Notes from Nowhere
Random musings, half-formed thoughts, and things that caught my attention.
This is random stuff — placeholder thoughts while I get the real writing going. Don’t read too much into it.
On switching contexts
There’s something no one tells you about working across four countries and a dozen industries: the skill isn’t knowledge transfer, it’s context compression. You get very good at figuring out what actually matters in a new environment within the first three weeks — and ruthlessly ignoring the rest.
Most organisations mistake familiarity for expertise. The person who’s been in the same role for seven years isn’t necessarily the most capable; they’re often just the most habituated. Fresh eyes aren’t a liability. They’re the only way to see the scaffolding everyone else has stopped noticing.
A thing about governance
Governance is one of those words that means everything and nothing. Tell someone you work in governance and watch their face politely arrange itself into blankness. But strip it back and it’s just this: who decides, how, and what happens when they get it wrong.
Most governance failures aren’t technical. They’re social. The framework was fine. The committee was captured. The policy was clear but nobody owned enforcement. You can write the best AI governance policy in the world and it’ll sit in a SharePoint folder until someone senior enough cares about it.
The unglamorous version of this work — the one I actually do — is making the social conditions for a policy to stick. That’s less interesting to put in a LinkedIn headline.
Things I keep coming back to
- The gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually reward is diagnostic. Read that gap carefully.
- Most “strategy” documents are post-hoc rationalisations of decisions already made. That’s not always bad — sometimes you need the document to make the decision durable.
- Consensus is overrated as a goal. Clarity is what you want. People can disagree and still execute.
- The best meetings I’ve been in had someone in the room who was willing to say the obvious thing nobody else would say.
On writing
I’m starting this site partly because I’ve been consuming and producing documents for other people for a long time and I want something that’s just mine. No brief, no stakeholder, no approval chain.
The format will be loose. Some posts will be long. Some will be two paragraphs. The category system exists mostly to help me find things later, not to signal that this is a Serious Publication.
If something here is useful to you, that’s a happy accident. I’m mostly thinking out loud.
Miscellaneous
The best professional advice I ever got came from someone who told me to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and start trying to be the most useful one. I’ve been chasing that ever since, with mixed results.
Melbourne is underrated as a city for thinking. Good coffee, low ambient noise in the right neighbourhoods, and people who’ll actually debate you at dinner. Not everything needs to be optimised.
More soon.