Field Notes
Notes from where the neat diagrams meet actual organizations.
Short arguments from practice: projects, risk, portfolios, management systems and AI — especially where the tidy explanation stops being useful and someone still has to decide what to do.
Start with the situation, not the framework.
A green dashboard beside a late project. Ten priorities competing for the same three people. An AI initiative looking for a problem. These notes start there: with the awkward situation a manager can actually recognize, then work toward the question underneath it.
A dashboard is not a management information system.
The test is simpler: when something goes wrong, does the screen help anyone decide what to do next?
AI should enter after the management logic is clear.
AI is excellent at accelerating things. That includes badly designed processes.
Observations still earning their length
Some ideas deserve a page. Some deserve another week in the notebook. These stay short until the evidence, argument or practical usefulness earns something longer.
The risk committee meets. The decisions do not happen.
A risk can be discussed for an hour and still leave the room without an owner who can actually make the trade-off.
Priority should change the allocation of something.
If nobody loses people, money, sequence or executive attention, calling something a priority has changed very little.
Training is the beginning. Capability is the result.
The useful test begins after the course: what can people now do differently when the real work becomes inconvenient?
Closed actions can leave open problems.
A closed action is administrative evidence. The harder question is whether the condition that created the action actually changed.