We can make work more efficient on paper while making the organization less capable in practice. In A City Is Not a Tree (1965), Christopher Alexander argued that living cities depend on overlapping systems that…
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More Than the Role
You were hired for one thing and got more than you bargained for. The problem is that the extra never made it onto your company’s org chart. There’s a version of this that plays out…
The Human Resource
{*} The AI narrator, employee view: Here are your tasks for the day. Ten items. Skill match 83%. All ten fall within your skill zone with the balance sitting in your comfort zone. You were…
Why Original Thinking Still Matters in an AI Content World
There’s a pattern emerging in how AI is being used to create content. Scrape what exists, and package it into something sellable. Push it out, and if it doesn’t land, scrape again. Then you adjust…
Why Task Force Thinking Is Changing How Organizations Work
Over the course of my career, I’ve been on more task forces than I can count, and for a long time, I thought they were one of the better ideas organizations had come up with….
Why Cities Fought Back
When planners began redesigning cities as machines, the logic seemed obvious. Efficiency, order, optimization: housing here, work there, traffic moving cleanly between them. It was the vision of architects like Le Corbusier, a city engineered…