The last mile problem
Redesigning how decisions get made
In enterprises, communities and the spaces between, people don’t resist change. They respond rationally to the system they are standing in.
The last mile is the distance between a decision being made and anyone acting on it.
Enterprise · Community · Governance
Novartis · Bayer · Sandoz · JTI · Vodafone · T-Mobile · LUSH · NHS · Croydon Council · Westminster City Council
Benchmark: Digital.ai, State of Agile report, 2023.
The spark is always there. It just needs the right conditions.
In January 2025 I sat with a room of young people in the Baqa’a refugee camp in Jordan. Every one of them had been told, in all the ways a system tells you without saying it out loud, that work was not coming.
By the end of the day they were pitching businesses to each other.
Nothing about them had changed in six hours. The conditions around them had.
People do not resist change. They respond rationally to the system they are standing in.
Different rooms, same problem. Decisions are not flowing, accountability is blurred, and the people closest to the problem have the least influence over the solution.
A decision system is the combination of governance, accountability and collaboration patterns that determines how an organisation actually functions, regardless of what the org chart says.
Twenty years, three continents, one recurring failure
For over twenty years I have worked as an enterprise transformation leader inside organisations where that system had quietly stopped working: Novartis, Bayer, Sandoz, JTI, Westminster City Council, Croydon Council.
Three domains, one problem
Enterprise · Croydon CouncilDecision systems and AI
I redesign the decision systems behind execution in regulated, high-pressure environments. AI does not create organisational problems. It timestamps the ones already there.
6 wkfrom stalled to the first AI products piloted
Community · eight countriesA social innovation lab
Peace Through Prosperity, self-funded and co-founded with my wife Sahar. Everything we validate, we open source.
4,000+micro-entrepreneurs since 2012
Governance · Better GovernmentWhen institutions stop holding
Better Government, a think tank on civic governance I co-founded, and a framework for diagnosing how communities are hollowed out — the same principles applied to civic engagement and adaptive policy.
5 + 50pillars, and resistance strategiesPhotograph: Rait TuulasRedesign it and things move. Whether the system is a Fortune 500 or a street market in a conflict zone.
The same approach that moved decisions across eleven markets at JTI helped Akram, a barber in Karachi, go from €2.88 a day to a barber shop with four people on the payroll in 9 months. The metrics prove it works. The stories prove it matters.
Keynotes and workshops
An opening keynote at Agile Estonia, a keynote at Lean Agile London, and workshops run with teams in eleven markets.
