This holiday season, I hope you find moments of peace, joy, and connection with those who matter most. I'm grateful for the shared learning, community and passion in 2025 and look forward to working together to improve outcomes and to make the world of work more humane in 2026! Happy holidays!

Do what you are good at, what you love doing, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. #Ikigai #BVSSH

In 1878, aged 22, Frederick Taylor made an unconventional choice. Despite strong family ties to the owners of Midvale Steel in Philadelphia, he joined the company as a common, unskilled labourer.

Start with Why. When improving 'how we do, what we do', colleagues will need to try something new and will fail. Ideally, failing fast, uniquely, cheaply and safely, with an absence of fear and blame.

Go slower to go faster. Or you will go slower. Balance. Renewal. Continuous Improvement. Prioritise time for it every day. Personal and work. #BVSSH

Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a great way to identify and nurture the natural innovators, the crazy hill dancers, in your organisation! ▶️ Voluntary, Law of Two Feet (come and go as you want) ▶️ Two co-chairs and a small organising group, when it gets larger, to organise and chair the sessions

Antipattern: Water-Scrum-Fall. Big Up Front Planning, Big Bang release, feature or story or story point counting, with the word Sprint ten times in the middle. Predicting the future at the point of having learnt the least.

Frederick Taylor, the 'Father of Scientific Management', in 1874, age 18, took a highly unusual step, given his 'upper-middle-class' background. He turned down a place at Harvard, with plans of becoming a lawyer, like his father.

A value stream has long-lived value consumers, producers (in multidisciplinary teams), and product(s) (things of value). Value streams are nested and networked. They are fractal. Teams & teams of teams are funded, rather than projects.

Get 1% better every day and after 365 days you'll be 38x better. And, obviously, don't stop after 365 days! Human systems entropy, improvement needs to be continuous. Standing still is not standing still, it is going backwards. #BVSSH

Leadership behaviour will make it or break it. 1. Role model behaviours you expect in others 2. Nurture psychological safety 3. Have an emergent mindset over a deterministic mindset (the future is not predictable, have hypotheses, run experiments) #BVSSH

Lasting change requires many people to unlearn and relearn. People need time to undergo that process. The pace of change is determined by the speed of unlearning The speed of (un)learning is determined by psychological safety #BVSSH

The Making of the CR*P Talk: Lots of learning when preparing the Certified AI Practitioner Talk! For this talk, there was an intro with talking babies, most slides contained AI-generated video content, and there was a talking baby outro. Here are the learnings:

The 'whole-job' team approach, Bell System Technical Journal, September 1983. "The principal advantage of this approach is that the developers themselves have a close relation with the clients. This results in high motivation, flexibility and low overhead. It is a proven technique and has been

Unique work is unknowable. The only way to learn is by doing. We need to minimise time to learning and value, to make the unknowable, knowable. We need to have hypotheses and run experiments, which are safe to intelligently fail (cheap, fast, safe).

The whole is something else than the sum of the parts. Two halves of a cow are not two smaller cows. Biological and social systems have emergent properties. We need to optimise for that. #BVSSH

This article, published in the Jan 1986 edition of the Harvard Business Review, is still just as relevant today as it was almost 40 years ago. Empowered multidisciplinary teams, moving up and down the pitch together with the ball. Over a relay race. Shared goals and incentives.

The way we work today is still influenced by Scientific Management (aka Time Study) as originated by Frederick Taylor. And, Taylor was in a unique situation to be able to inflict autocratic ways of working on people.

Communicate, communicate, communicate. Communicate three more times than you think you need to and you're a third of the way there. Change is social. Data, storytelling, change agents, incentive (it's a priority, the outcomes are better, the water is warm!).

Antipattern: Control without speed (one size fits all) or speed without control (fragile, not agile) Pattern: Speed AND control. #MinimalViableCompliance. Safety SMEs aligned to value streams. Not one size fits all. Continuous Compliance. The better your brakes the faster you can go #BVSSH

Company Announcement: "Teams are now fully empowered! (apart from decisions that have financial, reputational, architectural, social or operational impact)" 🥸 #BVSSH

Most organisations will have multiple ways of working, running in parallel, some increasing, some decreasing. Think Big, Start Small, Lean Fast. A big bang is an antipattern. It will be new labels on the same old behaviours. Step up the S-curve, at the pace of re-learning.

The Certified Really AI Practitioner (CR*P) certification is now up for grabs on Youtube! Watch here: youtu.be/11s7tqG9vuo?... #BVSSH

When writing OKRs it is helpful to use a canvas. The BVSSH OKR canvas contains strategic alignment to the one-year OKR, a view of the customer personas (who), along with the problem, insights or beliefs (why), the outcome hypothesis, the leading indicators, and finally the lagging impact measures.

People embrace change with an S-curve profile (Diffusion of Innovation, Everett Rodgers, 1962). Start by inviting the natural champions, the innovators. Change is hardest at the beginning, with the most headwinds, the most impediments, the least understanding and social proof in context.

From Project Management Office To Prompt Management Office 🥸 #BVSSH

Pattern: Dedicated data focus on ‘How’ measures #BVSSH

The future is unknowable. The only way to turn the unknowable into knowable is to learn by doing. With a clear goal (Think Big), we need safe to learn experiments (Start Small), minimizing time learning so that we have the cheapest cost of learning and can pivot sooner (Learn Fast).

The Certified Really AI Practitioner certification is now up for grabs on Youtube! Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=11s7... #BVSSH

Antipattern: Learning bubbles. Information, knowledge and learning trapped in silos (or worse, intentionally withheld with a view that 'knowledge is power') Pattern: Intentionally pop the learning bubbles

𝗦𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀𝗲 Nested and networked. Fractal and fluid. Emergent patterns change. Inside looking around, over outside looking in. Acting in the space changes the space. You are the system. The whole > sum(parts). Coherence through coordination. Circular, not linear. Balanced outcomes for all.

An Order Giving and Order Taking, I Know Best, Do As I Say behavioural norm is soo last century. Taylor explicitly industrialised it with ‘Scientific Time Study’ (AKA Scientific Management) in the early 1900s. In Shop Management (1905) he writes:

From Mythicise, to Analyse, to Standardise, to Empathise, to Synthesise In the West: ▶️ 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗲: Pre-Scientific. "𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴?". Authority in scriptures: Aristotle, Plato and Christian religious texts. Circular re-validation of existing 'truths' (1100 to 1700).

The Certified Really AI Practitioner certification is now up for grabs on Youtube! Watch here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=11s7... #BVSSH

It is 80% culture, 20% process with a focus on the outcomes. #BVSSH

The main source of failure is our failed attempts to avoid failure. Fearing intelligent failure is fearing learning. Fearing intelligent failure leads to unintelligent failure. Intelligent failure IS learning. We need to learn quickly, cheaply, uniquely and safely. #BVSSH

In order to get to growth, there is a need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, to pass through fear of failure, to get to early and often learning.

Did you know that Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton all had a hand in shaping the Gantt chart that you use in your company today? There is a direct link from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment (1680 to 1804) to Gantt charts!

The Certified Really AI Practitioner certification is now up for grabs on Youtube! Link in the comments! #BVSSH

As a leader ask: 🎯 What is the desired outcome? 📚 What have we learnt? 🧠 What will we learn next? 💡 How soon can we learn it? 🤝 How can I help? h/t: Mike Rother, Improvement Kata #BVSSH

Incentives (explicit and implicit) drive behaviours which drive outcomes. "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity", Rita Mae Brown

Certified Really AI Practitioner (CR*P) now available on YouTube! Welcome to your training! This is your One Best Way, One Size Fits All, Playbook for AI Dominance Transformation.

Did you know that the word 'entropy' comes from the Greek words for in (en) + transformation (tropē)?!

From Productivity To Valuetivity. Productivity: number of units of output, per unit of input. This is an antipattern in the Age of Digital & AI. We don't want more 'stuff'. Valuetivity: the most value, in the shortest time, with the least effort. Balanced with quality, safety and happiness (BVSSH)

Building the wrong thing faster, makes you wronger. #BVSSH

Did you know that the word "priority" has only existed in the singular form, until relatively recently? From the Latin 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳, meaning former or earlier, it referred to the "𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 that came before all others".

Great to see Myles Ogilvie and Tony Caink presenting on Speed AND Control at Fast Flow Conf today. Even more important with GenAI enabling more *stuff* faster. We need speed and control, not control without speed or speed out of control. #FastFlowConf #BVSSH

Great to see Chris Atkinson from Atom bank presenting on Automated Value Stream Maps at Fast Flow Conf today! #FastFlowConf #BVSSH

Your role is not your identity. Too often, we conflate our job title with who we are. But roles are temporary. Identity is enduring. Good people look after good people, agnostic of role. Your identity is defined by: ✅ How you show up ✅ How you behave ✅ The values you live by ✅ What you stand for

Our brains are wired for survival. We have Loss Aversion: we'd rather avoid a loss than seek a gain, which means that we'd rather avoid trying something that might fail. This is good from an evolutionary survival perspective when in the wild, however,