Recent essays
All →
All the Unwritten Processes
Before an agent can do anything, someone must make the workflow legible to it — a massive, skilled, unpaid investment in articulation that roadmaps never name and the most peripheral workers absorb.
The Ghost Competence
Deploying agents from day one doesn't remove the foundational learning phase — it makes it invisible, producing workers who look productive but never built the judgment to supervise what they delegate.
Briefing Is Not Chatting
Chat-style AI compressed the skill gap; agents reverse it — briefing rewards decomposition, specification and evaluation, the same managerial competences that educational capital has always distributed unequally.
The Articulation Gap
The AI super-user advantage is not a tech phenomenon — it's a laundered version of Bourdieu's linguistic capital, and LLMs are the most efficient class-sorting machine we've ever built.
Who Is Conducting Whom?
Working with AI didn't extend my mind — it changed the plane on which I think, and the gap between those two things matters enormously for anyone building systems that depend on people thinking well.
The Human Bottleneck
The constraint in AI-augmented work has already moved — not away from the technology, but onto the human who must direct, review, and judge what the machine produces.
The people in the middle of GenAI adoption
GenAI adoption stalls not because people fear the technology, but because organisations keep solving the wrong problem — and each failed rollout consumes trust that won't replenish itself.
When Feedback Fails
More than a third of feedback interventions degrade performance — not because the intent was wrong, but because most organisations treat feedback as a free good and skip the four design conditions that determine whether it helps or hurts.
When the Train Comes Off the Tracks
When performance slips, the instinctive managerial response is tighter control — which systematically destroys the information environment needed to fix the problem it was meant to address.
Recently reviewed
All →
WF
The War for Kindness
Strong diagnosis of why systems select against empathy. The prescription (rebuild kind systems) is less fully developed than the problem statement — which is where the book's limitations become visible.
BL
Blindsight
The most unsettling argument against consciousness ever written. Watts asks whether awareness is an evolutionary dead end.
GO
Good Power
The Boundary Paradox section is worth the whole book. The claim that setting limits increases your perceived value rather than reducing it took me a while to fully believe, then I watched it work.
MU
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
Read this after a project where I was the bottleneck without knowing it. The 'Accidental Diminisher' chapter named something I'd been doing for two years.