Writing 17 articles · 1 series

Working notes on services, organisations, and doing the day job.

Long-form articles on Organisational Service Management and the SIB - along with the occasional idea that earns a place in the list.

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Contribution Without Consensus

Getting what people know into an organisation's model is gated by agreement — fill in fields you can't honestly answer, then win the meeting. So people stop contributing and keep their own spreadsheet instead. A layer says only what it has an opinion about; where it stays silent, a lower layer shows through. Remove the agreement, and contributing stops being a negotiation.

13 min read August 2026 Read article →

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The argument, in order.

If you’re new, these read as a sequence - each one sets up the next. The full archive is below; this is the way in.

Foundations — The Case for Service-First

The Service Blind Spot

Metrics, Measurement & Truth

Activity Without Flow

Seeing — Visibility & Sensemaking

Seeing as Strategy

Governance & Decision Flow

The Myth of Control

Knowledge & the SIB

Knowledge Isn’t a Story

Frameworks, Best Practice & Maturity

When ‘Best Practice’ Becomes a Shield

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Foundations — The Case for Service-First

1 article

The Service Blind Spot Service structures are built for control, not coherence, and that gap obscures the truth about how Services really work. This is a human-centred critique of how those structures hide reality, and a framework for restoring meaning and trust.

Seeing — Visibility & Sensemaking

1 article

Seeing as Strategy Compliance and dashboards stand in for sight, hiding the gaps they claim to close. When we can see how a Service really flows for the humans it serves, that clarity is itself the strategy - and OSM makes that sight reliable and shared.

The Service Graph & Architecture

1 article

Truth vs Turf: Why CMDB, EA and PMO Wars Make Us Blind Operations, Enterprise Architecture and the PMO each guard their own models until detail hardens into bunkers. They aren’t rivals - they’re lenses on one service graph, and turf wars blur the shared truth we need to make good decisions.

Knowledge & the SIB

4 articles

Knowledge Isn’t a Story Reports don’t tell us the truth; they tell us a story written by someone, for someone. What Services actually need isn’t perfect data but credible knowledge - information we trust enough to act on right now.

A Promise With Nothing Behind It An SLA is just a promise - and most promises in an organisation float free of anything that actually keeps them. When a commitment isn't tied to what delivers it, a met target and a broken Service look identical on the dashboard. OSM makes promises first-class, so you can finally see what's really behind them.

The Myth of the Single Source of Truth Every organisation is trying to build one authoritative record — and quietly failing, because reality has more than one honest author. OSM stops negotiating a single truth and starts composing it: layer by layer, resolved on demand, so the answer is always current and always shows its work.

Contribution Without Consensus Getting what people know into an organisation's model is gated by agreement — fill in fields you can't honestly answer, then win the meeting. So people stop contributing and keep their own spreadsheet instead. A layer says only what it has an opinion about; where it stays silent, a lower layer shows through. Remove the agreement, and contributing stops being a negotiation.

Metrics, Measurement & Truth

2 articles

Activity Without Flow Organisations celebrate motion and reward output, but busyness is not progress. OSM reframes the question from what we are doing to what we are contributing, and gives teams the visibility to see how value actually moves.

Measuring What Matters Most service metrics measure system activity, not human experience. OSM puts friction, flow, and faith at the centre of measurement, so green dashboards stop hiding broken services.

Governance & Decision Flow

2 articles

The Myth of Control Bureaucracy is not control; layers of forms and approvals add distance, not safety. OSM relocates control into the Service itself - through visibility, ownership, and credible data - so governance finally works.

Decision Latency Time-to-decision quietly governs lead time, cycle time, and throughput, yet almost no one measures it. Second-guessing is a visibility problem, not a personality flaw, and OSM makes services legible enough for credible bets.

Ownership, Accountability & Authority

1 article

Ownership Without Authority Owning what we cannot see. Handing someone accountability for a service they don’t control creates scapegoats, not owners - OSM makes ownership real by making services visible, connected, and navigable.

Risk, Finance & Investment

2 articles

Risk and Investment - Mortal Enemies? Calling something a risk frames it as a threat to be controlled; calling it an investment frames it as a choice about where to stake time, money and attention. Both are the same uncertainty - and healthy organisations need to speak both languages.

Finance Without Fog Financial planning runs in a parallel world, detached from the services the business actually delivers. OSM treats cost as an overlay on the service graph, so a dollar spent connects to a service delivered and a value created.

Strategy, Certainty & Change

2 articles

Digital Transformation - Oh Really? Swapping tools without changing behaviour isn’t transformation - it’s tech cosplay. OSM treats the future as a hypothesis you test through movement, not a roadmap you document into paralysis.

A Lighthouse, Not a Map Rethinking strategy, certainty, and how organisations navigate change. Real strategy is a stake you take and learn from, not a defensible deck - and OSM gives leaders orientation rather than the illusion of a complete map.

Frameworks, Best Practice & Maturity

1 article

When ‘Best Practice’ Becomes a Shield Frameworks, maturity models and best practice promise progress, but too often they protect us from harder questions. Real maturity isn’t climbing someone else’s ladder - it’s the courage to design from your own context.

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