Notes from the consulting floor
Short writing on the work itself: what we see when transformations meet the real organization, why frameworks misfire, what tends to actually move a number. Published when there’s something worth publishing.
Field notes
What it costs to ask a colleague
Questions that used to go to a colleague or a manager now go to an assistant. The figures put on that shift will not bear weight,…
Read moreThe failing program nobody is allowed to stop
A workstream nobody believes in stays in scope because removing it costs the person who committed to it, and nobody else has the standing to propose…
Read moreAppointing a Chief AI Officer is the easier decision
A new central AI function is a differentiation decision, and a reasonable one. The commentary argues about whether the role should exist. It mostly leaves open…
Read moreSimplifying a report does not fix what the report was not doing
The EU Council has given final approval to the Omnibus I package, cutting CSRD scope. Both sides of the argument about how much was cut assume…
Read moreThe 95 percent AI failure figure, and what it counted
Ninety-five percent of AI pilots fail is now quoted as settled fact. The report behind it counted organizations rather than pilots, over six months, in a…
Read moreThe standard you cannot see is not a standard
A site moves a priority threshold by one notch for sound local reasons. Three years later every site has its own, and the staffing model built…
Read moreMost program delay is a queue of unmade decisions
On large programs the binding constraint is how long work waits for an answer, not how fast the work gets done. Two numbers make that queue…
Read moreWhy the AI pilot works and the rollout doesn’t
Most enterprise AI pilots succeed and most rollouts stall. The gap is rarely the model -- it is that nobody owned the change to how the…
Read moreWhy most digital transformations fail at the third quarter
The remarkably consistent failure point in the lifecycle of a digital transformation programme — what causes it, what survivors share, and how to run a structural…
Read moreThe portfolio review that actually changes capital allocation
Why most quarterly portfolio reviews change nothing — and the structural redesign that turns them into real capital reallocation forums.
Read moreWhen stage-gate stops killing things, it stops being stage-gate
Most stage-gate processes do not fail because the criteria are wrong. They fail because nobody actually kills anything at the gate. A 30-minute diagnostic and three…
Read moreWhat AI agents actually change about the consulting engagement
A field note on where enterprise AI agents are paying for themselves in 2026 — and three places they are quietly losing money.
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