Blog

I started writing here in 2010, mostly notes from delivery work: outsourcing problems, retrospectives, the small mechanics of getting a team to ship. Sixteen years on, the questions are the same size but the rooms have got bigger: boardrooms, a refugee camp in Jordan, a council chamber in Croydon.

Read enough of what’s here and a pattern shows up. A team that can’t prioritise isn’t short on discipline: it’s short on ownership. A community programme that stalls isn’t short on goodwill: it’s short on structure. Most of what I write is an attempt to name that structure before it gets blamed on the people standing nearest to it.

Enterprise, community, governance: three domains, one recurring failure. Some posts are practical, built for Monday morning. Others are slower, closer to the civic work I do through Peace Through Prosperity. Start wherever the title catches you.

Browse by topic

• Agile transformation
• Prioritisation and decisions
• Empathy and leadership
• Societal agility and governance
• Agile for peace and community
• AI and decision systems

Where to start

• A product owner’s guide to acceptance criteria: A practical guide to writing fit-for-purpose acceptance criteria for user stories.
• What Hussain teaches us about leadership that lasts: Why we must honour legacy without simplifying complexity.
• The 24-Hour Empathy Framework: Empathetic leadership as a discipline rather than a personality trait.
• Update or alignment?: The small distinction that changes everything.
• The failure that happens before the failure: Institutional capture as a governance design problem.
• What Societal Agility looks like: The five cultural shifts behind citizen-led change, from dialogue to trust.

The prioritisation series

• The criterion you’re already using (and why it’s urgency)
• Who can say yes, and does everyone know it?
• Scaffolding is not an event
• Nail it before you scale it

Practitioner toolkit

• Staceys-Matrix
• Microsoft Teams Planner How To
• What-Why-How-Done Canvas
• Topic Triage Matrix Optimising Your Meeting Time
• Working in Time Boxes
• Facilitating Retrospectives

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