FIELD NOTES · PEOPLE, TEAMS & ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE
Better work starts with better questions.
A practical, human perspective on how we work together, make decisions, handle resistance and create organisations where good people can do meaningful work.
The work is human. So is the friction.
I have spent much of my career working with teams, products and organisations trying to make things work better. The recurring lesson is that the problem is rarely just the process, the structure or the technology. It is often found in the space between them: unclear expectations, competing incentives, decisions nobody owns, and people who have stopped believing that speaking up will make a difference.
Improving the way we work is not about introducing another framework or adding more meetings. It is about understanding what gets in the way, being honest about what is not working, and making it easier for people to take responsibility and move forward together. These are observations from practice, not a collection of management recipes.
Start here
A recent reflection on what happens when a change initiative divides the very people it is meant to bring together.
Welcome to The Divide Trap
When a new way of working creates champions and holdouts, the split is rarely a simple matter of attitude. It is a signal that people experience the change differently. Understanding that divide is the first step towards making change work in practice.
The Cost of Being Right Too Early is a companion piece about experience, credibility and the way organisations sometimes silence the very knowledge they need.
Teams that can do their best work
High performance is not a headcount exercise. It comes from clear purpose, capable product ownership, room to grow and the conditions for people to collaborate without drowning in coordination.
Building high-performing teams
Collaboration, innovation and adaptability are outcomes of the environment we create, not slogans we put on a wall.
Countering inefficiency and increasing productivity
Why adding people can increase overhead rather than improve the flow of work.
The successful Product Owner
The role requires judgement, stakeholder understanding and the ability to give a team direction.
Retention issues as an effect of stagnation
People need challenge, development and the sense that their contribution still matters.
The Square Root That Runs the Company
A reflection on organisational size, restructuring and the human consequences hidden in a spreadsheet.
Change, resistance and organisational habits
Organisations are remarkably good at protecting familiar ways of working, even when those ways no longer serve them. Change asks for more than a new process. It asks us to question assumptions, recognise resistance and sometimes admit that the old answer has stopped working.
When you discover you’re riding a dead horse, dismount!
On sunk costs, organisational inertia and the courage to stop investing in a failing approach.
The Danish urge to re-engineer what already works
Why the desire to build something ourselves can get in the way of adopting what already works.
The Three Faces of Resistance
Resistance is not one thing. Recognising its different forms changes how we respond to it.
The Cost of Silence
When people withhold their real views, agreement can look like alignment while hiding the risk.
Collective Stupidity
How capable people can collectively support a poor decision, and why independent thinking matters.
The Cost of Being Right Too Early
What happens when experience is treated as resistance instead of useful organisational memory.
Listening, learning and making better decisions
Good decisions begin before the decision meeting. They begin with listening carefully, making assumptions visible and asking questions that help people articulate what they actually know and need.
Statements That Dive – Elicitation
A way of getting beneath the first answer to uncover tacit knowledge, needs and expectations.
The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear
Why reducing assumptions and the urge to respond is central to understanding a domain.
Ready Is Not a Status, It’s a Decision
Readiness is not something that appears after one more round of preparation. At some point, someone has to decide.
Metacognition Applied to Master Data Management
Stepping back from our own thinking, challenging assumptions and recognising the difference between what we know and what we believe.
A final thought
Better ways of working rarely begin with a grand transformation. They begin when someone notices a problem, asks a better question and is willing to change something that matters.
Explore more reflections in the Article Archive, or return to the home page.