Writing
Selected essays
On organisations, technology and the decisions that shape them. Published on ZiaSpeaks.
Explore the leading ideasSelected essays
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17 Jun 2026
The Offshore Saturation
The decision that enabled scale has become the decision that limits it.
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17 Jul 2026
The Code Is Not the Truth
Modernisation fails when one incomplete representation of institutional reality is mistaken for the truth. The running estate is evidence, and evidence has to be reconciled before it can be relied upon.
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3 Jul 2026
The Institution That Understands Itself
What would change if an institution maintained an understanding of its own systems, rather than reconstructing it for each programme?
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22 Jul 2026
Copilot Is a Business Model, Not an Architecture
Where the human sits is an architectural decision. A system built to assist a person needs a different execution path from one authorised to act.
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7 Apr 2026
The Quiet Veto
The most consequential governance decisions are never recorded as decisions.
Further essays
Browse 7 more essays
21 Sep 2026
Pace Yourself
AI capability can outpace the evaluation and governance needed to use it. The essay examines what happens when those rates of change diverge.
13 Aug 2026
AI Is the Fountain of Post-Truth
Generative AI makes convincing accounts cheap to produce. Many signals of credibility once reflected the effort required to create them; that effort is no longer scarce.
30 Jul 2026
A Link Is Not a Citation
A personal knowledge vault can work well for its owner. Someone else relying on it needs context and evidence the owner may never have recorded.
27 Jul 2026
Your Assistant Remembers. It Can’t Prove.
An assistant’s memory can be useful without providing proof of what was known. Institutional decisions need a record that can be checked.
16 Jun 2026
The Corridor Is the Unit
A narrow proof of concept can show that a technology works under the tested conditions. It rarely proves the economics work. The useful unit is the full path the work travels.
11 Jun 2026
The Loop Closes Quietly
Small, accepted increases in throughput can gradually transfer authority to a system. The essay examines how that happens without an explicit decision to grant autonomy.
12 May 2026
The Micro-Institution
The essay examines how smaller institutional forms can combine authority, capability and accountability, and why scale alone is an incomplete measure of organisational strength.