Principles
Six working rules for changing how an organization operates. Each one describes something I’ve seen, and each came out of a system that behaved differently than it was supposed to.
Start with the operation, not the software.
Most change begins with a tool decision, which picks the problem up by the wrong end. Watch how the work actually moves first, the way you’d watch where people walk before paving a path, then decide what the work needs. Software chosen before anyone understands the operation inherits whatever was already broken.
Friction is a systems signal.
Where people improvise, re-enter data or keep a private spreadsheet beside the platform, that’s where the design gave out. Complaints work like coordinates, they tell you where to look. Friction is evidence about the system, and it says very little about the people absorbing it.
Deployment changes the problem.
A system behaves differently once real work runs through it, the way a kitchen that looked calm at three in the afternoon shows its gaps at dinner rush. Volume, exceptions and habit turn up requirements no interview ever will, which makes first contact with the operation the only honest specification.
Technology is a component, not the objective.
Software, data, automation and AI are inputs to an operating model, and they carry leverage, not purpose. Install a platform inside a broken arrangement and you get a faster version of the same loss.
The outcome is the unit of delivery.
Shipped capability is the baton changing hands, and the race keeps going. The work is complete when a measurable change holds in the operation and the organization can run, explain, and change the system without the person who built it.
Important work should not fight the systems around it.
Most people already bring plenty of effort to the work, and too much of it goes to coordination the system should have absorbed. Removing that tax is the whole purpose of an operational system.
Every operation has its own version of these. If one of them sounds like yours, the diagnostic is where we find exactly where it’s happening.
How engagements begin