Essays
Essays on leadership and governance.
Shorter pieces drawn from the ongoing work — explorations of the patterns I keep returning to, observations from twenty years of leading teams, and notes on the governance challenges that the field is just beginning to face.
The Handoff Was Never the Only Option
Two essays in, the file structure is right and the discipline is right. Then a new feature surfaces a question the handoff file was never designed to answer: what if you don’t have to start over at all? On forking, branching, and the three continuity moves that keep a project alive.
The Session Is Not the Project
A handoff file gets you through the door — but on a project that runs for weeks, it stops being a signpost and quietly becomes a journal. The fix isn’t more prompting. It’s recognising that a long-running project needs its own architecture: stable knowledge in one place, active state in another, procedures written once instead of re-explained every session.
You Will Hit the Token Limit
Set things up the right way and you’ll never hit the token limit again — or so the advice goes. It’s misleading, and the newer version (context windows don’t matter anymore) is worse. Windows are finite. The real job isn’t avoiding the limit; it’s keeping the work alive when the window can’t — which turns out to be a leadership problem, not a prompting one.
The BUILD+ Leadership™ Framework — A Practical System for First-Time Leaders
When I started observing leaders across two decades of work — in banking, in IT services, in US healthcare, in e-governance, in CRM technology — I noticed the same pattern repeating itself. Capable people, promoted into leadership roles because they had been exceptional individual contributors, struggled in their new positions. Not because they lacked talent, intelligence, or work ethic.