Writing
“Where are you seeing this work?”
A small number of pieces each year, each one drawn from an engagement. We write when what we observed taught us something we did not know before, and we publish what we learned.
Every piece opens with the view we hear most often, in the words our clients use, and then sets out what the work showed instead.
“Nobody is using the tools we bought.”
Why disclosure of AI use collapses in firms where the credit is ambiguous and the audit risk is not. The usage dashboard was not measuring adoption. It was measuring who trusted their manager.
“Start somewhere small and low-risk.”
Processes selected for pilots are selected because failing at them costs nothing, which is the same reason succeeding at them proves nothing.
FromThree engagements, one of them ours
“The gap is prompting skill.”
The same task run twice by the same team: once as an exercise, once with the authority to act on the result. The prompts barely changed. The output did, because in the second run someone owned the answer and began reading it properly.
“It frees people up for higher-value work.”
Recovered time returns to the queue unless someone decides otherwise, and nobody had decided. What changed after the tool arrived was throughput, not the composition of the work. A reasonable outcome, and not the one that was sold.
“Our people are resistant to change.”
The most obstructive person in the building understood the process better than anyone and had been left off every session about it. This is the piece the firm’s name comes from, which is why we are least neutral about it.
The standard
Not an editorial policy for its own sake. It is why the archive is short, and why we can stand behind each piece in it.
It came from a room we were in
Nothing about the industry in general. If we were not sitting with the people it happened to, we have nothing to add that you could not read elsewhere.
The conventional view goes first
In its own words, not a version constructed to be easy to argue with. If we cannot state the other position in a sentence someone would actually say, we do not understand it yet.
We say what we used to think
Every piece exists because something we believed turned out to be wrong. The prior position stays in the piece. It is the evidence that the new one cost us something.
If your experience differs from what we have written, we would like to hear it. Several of these pieces were revised after a client showed us something we had missed.
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