Perspectives & provocation
Writing on AI adoption, leadership, organisational change, and the patterns most people don't notice until something breaks.
Self-assessment is the astrology of change management. Comforting, widely used, and predictive of nothing. If you can't observe the behaviour, it didn't change.
Long readThe loudest skeptic in the room gets the most design attention and deserves the least. Calibrate to the willing middle, and let the results do the arguing.
NoteBefore any AI upskilling programme: are you lifting the bottom or extending the top? Different goals, different programmes, different failure modes. Most organisations never choose.
NoteEvery organisation believes its situation is special. The vocabulary is special. The patterns never are, and that is the good news.
Teaching people to write better prompts misses the point. The real capability you need to build is knowing when to trust the output, and when to push back. That requires judgment, not syntax.
It's not a tool problem. It's a readiness problem. And readiness isn't about training - it's about what happens when the trainer leaves the room. Most organisations treat AI like a deployment challenge when it's actually a behavioural one.
Most leaders confuse politeness with kindness. The truth: withholding honest feedback is one of the costliest things you can do.
When people push back on change, the smarter move is to understand what the resistance is actually telling you.
The gap between where leadership thinks the organisation is and where it actually is lives in middle management.
Adding process to a system that lacks clarity is like putting shelves in a room where no one agrees what belongs there. Fix the clarity first. Process without clarity just creates faster confusion.
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