The strange thing about "best practice" is that it aspires to be average.
No one wants to be left behind, so "best practice" becomes the base standard everyone races hard to reach... and then just treads water around it.
The same goes for any tool or template. The moment something can be systematised, it stops being an edge and becomes the price of entry. What is left is the part that was never going to fit in a process: knowing which problem actually matters, what to do differently, when the obvious answer is wrong. That is judgment, and it is about the only thing that has ever really separated one business from another.
Thoughts in progress
Essays
- When a good idea isn't going anywhere A good problem isn't enough
- When something's gone wrong and there's a ready reason The comfortable explanation
- When everything's broken at once In a mess, don't fix everything
- When the pressure is to do something about AI The bottleneck was never the technology
- When you're accountable for a number you can't move Accountable for numbers you can't move
- When something won't budge, whatever you throw at it When the playbook stops working
Working positions