Journal Themes
The Fears and Hopes Protocol
A facilitation exercise designed to get a group’s expectations and concerns into the open at the beginning of working together.
Organisations confuse positive sentiment with successful sense-making, and treat "buy-in" as the objective
The question I care about is: Do people understand more than they did before?
Playing to win; Playing not to lose
If I am playing to win, I look for possibility. If I am playing not to lose, I look for threats.
From pathology to possibility
Change the object of enquiry - not what is going wrong, but what is gong right, and could go even more right.
Stop staring at the risk. Decide your response.
I think project management techniques are so valuable because they often work far beyond projects. Risk responses are a perfect example.
Desirable, Feasible, Viable
Yes, those are the three classic tests, often called the DVF framework: Desirability, Viability, and Feasibility. They are used in business model design, product work, innovation and design thinking to test whether an idea is likely to succeed.
Competitiveness and combativeness can work against persuasion, collaboration, and trust-building - key for both project and change work
A psychological orientation towards status, control, and self-protection may overpower the collaborative instincts that good project management usually requires. A few different bodies of literature speak to this. I wanted to dig further into some of these.
If the market won’t sit still, your business model and offers must be adaptive
The businesses that cope best right now are not the most polished; they are the most responsive. When you build that responsiveness into the way your business functions, uncertainty becomes something you work with, not something that works against you.
Practical prompts to stop playing only to win
If you want to build space for thinking how to change the game, try these prompts in a leadership meeting, planning session, or strategy day. If you are a solopreneur, try them in a journal or a thinking walk.
Different leaders need different things. Here's where I help.
Sometimes that means working with strategy. Sometimes it means working with governance, delivery, readiness, operating models or change. The specific tools vary but the underlying purpose of Wrixle is consistent: helping people to transform ideas into reality.
Examples of a layered revenue architecture by industry
Monetising value at multiple layers is highly protective.
Why I deliberately lead people into ambivalence and encourage them to slow down meaning-making
One of the most counterintuitive things I do when preparing a major change announcement, a team away day, or the launch of a high-risk, uncertain project is I discourage people from reaching a decision too quickly.
Running pilots, trials, proofs of concept
As part of a wider transformation agenda focused on flexible working, a large organisation explored whether tablet devices could become a standard, supported part of its end‑user computing estate
For readiness, start with the decision
Not every project requires readiness management. Every project requires planning, governance and delivery management. Readiness is only needed when the project will culminate in a consequential decision that stakeholders must consciously authorise and then stand behind.
How project accounting adds value
Project accounting offers multiple benefits - across understanding profitability of a specific project, spotting early warning signals, and building a bank of data that, over time, improves pricing and estimating.