organization. The roadmap was never the point; knowing which problems were worth solving was.

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Service Operations

The same customer called every day for two weeks.

A regional telecommunications provider hired me to fix how its support tiers escalated problems — leadership was sure the issue was communication. But after listening to a handful of calls, a different picture emerged. No one had defined who owned which decision, what each tier should diagnose, or when an issue was actually resolved. One customer called every day about speeds the equipment could never deliver. Every team worked hard and still failed, because nobody had agreed what success looked like.

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Enterprise Software

"I work on paths."

I was leading the ground-up redesign of a large enterprise application, and we spent three days observing experienced users. The research looked successful — pages of suggestions. But something nagged at me: people identified themselves by the objects inside our software rather than the engineering work they did. When I sat with them and asked what they were actually trying to accomplish, many couldn't say. Their expertise had quietly become the software, and their requests optimized the tool, not the work.

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