Might AI transcripts have a chilling effect on team bonding?
There's an AI notetaker in most of my meetings now, turning everything into a permanent, searchable record. I keep wondering what that does to the rapport-building and playfulness that colleagues need to grow into tight, effective teams.
Usability testing isn't enough
Usable, useful and used are three different things - pay attention to usability alone and you’ll miss things that really matter (often more).
A tragic waste of hope
The awkward question in the room usually isn't cynicism, it's care. Real hope asks hard questions, and a good retrospective is one of the most optimistic things a team ever does.
What’s your bureaucracy ratio?
Every organisation has people who do things and people who spent a lot of time only talking about doing things. The ratio between the two tells you most of what you need to know about whether change will actually happen here.
Traditional GDS model versus Test and Learn
Government Digital and Spend controls were designed for large programmes and for greenfield service development in low-capability spaces - and so the governance is proportionate for these contexts where risks are higher and delivery is staged. But if you’re taking a lower risk test and learn approach, with assurance embedded and delivery regular, small and incremental - they become a throttle.
Swansongs and lame duck leaders
Two kinds of outgoing leader do real damage: the one chasing a legacy and the one who has already mentally left. Both can really hinder the people they leave behind - but there's a better way to handle the last stretch.
Who does she think she is?
Voice an opinion as a woman and someone, somewhere, decides you're getting above yourself. This post is on the penalty women pay for taking up space, and the tired trade-off between being liked and being taken seriously.
Freewheeling
Sometimes there's plenty of motion and no actual movement: the wheels turn but the gears never engage. Momentum and the feeling of momentum are not the same thing, and transformations confuse them constantly.
Unbridled techno-optimism
"This is the worst these tools will ever be," people say about AI. I want to add some realism, because software degrades, data rots, and progress is a choice we keep making rather than a law of physics.
Where’s our moat on AI?
If a machine can churn out the obvious, what's left for designers? Quite a lot, and most of it sits in judgement rather than generation.
Repairing damaged peer relationships
Most damaged lateral peer relationships never rupture. There's no row, no betrayal, no dramatic falling-out that you can point to as the moment it went wrong. The relationship just cools - someone pulls away instead of leaning toward. You can fix that - as long as you notice.
Translucency
Most of what we call transparent is really translucent: the light gets through, but it's been filtered and coloured on the way to you. So we need to stop treating information shared in the name of “transparency” as indisputably objective - because it isn’t.
Your risk aversion is riskier
There's no risk-free option, only risks you've decided not to look at. How I size a risk honestly, and why starting small enough to survive being wrong beats trying to avoid it altogether.
The Flinch
An email lands and your body reacts before you've read a word: shoulders up, stomach tight. It's worth paying attention to what that flinch is telling you, what it does to a team over time, and what a leader owes the people who feel it.
Spurious detail, false certainty - we need to get more comfortable with "just enough"
The more detail and certainty you insist on before you start, the lower your chances of reaching the outcome you wanted. I had to learn to set off with just enough of a plan.
But we’re already doing…agile
Daily stand-ups, a Kanban board, Jira, retros, a roadmap, and a lot of complaints. Plenty of teams have every ceremony of agile and none of the results - so what’s missing?
AI is giving early 2008
I've been trying to figure out why I’ve been feeling so very uneasy recently. The honest answer is that it feels like the months before the financial crisis, and I saw that one unfold up close.
But we’re already doing…multidisciplinary teams
Multidisciplinary team, agile, outcome-focused, user-centred: tick, tick, tick, tick. So why no results? Because those labels are shorthand for conditions you might not actually have in place.
5. Putting this into practice
Realistic optimism without action is just a nice attitude. Here's how to turn the yeah-buts into a plan and the small steps into momentum.
4. What you expect of people is what you get
What you expect of your team shapes what they deliver. The Pygmalion effect has been tested hundreds of times and it's never been debunked. So what are your expectations teaching people?