Latest
19
Jul
Friday Fun: The Office Escape Room
Long before escape rooms became fashionable corporate team-building exercises, engineers, locksmiths and craftsmen had been designing mechanical puzzle boxes whose sole purpose was to challenge the human mind
3 min read
16
Jul
Wednesday Reality: Engineering Begins Where Certainty Ends
Neither the Royal Navy nor NASA expected reality to honour their plans. Charts remained incomplete. Weather changed without warning. Equipment failed. Calculations drifted. Human judgement remained imperfect.
4 min read
13
Jul
Monday Myth: Great Organisations Feel Dynamic
The highest compliment a passenger can give aviation is that nothing memorable happened.
Perhaps the highest compliment customers can give an engineering organisation is exactly the same.
5 min read
12
Jul
Friday Fun: The Corporate Airport
Many organisations, however, quietly make that mistake, becoming exceptionally good at refining coordination, governance and process while gradually forgetting that these things exist only to support delivery
5 min read
09
Jul
Wednesday Reality: We Did Not Lose Engineers. We Stopped Engineering.
Software proudly adopted the language of engineering, but somewhere along the journey it quietly abandoned many of its defining characteristics. The transformation was gradual enough to appear natural.
5 min read
07
Jul
Monday Myth: Success Creates Scalability
What appears inefficient to someone measuring today's utilisation often represents resilience, flexibility and optionality for tomorrow. Spare capacity is not evidence of waste. It is evidence that the system was designed to survive its own success.
6 min read
05
Jul
Friday Fun: The Corporate Archaeologist
Civilisations are not built in a single generation, and neither are they buried in one.The same principle, I recently discovered, applies surprisingly well to technology companies.
5 min read
02
Jul
Wednesday Reality: Your Organisation Is Steering by Yesterday
The larger an organisation becomes, the greater the temptation to replace experience with representation.
Distance feels efficient because it removes friction. It also removes sensation.
7 min read
30
Jun
Monday Myth: Success Makes Organisations Stronger
When failure threatens existence itself, organisations cannot afford comfortable illusions. Waste becomes visible not through analysis but through necessity. Complexity must justify its presence because every additional element introduces risk.
8 min read
26
Jun
Friday Fun: The Order of the Sacred Meeting
A curious account of an order whose discipline became legendary, though few could remember what it had once been founded to accomplish.
4 min read