Writing
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Essay
You Never Know
Someone can appear capable and focused at work while struggling deeply with their mental health. I know because I’ve been that person. In this personal reflection on anxiety, men’s mental health and leadership, I share experiences that have shaped how I understand myself and support others. Everyone’s experience is different, but mine has taught me the importance of looking beyond appearances, showing kindness and creating a workplace where mental health is never treated as a weakness.
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Essay
Talk, just talk
Talking about mental health isn’t always easy, especially when you’re struggling. Reflecting on Time to Talk Day and my own experiences, I’ve been reminded how much everyday kindness and ordinary conversations can mean. From colleagues on a leadership course to familiar faces in a coffee shop, people have helped me without knowing what I was going through. This is a personal reflection on men’s mental health, listening and creating space for connection without needing the perfect words.
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Essay
Anchors in the Storm: Leadership, Loss and Mental Health
Grief doesn’t pause when the working day begins. After losing my brother, I found myself thinking differently about leadership, mental health at work and what it means to keep going when you’re far from your best. This is a personal reflection on finding steadiness through loss, accepting that our capacity changes, and recognising how much we depend on the people around us. It is also about leading with empathy, including towards ourselves.
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Essay
One Day At A Time
Losing my brother to suicide has left me taking life one day at a time, finding comfort in small moments and in the people who quietly show up. This is a personal reflection on grief, suicide bereavement and mental health, and on what it means to support someone without having the answers. It is also about vulnerability in leadership and making room for people to be human when life is difficult.
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Note
AI Is Making Change Cheaper. How Should Governance Respond?
AI is changing the economics of digital transformation by making it cheaper to build, test ideas and learn what works. That raises a question for organisational governance: when an experiment is small, safe and reversible, how much certainty should we demand before allowing it to begin? The opportunity goes beyond faster delivery. It is about adapting decision-making, funding and assurance so organisations can learn more quickly while keeping scrutiny proportionate to the consequences of getting something wrong.
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Essay
If AI Does the Doing, How Do We Learn the Judgement?
AI can increasingly produce work that once required years of accumulated skill. That creates an enormous productivity opportunity, but it also raises a harder question about how people acquire the judgement to know whether the work is good.
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Essay
This Article Used AI. Does That Make It Less Mine?
If I use AI to help write something, does that make it less mine? As AI watermarking brings greater attention to the origins of AI-generated content, we need to think carefully about what it tells us about authorship. Using AI to sharpen an argument or improve a job application is different from accepting whatever a chatbot produces. Transparency matters, but so does understanding the human contribution: the ideas, judgement and responsibility behind the finished work.
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Essay
Don't Build Big Things With AI. Build Big Things Through AI.
What makes a good AI strategy? For me, it starts with understanding the problems we need to solve and what people could achieve with greater capability. As artificial intelligence changes how we analyse, build and deliver, it raises bigger questions about digital transformation, technology leadership and how we measure value. The opportunity goes well beyond finding AI use cases: it is about enabling more people to do things they could not do before, with the right support and governance around them.
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Essay
The Quiet Cost of Perpetual Possibility
Is AI creating space or pressuring scope?
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Note
Turning Things Off Is Part of Building
Technology organisations celebrate launches because new capability is visible. Decommissioning creates a quieter kind of value: less risk, less complexity and more freedom to change what comes next.
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Note
The Boundaries Around What We Can Do Have Moved
The most interesting strategic question about AI may not be how much AI an organisation should use. It may be what has become possible now that some old constraints are moving.
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Note
Make the Safe Path the Easy Path
If AI makes delivery dramatically faster while the functions around delivery still operate at the old speed, the constraint has not disappeared. It has moved.
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Note
Expertise Isn't Disappearing. It's Moving Up a Level.
If AI can increasingly perform the execution, human expertise shifts towards understanding the problem, directing the work, challenging the output and knowing when not to trust it.
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Note
Don't Automate the Workaround
AI makes it increasingly easy to automate the work people already do. That makes it more important to understand why the work exists before making it faster.
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Note
Capability Without Judgement
The dangerous threshold for agentic AI may not require human-like intelligence. A system that can pursue an objective persistently, use tools and take consequential actions can matter long before it understands the wider context.
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Note
Performance Management Isn't a Favourite Rank Order
Poor performance should be addressed. But ranking everyone against everyone else is not the same thing as understanding who is performing poorly and why.
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Note
When Do We Stop Measuring AI Adoption?
AI usage can be a useful signal while organisations build capability. It becomes a poor destination if the objective is simply to make the number go up.
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Note
AI Cost Is an Architecture Problem
At enterprise scale, the price of the model is only part of the economics. Calls, context, routing, retries, loops, evaluations and fallbacks determine how that price becomes a system cost.
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Note
Building Is Getting Easier. Owning Still Matters.
AI is lowering the cost of building and experimenting with software. That makes the boundary between an experiment and an owned service more important, not less.
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Note
What If the Most Efficient Team Isn't the Best Team?
AI may let smaller teams produce the same or greater output. But output is not the only thing teams produce.
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Note
When the Artefact Stops Being the Evidence
AI is making polished CVs, applications and take-home work easier to produce. That may make the process behind the artefact a more useful signal than the artefact alone.
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Note
As Execution Gets Cheaper, Clarity Gets More Valuable
AI is making implementation and rework dramatically cheaper. It is not making ambiguity cheap.
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Note
Models Commoditise. Harnesses Accumulate.
The model may be the most visible part of an enterprise AI system, but the durable capability is increasingly everything the organisation builds around it.
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Centralise the Reusable. Distribute the Problem Solving.
A specialist AI capability can be valuable, but its success may ultimately be measured by how much useful capability becomes ordinary across the rest of the organisation.
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When Writing Software Stops Being the Scarce Bit
AI is making software dramatically easier to produce. The more interesting organisational question may be what becomes scarce when engineering capacity is no longer the constraint it once was.
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Note
Capability Without Judgement
The dangerous threshold for agentic AI may not require human-like intelligence. A system that can pursue an objective persistently, use tools and take consequential actions can matter long before it understands the wider context.
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Note
Making Change Cheaper
AI may be changing more than the cost of doing the work. It may be changing the cost of trying something, learning that it is wrong and changing direction.