Category: Ways of working
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Metacognition Applied to Master Data Management: Two Levels, Different Setting
I have a habit I’m slightly embarrassed by. Every so often, halfway through an argument, I stop and ask myself why I actually believe what I’m saying. More often than I’d like, the honest answer is “because everyone around me does”, or “because I read it somewhere once and it stuck”. It’s an unsettling question,…
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The Cost of Being Right Too Early
There is a specific kind of quiet that happens in a meeting when someone with fifteen years on the team says, “we tried something like this before, and here’s where it broke.” You can watch the room’s temperature drop by about five degrees. Nobody disagrees aloud. Nobody must. Everyone just quietly reclassifies the comment in…
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Welcome to The Divide Trap.
Have you ever sat in a room where a new way of working was being rolled out, and within a few weeks, the team had quietly split into two camps? One group talking about how much better things are now. Another group, off to the side, rolling their eyes every time the new process comes…
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The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.
I simply love this quote of Rumi. When you reduce internal noise, ego, assumptions, urgency, and the need to respond or control, your capacity to truly perceive increases. In domain modelling, listening is not a soft skill. It is the core technique. The quality of a model depends less on notation and tooling, and more…
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The Three Faces of Resistance
At the start of my career, I learned a simple tool that has helped me navigate one of the most persistent challenges in any workplace: resistance. Not technical complexity. Not lack of tools. People. Whether it is a colleague clinging to familiar processes, a team member struggling with new systems, or an entire department hesitating…
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Ready Is Not a Status, It’s a Decision
I’ve often encountered the belief that readiness is a status, a summit reached only after enough preparation, enough meetings, enough alignment. I disagree. Readiness is not a summit, and it’s not even a milestone. It’s a choice, the most defining choice any leader, architect, or team member can make. This fits with a quote by…
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Manpower Moves Mountains: Building Beyond the Machines in China
In the Golden Mountains of China, hotels rise where no lorry, crane, or forklift can reach. Yet the construction never stops. Material is carried by hand, sometimes dozens of workers at a time, hefting bricks, timber, and concrete up paths so steep they make your legs scream just to look at them. If something is…
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The Square Root That Runs the Company
Reflections From Watching a Company Right Size Itself It is soon Christmas time again, and the rightsizing monster is upon us. You sense the tension in the hallways. You hear the difficult conversations. You see people reconsider their roles, their value, and the future shape of the organisation. Some take the consequence, and give in…