Category: Corporate Culture
Why Technology Planning Is Fundamentally Dishonest
1. Estimation Fails Exactly Where It Is Demanded Most Estimation is most aggressively demanded in workstreams with the highest discovery, the highest uncertainty, and the highest intellectual property density. This is not an accident. The more uncomfortable the terrain, the more organisations reach for the false comfort of numbers. In these environments, estimation is not […]
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Stop Email Threads: 5 Rules for Smarter Team Collaboration
Email trees are not an accident. They are the predictable outcome of organisations repeatedly using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Despite decades of evidence, email is still treated as a collaboration platform rather than what it actually is: a slow, lossy message delivery system. The result is wasted time, fragmented thinking, and an […]
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Corporate Herding: How Bad Meetings Kill Decision Making
1. The Dead Giveaway Is the Meeting Itself There is a reliable early warning signal that corporate herding is about to occur: the meeting invite. No meaningful agenda. No pre reading. No shared intellectual property. No framing of the problem. Just a vague title, an hour blocked out, and a distribution list that looks like […]
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Why Motive Under Autonomy Reveals True Leadership Culture
Culture is not revealed by behaviour under control, but by motive under autonomy. Highly controlled environments mask intent and allow organisations to promote leaders whose inner compass has never been tested. When controls are later removed at seniority, behaviour shocks leadership and risk materialises. Durable outcomes, whether in fraud prevention, customer trust, or leadership quality, […]
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Organisational Bloat: Fix Muscle Imbalance in Your Team
1. The Question That Exposes Everything Walk into any large organisation and ask a deceptively simple question: “What does everyone do?” Not what are your job titles, not what does your org chart say, but what do people actually do all day. The silence that follows is never accidental. This blog is a reframing of […]
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Banking Complexity: Leadership Failure or Inevitable Growth?
If you look back over time at all once great companies, you will see that eventually simplicity gave way to scale. What are some of the risks that drive this? This is where many great banks lose their edge. But is this really a shared destiny for all banks, or did the leadership simply fail […]
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How Low-Trust Organisations Destroy Delivery With Control
1. The Organisation That Optimised for Distrust I once worked in a company with spectacularly low trust. Everything took ages (like years), quality was inconsistent (at best),costs were extraordinary and there was almost no common understanding of why things were so bad. Clients were charged a small fortune for products that competitors could deliver at […]
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Why Forced Regular Stability Work Beats Reactive Fixes
Why do Companies Get Stability So Wrong? Most companies do not fail because they cannot innovate. They fail because they misjudge stability. Some organisations under invest. They chase features, growth, and deadlines while stability quietly drains away. Outages feel sudden. Incidents feel unfair. Leadership asks how this happened “out of nowhere”. Other organisations over invest. […]
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AI Engineering: How Small Teams Now Build at Scale
I have started writing production code again. Not prototypes. Not proofs of concept. Real systems. Real risk. Real consequences. At Capitec, a very small group of engineers is now tackling something that would historically have demanded hundreds of people: large scale rewrites of core internet banking capabilities. This is not happening because budgets magically increased […]
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Data vs Wisdom: Why More Information Isn’t Enough
Why More Information Doesn’t Mean More Understanding We’ve all heard the mantra: data is the new oil. It’s become the rallying cry of digital transformation programmes, investor pitches, and boardroom strategy sessions. But here’s what nobody mentions when they trot out that tired metaphor: oil stinks. It’s toxic. It’s extraordinarily difficult to extract. It requires […]
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