organisational dynamics | The Broomstick Brief

Nothing reached the gate

The agent has been doing this for eight months. It reads approved tickets, renders them into firewall configuration, verifies the result against intent, and closes the loop. It is good at the job: faster than the network team it replaced, and it does not mistype an address at the end of a long shift. A change ticket ar…

The evidence starts too late

The hinge ended with a person doing the comparing: for example, an analyst who takes what the systems report, holds it against what is actually happening, and decides which of the two to believe. Route around that job in one place and it reappears in another. So the obvious next proposal: give the comparing to a model.…

A door hinge rendered as a technical illustration, but the central pin of the hinge is a human silhouette, standing upright, holding the two leaves together. The left leaf is dense and disordered: overlapping raw material, weather, cables, half-legible signals, textures that do not resolve. The right leaf is clean and ruled: a severity matrix grid, policy clauses, an architecture diagram with tidy boxes and arrows.

The hinge in the attention argument

Cassie Kozyrkov’s question is a good one: if machines now do the doing, what is left for leadership? Her answer is attention. Leadership becomes the design of what machines notice, optimise and repeat. That is a useful shift, but the argument becomes more interesting if Ashby’s law and Lewin’s field theory are read a l…

A drawn fantasy map titled The Metier Landscape. Everyday Settlements sit at the front, with trailheads marked Dashboards, Meetings, Glossary, Projects, AI Tools, Audits, Reorg and Incidents. Paths climb through Operations Plain and Information Valley to Concept Ridge, Concern Ridge and the High Country beyond. A panel in the corner reads: many entrances, many paths, no single route.

All of it would survive an audit

The Monday report is accurate and on time. Its third column has a name that made sense to whoever built it, and that person moved teams in 2021. Everyone who reads it knows roughly what the column counts, and no two of them would write the same sentence about it. Down the corridor a working group is meeting for the fou…

Concerns as an organising principle

The reorganisation was announced in October. Four directorates became three, the data team moved out of IT into a function called Information and Insight, two roles went and three were created. The intranet A to Z was updated inside a fortnight. By April the new structure was being asked what the old one had been asked…

The organisation without a model of itself

In March a new starter sat for a week without a login. Six people met four times and recommended a pre-start checklist. The checklist was adopted. In September a new starter sat for a week without a login. The March report named three causes: unclear ownership of onboarding, a communication gap between IT and HR, and a…

Why maturity models disappoint

The assessors came for three days in October. The evidence pack ran to 412 documents, 61 of them written that fortnight. The verdict was level three of five, with a roadmap to level four. The certificate hangs by the lift. In November a release went out without a rollback plan, the way releases had always gone out. Pol…

AI is exposing old organisational weaknesses

The assistant went live on a Tuesday, indexed the intranet, and was asked by somebody about to resign what notice period applies. It answered three months, quoting a policy page from 2019. The answer has been one month since the 2022 handbook. The pilot review recorded a hallucination. The model had not hallucinated. I…

Why intelligent people disagree while using exactly the same words

Four people leave a meeting agreed about the risk of moving payroll to a new provider in January. The minute says so, and none of them has reason to doubt it. In the room, the payroll manager meant the chance that the first run would come out wrong. Finance meant what it would cost to put right. Legal meant who would a…

Most organisations do not have an information problem

A familiar ritual follows organisational trouble. A decision goes wrong, a delivery slips, a risk materialises that somebody somewhere had documented, and the retrospective lands on a convenient conclusion: the information wasn’t good enough. The remedy writes itself. Another dashboard. A new report. A data lake, prope…

Legible

There have been and are prominant figures whose conduct is usually filed under unpredictability. The word does a lot of work, and most of it is concealment. Unpredictable is what an observer says when a pattern is present but a frame that would catch it has not been picked up. It describes the watcher, not the watched.…

Een toets heeft een stabiel object nodig

Bestuurlijke instrumenten beoordelen toestanden. Een toets, accreditatie of kader stelt vast of iets op een bepaald moment in de juiste staat verkeert, en ontleent zijn waarde aan de aanname dat die toestand stabiel blijft tot het volgende toetsmoment. Dat werkt zolang de eigenschap waar het om gaat berust op een stabi…

The part that stays strange

Any lens explains something. That is the problem with them, not the recommendation. Point a strong enough frame at a situation, and it will find its own pattern there, because a frame is built to find that pattern, and the finding feels like discovery rather than like the frame doing what it was made to do. So the fact…

A world map in the muted, slightly aged style of an old commercial atlas, deep greys and warm parchment tones, no bright colours. The landmasses are plain and understated, deliberately unremarkable. The eye is drawn instead to the chokepoints: a handful of narrow sea passages marked with subtle bright constrictions, like a ribbon pinched between two fingers, at the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb and Suez, the Panama Canal, the Danish and Turkish straits. Thin flowing lines of shipping traffic stream across the oceans and visibly bunch and narrow as they squeeze through each pinch point, thick and tangled at the straits, thin elsewhere. At several of these pinch points sits a small, discreet military marker, a simple anchor or star symbol with a faint defensive ring around it, showing a base or fleet holding the passage: one at Hormuz, one in the middle of the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia, one at the mouth of Bab-el-Mandeb near the Horn of Africa where several such markers cluster together uneasily, one at Panama. Over the landmass of China, a different marker: not a passage but a cluster of small refinery and smelter symbols glowing faintly, with dispersed thin ore-lines from Africa, South America and Australia all converging into that single cluster, showing the scattered sources funnelling into one processing hub. Across the Arctic top of the map, a faint dotted route curves over the pole, bypassing the pinch points below, marked discreetly as the northern passage, with a single marker of its own. In one corner, almost incidental, a few small human figures rendered very small and plain, standing apart from the grand map, suggesting the people downstream of the passages who never appear on it.

The map is mostly bottlenecks

The usual way of reading the contest over resources is to look at where they are. Whose ground holds the oil, the gas, the rare earths, the cobalt. On that picture power follows the deposit, and the country sitting on the richest seam holds the strongest hand. It is the picture behind a great deal of the current talk a…

A lone figure seated on an ornate throne-like chair at the centre of a grand hall, gripping the armrests with the confident posture of someone who believes the room revolves around them. The chair stands on a circular dais, but the dais is wheeled and slightly tilted, beginning to roll away unnoticed. All around, smaller groups of figures have turned their chairs to face one another in tight conversational clusters, forming their own little circles, none of them looking at the central figure. A few have already drifted toward the open doors, where soft daylight spills in. The central figure holds a length of rope that once tethered the surrounding chairs, but the rope is slack and the knotted ends have quietly come loose on the floor.

The centre that depends on the room

The usual way of reading power treats it as a possession. Someone holds the leverage or they do not; the troops, the money, the umbrella, the seat at the head of the table. On that picture the strong actor is the one who can hurt the others more than they can hurt back, and the others arrange themselves accordingly bec…

A shape of European rearmament

Everyone knows by now that Europe is rearming. That part is easy to write and carries almost nothing, because “investing in defence” survives any amount of vagueness. The interesting reading sits a little lower down, in the documents that have to name things: how much money, raised in what way, spent on what, through w…

Reading the procurement, not the press release

A policy speech says what an institution wants to be seen wanting. A procurement document records what it has agreed to pay for. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is usually the more interesting reading. A press release costs nothing to write and binds no one. A call for tender names a budget, a deadli…

A single weary civil servant at a cluttered government desk, buried under towering stacks of paper documents and redaction folders, frantically rubber-stamping and blacking out pages. In the background, an empty pristine filing system labelled 'intake' sits untouched and gathering dust.

Een transparantiewet die vindbaarheid eist

Er is een gewoonte in detection engineering die een organisatie tijd kost om af te leren. Een team kijkt naar de waarschuwingen, de dashboards en de dekkingsrapporten, en beschouwt die als de plek waar detectie gebeurt. Dat is niet zo. Het is de plek waar detectie zichtbaar wordt. Het werk dat bepaalt of er iets te zie…

The stability of dysfunction

The stability of dysfunction Many discussions of large systems quietly assume that a stable system is a healthy one, and an unstable system is a sick one. Complex systems tend to violate that intuition. They can remain operational for a very long time without becoming any healthier, and they possess several mechanisms …

Architecture reviews that approve instead of challenge

Architecture reviews exist to catch problems before they become expensive. In practice, most reviews catch a different set of problems from the ones they were designed to find, and miss a different set from the ones that will eventually cause trouble. This is not because the reviewers lack competence. It is because mos…