Short notes I have shared on LinkedIn on critical thinking, decision-making, agile and delivery, newest first.
Stanford Law Review cited my "hypertext-linked web page"
While updating my Google Scholar citations, I found that a 1997 Stanford Law Review article cites my soc.culture.scottish FAQ as an example of a new form of literary work it calls a "hypertext-linked web page". The reference appears in the introduction and the second footnote.
Think agile is dead? Searches are just a proxy
Falling searches for the word "agile" are only a proxy. The better question is where agile is going. A paper from the Centre of Economic Security, drawing on the Future of Security Conference at King's College London in July 2025, calls for institutions that are permanently adaptable, data integrated across silos, and a shift from risk aversion to risk tolerance. I argue that all of this is agile. The conversation has moved beyond Scrum and SAFe to solving meaningful problems, enabling collaboration and resolving bottlenecks.
Human originality in a world of AI art
Seeing one of the world's best known paintings in person at the Uffizi in Florence prompted a question. AI can generate art in a few seconds and we are devaluing human originality, so are we losing something that makes us human if we undermine our ability to create original art by hand?
Red Team Instructor™ certification
I have completed the Red Team Instructor™ certification with Red Team Thinking®. It was not a turn-up-and-get-a-certificate course. It ran over several months, often needing many hours a week of instruction, group work and coaching one another, with students spread across Europe, North America and APAC. Some pulled out and not everyone passed. I have already spoken on the topic in several countries and am now speaking to a major business school.
Digital transformation in the world of AI
After hearing BCS President Daljit Rehal speak on digital transformation in the age of AI, one question stayed with me: are we effectively outsourcing our thinking to AI and accepting what it says? I cite a peer reviewed paper reporting a significant negative relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, with cognitive offloading as the mediating factor. I see that as a big risk to organisations.
Delivering critical thinking across the world
In the previous 12 months I delivered critical thinking in Romania, India and Malta, with further opportunities then coming up in Ireland, and it was a pleasure to co-deliver with Scott Henderson for the first time. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report names analytical thinking as the top skill required in business (page 35), with 50% more employers saying it is more important than AI. Better decisions, faster: how valuable could that be for your organisation?
There are no ceremonies in agile
Scrum has never used the word "ceremonies" in any edition of the Scrum Guide. Scrum and SAFe call them events, the Kanban Guide mentions meetings as a possible practice, and the Spotify model refers to meetings. I argue that terms such as "agile ceremony" and "agile methodology" signal cut-and-paste or fake agile, because words have meaning and the wrong words drive the wrong behaviours. Agile is a lightweight way of working aimed at doing valuable work in the most efficient way.
Academia.edu's AI reviewed my paper
Academia.edu's AI review of my paper on how critical thinking uncovered an error in Thinking, Fast and Slow praised its clarity and its concrete real-world example of evidence-based inquiry. It also highlighted the respectful dialogue with Professor Shane Frederick, the use of direct correspondence and data, and the link to research on System 1 and System 2 thinking, bias and heuristics.
Not much of a thought leader
Posting an updated "agile manifesto" does not make you a thought leader. I asked ChatGPT for an Agile Manifesto 2030 and it produced four new value statements in about ten seconds. My tip: be more original.
Red Team Coaching™ Level 4 certification
After over a year of training, I have completed the Level 4 Red Team Coaching™ certification with Red Team Thinking®, led by Bryce Hoffman, author of Red Teaming. For me it was a five-year journey. In 2019 I prepared a talk on strategy, failure and thinking differently for Agile Tour London, later given at Agile Tour Lithuania and Agile Tour India. In March 2020 I met Bryce, and our class predicted a second and worse Covid wave. That class called out groupthink, which the Covid inquiry report also identified as a failure of government planning. Our July 2024 assignment was to improve a government's post-Covid health strategy using Red Team Thinking® practices.
Why the 80/20 rule is rubbish
The 80/20 rule says 80% of a product's value comes from 20% of the effort, which puts the remaining edge cases at the bottom of the pile. That fails disabled people and other minorities, and niche products can drive mass adoption. Job boards show the problem: they still treat "remote" and "hybrid" as locations and lack filters for inside or outside IR35, languages, security level or nationality, even though I led the development team that delivered online accommodation booking in 2000. Edge cases matter, minority groups matter and inclusivity matters. 80/20 only works if you know where 80% of the value truly lies.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast?
The line attributed to Peter Drucker fails on two counts. Culture and strategy work together, so one does not eat the other, and there is no validated evidence that Drucker said it: I asked the Dean of the Drucker Institute, who called it a myth. I posted it on the 710th anniversary of Bannockburn, a winning strategy against overwhelming odds. Great leadership plus great strategy is a winning combination, and it is not an either/or. I have given a talk on strategy referencing this at Agile20Reflect, Agile India and Agile Lithuania.
Turn the Ship Around, compared with your agile transformation
L. David Marquet's Turn the Ship Around describes a submarine with legacy technology, an 18th century organisation, bespoke kit on every boat, about 100 people (comparable to an Agile Release Train or Spotify tribe), command and control, heavy regulation and safety-critical stakes, at a cost of billions of dollars. Marquet turned it around in six months, with no consultants involved. What is stopping your transformation? You have the answers already; you need effective leadership.
Remote working is context sensitive
A widely shared article on going back to the office makes no reference to context and quotes no referenceable data. It also overlooks the inclusion benefits of remote working for disabled people, neurodiverse people and those with caring needs, the financial pressure of commuting, and the companies that were fully remote before the pandemic. My 1993 research on teleworking reported growth of about 10% a year, held back by management acceptance. That is still true: the barrier is cultural attitudes, not technology.
A story about public speaking
As an undergraduate I was hopeless at public speaking. Confidence came from a Channel 4 programme about my campaign to ban smoking in pubs, which reached 3 million people, and then a solo singing competition in 1996 where I was runner-up. I became an agile coach in 2011, gave my first conference talk on my own content in 2019, invented a new technique for organising learning content and conference speaking in 2020, and gave that talk in 2021. The conference organisers then asked me to present it to their speakers beforehand so they could adapt their talks to the format, which took me from first-time speaker to helping others speak in under three years. It is a mind map alternative geared to the neurodiverse community.
Are leaders the problem, or is leadership the problem?
Great leadership did not start with agile: Deming, Andy Grove and Allan Mulally came first. Agile transformations need great leaders, but leadership is much bigger than agile. Rather than waiting for dysfunctional leaders to change, I ask what the data says about how many leaders fall into each group. I also ask whether organisations could raise their standards so that effective leaders and critical thinkers are expected and ineffective ones are removed sooner. Should we change the leader or change the leadership?
Body language and the return to the office
Some leaders say people must go back to the office because body language matters. I looked at the evidence offered for this and found much of it cited without peer reviewed data, while a course for leaders even says body language is easier to read online because faces are magnified. The point is to use critical thinking and challenge assumptions with evidence, not assume the loudest person in the room is right. It also matters for blind and neurodiverse colleagues, for whom much of this passes by anyway.
Agile transformations
An agile transformation should focus on flow, quality, happiness, safety and value, and get there by collaborating, delivering, reflecting and improving. You probably do not need a big-name consultancy to understand that.
How's your agile transformation?
Agile, or agile in name only? Using the Agile Principles as a test, I set out five situations: headcount reductions that hurt team productivity, contractors removed with no replacement, all contractors moved inside IR35 so projects run late, a return to the office because the big boss says so, and team members pulled onto other projects. For the first three I ask who gets the final say, the accounts or risk department or the team. Agile would look like outcomes over output and responding to change over following a plan.
Why pay consultants more than executives?
Bryce Hoffman asks in Forbes why you pay your consultants more than your executives. I add that consultants often talk about the wrong things, do not address the problem and have no great list of successes either. The Agile culture report published that day concludes that focusing on culture is a proven route to more effective outcomes. If your consultants talk about process rather than culture, are they adding the value you need? Do not outsource thinking: challenge groupthink and change your culture by changing how you act.
Instant news and the early web
The web gives us instant news worldwide with a click. Before it, newspapers and magazines arrived by post days or weeks later, at great cost. In 1990 I set up a Scottish news service to keep everyone in touch. Through it and other ventures I gained enough online profile to appear in the 1994 book Email Addresses of the Rich and Famous, next to President Clinton.
IT as a profit centre
Many workplaces speak of "the business" as if it were a different company, with IT as a supplier meeting its needs. I argue that we all work for the same company, that IT is responsible for enabling profit, and that IT is better seen as a profit centre than a cost centre, with part of that profit ring-fenced for further IT investment without needing approval from "the business". RBS is an example of how the alternative turns out.
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