Your Organisation Is Not a Startup Anymore – Stop Behaving Like One

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.

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

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.

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.

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