I've been Head of Business Systems long enough to know that the most dangerous phrase in any organisation is "that's just how we do it." My job, on a good day, is to find those moments, ask why, and figure out whether there's a simpler path to the same outcome. Less friction. Fewer handoffs. More signal, less noise.
The last eighteen months have felt like someone pointed that same lens back at me. AI tools have crept into my working week in ways I didn't fully anticipate. Not in the dramatic, replace-everything sense the headlines love, but in the quieter, more interesting way that genuinely useful technology tends to arrive. A better first draft. A faster way to sense-check a process map. A conversation partner at 11pm when I'm trying to untangle a requirements doc.
Why I'm writing this
I've noticed I'm forming opinions faster than I'm articulating them. That's a bad habit in any systems thinker: you end up with a head full of half-processed observations and no coherent view. Writing forces the synthesis. It's the same reason I carry a notepad wherever I go: if I don't write down what I changed in a recipe, I'll never be able to repeat it.
A process you haven't documented is a process you don't actually understand yet.
So this blog is, in a sense, my documentation. Thoughts on AI adoption in mid-market businesses. Notes on tools I'm genuinely using rather than just evaluating. The occasional detour into what I cooked at the weekend, because cooking, it turns out, is just systems thinking with better smells.
What to expect
I'll be writing about the places where new technology meets real organisational life, which is messier and more interesting than most vendor content admits. I'll write about what I'm learning in the kitchen too, because the overlap between a well-designed workflow and a well-built sauce is more genuine than it sounds.
No thought-leadership waffle. No five-point frameworks with an acronym. Just honest notes from someone who's been in the weeds of business systems for years and is now genuinely excited, and occasionally baffled, by what's changing.
Glad you're here. Let's see where this goes.