Five hypotheses about an organisation. Every one wrong. Not wrong in the way AI is usually wrong. There was no hallucinated statistic, no invented source, no confident nonsense that a quick search would catch. Each hypothesis was well argued, properly sourced from what I’d given it, and coherent from the first sentence to the last….
Co-creation, in practice, tends to mean getting enough people to nod that nobody can later say they weren’t asked. The workshop ends, the objections are noted, the design moves forward largely as planned, and everyone involved has technically been consulted. It looks participatory. It isn’t. The trouble with treating consensus as the goal is that…
For most of the modern era, leaders have been able to ignore the fundamentals of how their organisations actually work. Operating models were left to accumulate rather than being deliberately designed. Nobody owned them. Coordination across functions was assumed rather than built. And for decades, many organisations got away with it. They got away with…
The World Economic Forum, with Kearney, has published a blueprint for an AI-first enterprise. It is one of the best papers I have read of how deeply AI changes the way an organisation creates value, and a good deal of it is simply correct. So let me start with what it gets right, because there…
There is a version of AI adoption that is going well in a lot of organisations right now. Teams have access to tools. People are being asked to identify where AI could help them. Use cases are being logged, prioritised, piloted. There is genuine engagement, genuine participation, and in many cases, genuine improvement. This is…
A keystone is the central stone at the top of an arch. It is the last stone set, and it is the one that locks every other stone in place. Take it away and the arch does not weaken slowly or sag at the edges. It collapses. Every other stone was depending on it. I…
Most businesses cannot afford their operating model. They just do not know it yet. That is not a provocation for its own sake. It is the conclusion I keep arriving at after years inside complex global organisations and now working with the leaders trying to scale them. The patterns that cause operating models to fail…
There is a familiar pattern in how organisations approach major change. They invest in technology, process redesign, and a training plan. They commission a change management workstream, usually late in the programme when the design is already set. They measure adoption at go-live and call it done. This pattern has always been inadequate. For AI,…
Some of the most critical evidence about how an organisation really operates is not missing from the record because nobody thought to capture it. It is missing because it lives in conversations, relationships, and informal agreements that happen outside of any system and were never meant to be logged. I worked with a team that…
Last week, 11,000 people were told they no longer had jobs. Meta cut 8,000, framed explicitly as the cost of becoming an AI-first organisation. Intuit cut 3,000 on the same morning, with their CEO making a point of saying this had nothing to do with AI. The reason given was reducing complexity, streamlining execution, cutting…
Microsoft published its 2026 Work Trend Index this week. It surveyed 20,000 workers across 10 countries, analysed trillions of productivity signals, and reached a conclusion that will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time inside a business trying to make AI work. The technology is ready. The organisations, in most cases, are not. They…
80% of companies deploying AI cut headcount. Most saw marginal returns or negative outcomes. In some cases they are having to rehire significant numbers of employees. That is the Gartner finding from 350 enterprises, all with revenues above $1 billion, all actively deploying intelligent automation.The conclusion they reached? Layoffs do not create AI returns. This…
There is a version of the AI conversation that most organisations are having, and then there is the conversation they need to be having. The one they are having tends to centre on tools: which ones to buy, how quickly to deploy them, how to demonstrate return on investment before the next board cycle. The…
Last weekend I was at the Royal Albert Hall to watch The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all three films, with a live orchestra and choir. The music came through the air and I could feel it. When the soloists performed, adults and children both, I had goosebumps. There is something about being in a…
Product wants velocity on new features. Engineering wants to reduce technical debt. Customer Success wants immediate fixes for top clients.Everyone’s optimising their piece of the puzzle and the enterprise is breaking. I see this pattern constantly. Each department builds the perfect solution for their world. Product gets their sprint velocity. Engineering carves out time for…
Looking at dozens of companies, from fast-growing scale-ups to established multinationals, many are doing impressive things: expanding markets, launching products, delivering strong financial results. But as I dug into their structures, I noticed something. A surprising number don’t have a COO. About half of Fortune 500 companies operate without one. The percentage has fluctuated over…
Most of the conversation focuses on risk. Fix your processes before you implement. Clean your data. Sort out your governance. Get your house in order or the technology won’t deliver. That framing is correct. But it’s incomplete. Because AI doesn’t just expose operating model weaknesses. In the right conditions, it has the potential to solve…
If you’re running an SME and looking at HubSpot’s pricing right now, you’re probably doing the maths. The jump from free to functional runs into hundreds or even thousands of pounds a month before you’ve unlocked the features that actually matter. So “build your own” starts to sound like the obvious answer. Just use a…
S&P 500 companies mentioned AI in earnings calls at record rates between 2024 and 2025. Almost all of them described implementation as entirely positive. The productivity data tells a different story. Most macro studies of productivity growth find limited evidence of a significant AI effect. Even firms that say it is useful find little evidence…
A few years into a senior role at a major global firm, I was asked to diagnose a problem that had puzzled the CFO. Every year, sales targets were hit. Revenue targets were not. Since the sales targets were supposed to generate the revenue needed to hit those targets, something was wrong. Nobody could explain…
This isn’t a gap you can fill by assigning it to someone; it requires a distinct capability that most operational leaders were never trained to develop. Someone asked me recently what happens to the operating model after I leave. It was a fair question. And the honest answer is: it depends on whether anyone owns…
Why the behaviour you are trying to change might be the most rational thing in your organisation There is a version of organisational diagnosis that goes like this: the teams aren’t collaborating, the silos are entrenched, the behaviour is territorial. The conclusion you come to is that you have a culture problem. The solution is…
A CFO I worked with at a global professional services firm had a problem she could not get underneath. Sales numbers were being hit. Bonuses were being paid. And yet the company kept missing its overall revenue targets, quarter after quarter. The data showed her the gap but could not tell her where it was…
Most organisations I speak with know something is wrong before they call me. They know they have a problem. They can see the symptoms. Decisions that should take days are taking weeks. Teams that should work together have built workarounds and shortcuts to avoid each other. Initiatives keep launching but improvement keeps failing to materialise….
Earlier this week I wrote on LinkedIn about a message from a former colleague. She had just come out of two difficult sessions about a new tool rollout, frustrated not by the tool itself but by how the decision about it was being made. It prompted me to write about what I used to do…
I have spent the better part of two decades inside large organisations, watching the same problem appear in different costumes. A company scales quickly. Headcount doubles. New markets, new products, new reporting lines. Leadership hires smart people and builds processes to manage the growth. And then, somewhere in the middle of all that activity, something…
