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chronicles

23
Jul
Wednesday Reality: Control Has Mass

Wednesday Reality: Control Has Mass

Modern organisations rather than improving the architecture of work, increase the number of people watching it.
9 min read
21
Jul
Monday Myth: Standardisation Kills Innovation

Monday Myth: Standardisation Kills Innovation

Standardisation therefore functions less as a constraint than as infrastructure. Like roads, railways or electrical grids, it rarely attracts admiration once established because its greatest achievement lies in becoming invisible.
8 min read
19
Jul
Friday Fun: The Office Escape Room

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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