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.
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
Latest posts
-
AI does not create redundancies. It makes them visible.
-
Discovery dies of old age
-
The pilot worked. Nothing changed.
-
Nail it before you scale it
-
Scaffolding is not an event
-
Who can say yes, and does everyone know it?
-
Societal agility and governance
The Quiet Regression of Western Democracy
-
The criterion you’re already using (and why it’s urgency)
-
Paid Grassroots Internships 2026: 3 Teams, Anywhere in the World
-
The wall where the real rules live
-
What Your Team Already Knows About Prioritisation (But Hasn’t Seen Together)
-
Prioritisation is a scaffolding problem
-
The Decision System Your AI Strategy Is About to Expose
-
AI Won’t Fix Your Organisation. It Will Show You What’s Broken.
-
Societal agility and governance
Unerasable: A Free Resource for Communities Under Pressure
-
What 15 Years of Fieldwork Taught Us About Community Resilience
-
The Five Pressures: How Communities Are Worn Away, and the Strengths That Hold Them
-
The Coincidence Problem: When Community Decline Isn’t Accidental
-
Decision Latency Is Rarely About Speed
-
Societal agility and governance
The Failure That Happens Before the Failure



















