Writing
Posts, papers, and ideas on leadership, performance, transformation, and resilience.
Latest Posts
AI Is Now the Operating System. Here’s What That Actually Means.
AI platforms have shifted from productivity tools to enterprise operating systems. This post examines what that means for competitive strategy, workflow redesign, and how product teams should think about building and scaling AI agents.
The Moats That Matter in Defence AI
A framework for thinking about what makes a deftech AI company genuinely hard to compete with over time. From compliance and accreditation infrastructure to knowledge architecture and cleared human capital, the most durable moats in defence AI are not the most obvious ones.
What Elite Organisations Actually Have in Common
Elite organisations are written about through their surface features. This post examines the four structural patterns that actually sit underneath high-performing organisations, drawn from direct experience inside the Royal Marines, NASA, SpaceX, and a startup exit.
AI Is Now the Operating System. Here’s What That Actually Means.
AI platforms have shifted from productivity tools to enterprise operating systems. This post examines what that means for competitive strategy, workflow redesign, and how product teams should think about building and scaling AI agents.
The Moats That Matter in Defence AI
A framework for thinking about what makes a deftech AI company genuinely hard to compete with over time. From compliance and accreditation infrastructure to knowledge architecture and cleared human capital, the most durable moats in defence AI are not the most obvious ones.
What Elite Organisations Actually Have in Common
Elite organisations are written about through their surface features. This post examines the four structural patterns that actually sit underneath high-performing organisations, drawn from direct experience inside the Royal Marines, NASA, SpaceX, and a startup exit.
They Wanted to Leave the State. Instead, They Built Its Eyes.
Silicon Valley spent a decade building an ideology about escaping state power. What it actually built was the most capable surveillance and military contracting infrastructure in history. This post asks what that contradiction means for the founders now being recruited into the defence tech wave.
There Is More to Readiness Than Fight Tonight
Fight tonight is the dominant phrase in UK defence readiness right now. But shorthand compresses things. This post unpacks what genuine readiness looks like across five dimensions, and asks which ones are actually being built for.
The AI Problem Is Not the AI
Between 70 and 85 per cent of AI deployments fail to meet their targets and the postmortems blame the technology. They are looking in the wrong place. Every AI failure is traceable to a human decision, not a technical constraint.
Pressure Reveals What Training Hides
Real pressure changes how you think in ways that no training environment can replicate. Drawing on Royal Marines service and building a startup, this post examines what genuine pressure actually does to your decision-making and why most leaders have never had to find out.
The Invisible Architecture
Leaving elite institutions like the Royal Marines, NASA, and SpaceX gives you invisible scaffolding you do not notice until it is gone. This post examines what happens when you become the person responsible for building it from scratch.
Resilience is not Redundancy. What Catastrophic Failure Actually Teaches You.
Redundancy delays failure. It does not prevent it. Drawing on two real MOD recovery operations, this post sets out what genuine digital resilience actually looks like and why most digital programmes are dangerously underprepared for failure.
What Building a Startup Taught Me About Delivery in Defence
Running a startup teaches accountability in a way no programme governance framework can. This post draws on experience building and selling a company to examine what large defence programmes get structurally wrong about ownership and consequence.
The Hiring Problem Is Not the Candidate
Most bad hires are not candidate failures. They are system failures. When hiring keeps going wrong, the question is not how to hire better people. It is what the pattern of failures is revealing about the organisation itself.
Start With the Fire
The real insight in Ogilvy’s fire extinguisher line is not about how to open a pitch. It is about whether you actually know which fire you are fighting.
Book Seb to Speak
Keynotes on leadership, transformation, and performance in complex environments.
Explore Advisory
Selective support for leaders navigating complexity, change, and high consequence decisions.
Latest Writing
Posts, essays, and ideas on leadership under pressure, resilience, and organisational performance.