Operational thinking,
out loud.

Story

Prologue · 2 min

Over a Pint

I should probably tell you how this actually started, because it wasn't in a boardroom and it definitely wasn't in a strategy deck.

Philosophy

Chapter One · 4 min

Why Now? The Great Software Misunderstanding

I've become slightly obsessed over the last couple of years with constraints, in the way you become obsessed with something once you've noticed a pattern and then start seeing it everywhere.

Method

Chapter Two · 4 min

Start With the Work

One of the strangest realisations I've had over the last few years is that I don't think I work in technology anymore.

Story

Chapter Three · 3 min

The Night It Actually Clicked

For a while I thought the discovery was speed. That is the obvious thing to notice when you can make something useful in an evening that once needed a project plan, a budget line and three meetings before anybody was allowed to touch a keyboard.

Operations

Chapter Four · 3 min

Store-First, Why the Shop Floor Knows Before the Boardroom Does

There's a particular kind of meeting I've sat through more times than I can count, and I suspect you have too.

Method

Chapter Five · 3 min

Prove Before You Buy

I used to be quite good at buying software. I could run a procurement process, compare vendors, negotiate a contract and land a platform.

Operations

Chapter Six · 3 min

From Insight to Instinct, Turning Patterns into Tools

Dashboards get a lot of credit they haven't earned. I say that as someone who has built more of them than I'd like to admit, and who still believes they have a place.

Method

Chapter Seven · 4 min

The Pilot, the Proof and the Patience

If you'd asked me twenty years ago what a pilot was for, I'd have told you it was to prove that the technology worked.

Leadership

Chapter Eight · 7 min

The Human Stays in the Room

There is a slightly embarrassing gap in the story so far. I have spent chapter after chapter telling you to go to the person doing the work, watch what gets in their way, listen to the workaround and let them puncture your assumptions.

AI

Chapter Nine · 3 min

When Clever Gets in the Way

There is a particular sentence that has become one of the best compliments I can imagine receiving about something I have built.

Operations

Chapter Ten · 3 min

The Flywheel, How One Signal Becomes Five Tools

I remember the exact moment I understood what I now think of as the flywheel, mostly because I'd got something quite badly wrong just beforehand.

Leadership

Chapter Eleven · 3 min

Money Without Magic

I've sat in a lot of rooms where somebody stands up and announces a number that isn't quite true.

Method

Chapter Twelve · 3 min

The Best Thing We Never Built

The easiest mistake to make once you discover that you can build software quickly is, rather predictably, to start building software quickly, and I know that because I have been extremely good at making that mistake myself.

Leadership

Chapter Thirteen · 2 min

When Small and Fast Is Wrong

There is a version of this approach that I would not trust. It is the version that hears “small and fast” and translates it as “cheap and reckless”.

Method

Chapter Fourteen · 3 min

The Graduation Point

TableTalk taught me this in real time. It began as a small response to a specific problem.

Lessons

Chapter Fifteen · 2 min

The Builds That Did Not Win

One of the things I distrust in business books is the extraordinary success rate of their authors.

Leadership

Chapter Sixteen · 3 min

Organisational Antibodies

I used to think resistance to technology was mostly about technology. Then I worked in organisations.

Lessons

Chapter Seventeen · 3 min

App Confetti

AI has created a new organisational risk that I did not really have a name for until I started living through it.

AI

Chapter Eighteen · 3 min

The Ladder, Trust Before Automation

I've come to think of the relationship between people and automation as something closer to a courtship than a rollout, and I don't say that flippantly.

AI

Chapter Nineteen · 3 min

When Building Becomes Abundant

There is a reason this way of working feels possible now in a way it did not ten years ago, and avoiding the subject because everybody is tired of hearing about AI would be dishonest.

Method

Chapter Twenty · 3 min

Find. Strip. Try. Prove.

By this point you may reasonably be wondering whether there is actually a method hiding underneath all of this.

Philosophy

Chapter Twenty-One · 3 min

What Comes Next

I do not think this thinking is finished, and I would be suspicious of it if it ever claimed to be.

Leadership

Chapter Twenty-Two · 14 min

Who Gets the Time Back?

There is an uncomfortable question hiding underneath almost everything I have written so far, and I think I have avoided it for long enough.

Story

Epilogue · 2 min

The Second Pint

Neil asked me recently whether I thought I had actually discovered anything, or whether I had simply noticed something that had been obvious all along and everyone else had somehow missed.