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 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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
A friend who was at HackIT 2026 in Firenze sent me a photograph of a printed handout. Two pages, a bit creased, a faint smear of something on the second one. It was the material for a workshop called Imagining collectivity under oppression, run on the Friday afternoon in Sala M by two people going by Alecs and webbie. …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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 …
Many critiques of Agile assume something went wrong. The story is usually told as a fall from grace: a practical response to software uncertainty that then disappeared beneath ceremonies, certifications, frameworks, and consultants. There is another way to read the same history. Perhaps Agile did not fail. Perhaps it s…
Most engineering disciplines accept that method follows from context. Nobody expects a bridge engineer, a documentary director, and a trauma surgeon to share a planning model, and nobody finds the difference remarkable. Software is one of the few fields where people go looking for a single methodology and then try to a…
A few days after sending an application to the Dutch Ministry of Defence for a senior cyber and information security advisory role, I read an NRC article about publicly accessible details of Dutch military infrastructure. Not leaked documents. Not espionage. Not shadowy dead drops in rainy parking garages. Public websi…
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…
Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022. Obliviousness and congruence Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved, just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most…
We’ve got two brain hemispheres, structurally asymmetrical. The left one? Brilliant at building bridges, splitting atoms, counting beans. It’s been instrumental in all that humankind has achieved. Unfortunately, it’s also a terrible driver of the human experience. A wonderful servant, yes, but an appalling master. The …