Writing
Long-form pieces on enterprise architecture, business architecture, dynamic capabilities, AI strategy, and the gap between strategic signal and organisational response.
Nokia shipped a touchscreen smartphone in 2004, three years before the iPhone. So the failure was not that they could not build it, and it was not that they could not execute. Four years went somewhere else entirely, and it is the part almost nobody measures.
Read →Your organisation has a guaranteed response time for a broken laptop and none for a broken business model. The most disciplined response machinery in the enterprise lives at the bottom of the building, and the principle it runs on has never once climbed the stairs.
Read →I learned strategy in a room I did not know was a classroom. A real-time strategy game, a business simulation, fifteen years of wilderness, and the socket that finally arrived. And a question I cannot put down: where does the next generation get its reps?
Read →I trained for the strategy room and spent twenty years in the requirements room. The reason wasn't me: the discipline itself had quietly vacated the strategic layer. Here's the collapse that explains it, and the layer worth reclaiming.
Read →Enterprise architecture struggles at the strategic layer because three theoretical foundations are missing from its paradigm. Maps stay accurate; the change still doesn't happen.
Read →The world's most valuable enterprise software company is doing what enterprise architecture has been trying to do for thirty years. They just stopped calling it architecture and started wiring it into operations. The lesson is bigger than Palantir.
Read →Mahmood Mamdani's framework for understanding colonial binaries turns out to be the best description of what happens inside organisations during transformation. The pattern, and its resolution, applies to political transitions, market disruptions, and every major organisational change.
Read →Ward Cunningham's technical debt metaphor works at every level of human organisation. When applied to national institutions, especially those inherited from colonial architectures, it reveals why policy reform so often fails against structural constraints, and what business leaders can learn from the pattern.
Read →Your growth strategy assumes a labour market that may not exist. Employment elasticity, broken pyramids, and the historical pattern of what happens when economic architecture fails to absorb a generation, from the Industrial Revolution to AI.
Read →Some organisations accelerate as they grow. Others slow down. The difference often comes down to whether capabilities and architecture reinforce each other or fight each other. Here's how to recognise which cycle you're in.
Read →The organisations that scale fastest don't choose between stability and flexibility. They architect for both simultaneously. Here's how strategic layering creates the conditions for sustained growth.
Read →When formal institutions don't exist, entrepreneurs don't wait. They improvise. Institutional bricolage is the art of combining formal and informal mechanisms to create functioning business architectures where traditional approaches would fail.
Read →Most architecture frameworks treat organisations as machines to be optimised. But organisations aren't machines. They're living systems that need to sense, seize, and transform. Here's why dynamic capabilities change everything.
Read →Architecture describes. Engineering builds. Most organisations have plenty of architecture, but not enough engineering discipline applied to how they actually change. Here's why enterprise engineering is the discipline we've been missing.
Read →Capability mapping has become standard practice. But mapping alone doesn't make organisations more capable. Drawing on Capability-Driven Development research, here's why the real value lies in designing and developing capabilities that adapt to context.
Read →What if we treated organisations the way engineers treat complex systems? Not as machines to be managed, but as purposefully designed systems that can be redesigned. Enterprise Engineering offers a rigorous foundation for exactly this.
Read →Most professions don't spend their time explaining why they matter. Enterprise architecture? Still fighting for legitimacy. Here's why, and what actually works.
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