Don’t outsource all the hard work
Writing is thinking; by outsourcing the process to AI, professionals risk losing their taste, discernment, and the capacity to lead with clarity.
Focus
What deserves our attention, and what can we let go? Essays on priorities, decision-making, saying no and finding clarity amid complexity.
45 articles. The highlighted label is each article’s primary category; other labels are secondary tags.
The problem isn’t the small stuff. It’s small stuff without a horizon.
The small issues of daily life are manageable, but they become overwhelming and distracting if they lack a clear, overarching strategic horizon.
Don’t trust your vision. Trust your habits.
Habits are a more honest indicator of strategy than any written document; ensure your daily routines actually match your stated ambitions.
Don’t Waste “Tired You”
Fatigue is not always a sign to stop; it can be a productive state for generating the raw, imperfect material needed for future brilliant work.
🚨 Success is easy to waste.
Reflection is a critical sense-making practice that allows leaders to pause, extract lessons from success, and decide what truly warrants repetition.
The big picture can wait
Detailed, small-scale work is not a distraction from strategy; it is the essential process through which a coherent big picture eventually emerges.
The power of taking things away
Strategic creativity is an act of subtraction, stripping away non-essential priorities so that the core mission has the space to gain momentum.
The tiny routines that stop big failures
Significant organisational failure is best prevented not by complex systems, but by the disciplined repetition of small, observable human routines.
It’s time to test your vision
A robust vision statement should force difficult trade-offs; if the reverse of your vision seems unthinkable, your statement is likely too generic.
What are you tolerating right now?
Leaders must distinguish between harmful stagnation and constructive friction, ensuring they do not inadvertently wash away a culture's valuable history.
The smallest leadership move with the biggest ripple effect
In times of complexity and negativity, a deliberate choice of relentless positivity and a simple smile can restore clarity and effective team action.
Swimming on the living-room floor and other lessons we might avoid
Banning social media for young people is like swimming on dry land; true resilience is built through engagement, not avoidance of real-world contexts.
Three weeks. Three cities. A lesson on speed.
Pace is a personal perception; schools should plan for rhythm and reflection rather than equating rapid movement with actual progress.
The Five Day Rule to lighten your load
Deferral is a decision; using a five-day rule to either execute or delete commitments helps leaders stop pretending that the future will add capacity.
101 days left.
Late September offers a superior opportunity to reset focus through small, repeatable habits compared to the artificial pressure of January.
Through the Dip: How Strategy Survives Contact with Reality
The dip of frustration in any project is where the real work happens; perseverance and purpose allow strategy to survive reality.
What if your best decisions begin with doing nothing at all?
Clarity for difficult decisions is often found in the gaps of silence and rest, not in the frenzy of an always-on work culture.
There is a background noise that boosts thinking. The other kind kills it.
Optimal creative thinking requires specific background environments, while fragmented, inconsistent noise disrupts focus and mental clarity.
I interrupted myself. Do you do the same?
True focus is about knowing the right thing to prioritise at the right time, rather than attempting to do one thing at the expense of all else.
The same old story, by … everyone.
Leaders must avoid generic, AI-generated messaging and instead unearth specific stories that define their school's unique secret sauce.
You don’t need a plan. You need a pause.
Breathless school teams often need a pause to surface core strengths and decide what to ignore, rather than starting new, distracting initiatives.
Why schools ride dead horses (and how to stop)
Institutional focus is regained by identifying and stopping habitual projects that lack purpose, allowing space for genuine innovation.
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
Deadlines often create ripples of unfinished work when underlying priorities are blurred; moving past the fog requires clarity and purpose.
Boeing says its core values are safety, quality, integrity and sustainability. You’d hope so.
Genuine strategy requires making hard choices and sacrifices rather than relying on generic truisms that fail during real decision-making moments.
Comfort Is a Terrible Compass
When facing institutional crises, schools must ignore the comfort of tradition and return to their core purpose to guide effective decision-making.
The secret to happiness and wellbeing.
True happiness is found at the intersection of meaningful work, personal growth, and helping others, rather than in policies or shallow perks.
Complexity kills autonomy.
Complexity breeds helplessness; stripping away unnecessary policies and clarifying responsibilities empowers teams to do their best work.
So they don’t like your idea: just bring them closer.
To overcome apathy, communicate ideas effectively and maintain curiosity, knowing that busy people often miss potential innovations.
Bikeshedding: you probably do it every week.
Teams often obsess over trivial decisions because big strategic choices feel too intimidating, a pattern that prevents real progress.
The biggest mistake I ever made.
Major failures are often the result of accumulated small errors; pick up the phone daily to address issues before they become disasters.
Lessons from the unique move in every game of cards
Like a unique card shuffle, strategy requires expert analysis to find the outlier gem that defines success, rather than following generic plans.
How to stop worrying about the things outside your control
If we want to change the system, we can start by changing something in our small corner of the world, with the people who are with us in that small corner.
Don’t push your planning if the time isn’t right.
So put one foot in front of the other, and get consistently better at what you already do well.
How to be boring and succeed, according to Aretha Franklin.
You see, the key to great leadership and team success is to communicate repeatedly about the same, single idea.
Flying lessons focus on one thing: how not to stop flying.
When you start to worry that you’re sinking closer to the farm, it’s time to learn.
You only need one policy: don’t make more work than you have to.
We feel that pressure to create lots of content, too, when we write core values or mission statements.
A new device that will open up conversations you’ve never had before.
I spent four days in the Japanese Alps one summer, away from distractions. The irony of stepping away from work is that my brain seems to make more connections and gain far more clarity.
How you can never run out of time.
I tend to write our weekly newsletter, the Provocation, on a Friday afternoon. This time last week I was struggling to write Monday’s newsletter.
Last orders… and a secret to happiness.
I’m going to ask you to stop ‘giving it your all’. Give it 70% instead.
How to unlock the magic of undivided attention.
When I worked in the television industry in 2008, we were at the dawn of cell phones actually being able to do things, and we were experimenting how to inv
Would you use a teaspoon to dig a hole?
A mentor asked me this question over coffee a couple of weeks ago. Would you use a teaspoon to dig a hole?, they asked. Of course not!, I replied.
Your urgent isn’t my urgent. Or hers. Or his.
Your urgent isn’t my urgent. Or hers. Or his. Four years ago, the pandemic created a productivity hustle. And it's not gone away.
Everythingitis - Focus helps you achieve everything you need to. Eventually.
Matt Mullenweg founded WordPress. Today, the company’s software drives around 40% of the world’s websites. But it nearly failed. WordPress Version 2.0 was
A lack of focus leads to terrible decision-making.
A lack of focus is a symptom of and contributor to poor decision-making. When you don’t have focus you might find yourself avoiding taking quick decisions.
How to find laser sharp focus
Has anyone in your leadership team taken up their post in the last two years? Up to half of them will be deemed to have failed within the first two years o