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Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a meditation workshop at the Amaravati Buddhist Monastery.

“‘Tain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.” – Ella Fitzgerald Teams involved in scientific research & development (R&D), operations, quality assurance (QA), and support often struggle to adopt OKRs.

Agile concepts often feel quite alien to teams who are used to traditional ways of working, especially when they’re involved in a wholesale, large scale “agile transformation” effort.

If you follow my work, you know I love thinking about about how teams work and how to create positive change within teams.

Early in my career, when I was getting into “project management”, I often felt confused and intimidated by all the terminology I heard people throwing around.

OKR check-in explainer video I’ve recorded a short video below explaining the concepts in this blog post.

Is it done, yet?

A shimmering, bouncy synth track to chase away the winter blues.

Teams who are used to being told what tactics or outputs to deliver often fall into the trap of duplicating their plans and reports in their OKRs.

The real benefit of using OKRs comes from performing regular check-ins.

UPDATE (May 2019): The video below has been updated and expanded.

Helping technology teams to deliver with joy and excellence.

I help teams to get clear on what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how to get better at doing it – all while enjoying the journey.

It matters to me, too.

I love helping teams to get clear on what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how they can get better at doing it while enjoying the journey.

Previously, I’ve written about Nonviolent Communication and Saying Please.

As long as we’re growing, be it personally, professionally, or in any other way, we’re constantly being confronted with new events and new information.

Previously, I’ve introduced Nonviolent Communication and one of my favourite observations from its founder, Marshall Rosenberg: that “people are only ever saying ‘please’ and ’thank you’”.

I’ve been helping a team to improve its Continuous Delivery pipeline and as part of this work, we’re introducing BDD-style test automation using Serenity.

Nonviolent Communication or NVC is a vast and nuanced area of study but the basic concepts can be grasped and applied almost immediately.

Originally published in 2018; updated Sept 2025 to reflect my OKR Map technique.

Editors Note: In 2019 I discovered the wonderful book Accelerate and never looked back.

Fixed budgets and plans assume that the world will stay largely the same throughout the duration of delivery.

While working for one government client, I was invited to fill out an employee survey.

The always brilliant Nick Tait sent me this useful, 10 minute video by Julian Treasure with some concise tips for public speaking.

One of my favourite activities is to sit down and just play the piano.

Aggressive yet stylishly cool, this intense track brings an infectious synth lead, glassy stabbing strings, rock-steady Paris-disco/house beats, driving piano chords and a lush soaring string break with piano melody.

I remember the thrill of using Webmonkey to learn HTML in the mid-90’s in Boulder CO, publishing my first website in 1996 and hosting it on my university’s unix servers.

Swaggering gallantly (but relatively ineptly) into the worlds of mathematics and biology, ABSTRAKTOR is a vaguely authoritarian, non-gendered art collective (of one) using algorithms, pattern, and selective mutation to explore the limits of mechanised hum…

2004-2016 Projector, computer, audio equipment Dimensions & duration variable Around 2004, I began noticing pseudo-random words appearing at the foot of spam emails I received.

Mostly for my own future reference, here’s a quick low-down on how I like to test apps and web-pages in IE from my Mac.

2005 In 2005 while living in Seattle, I had the good fortune to meet one of Jenny Holzer’s assistant, Abigail Guay, and journalist Brendan Kiley at a party.

Words are extremely powerful things.

Jerry Nelson, puppeteer and voice of Count Von Count on Sesame Street for four decades has died at the age of 78, and with him goes a little piece of my childhood.

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of visiting the newly (re) opened Tanks at Tate Modern.

If you ever visit the Saatchi Gallery in London, be sure to go down to the ground floor and see Richard Wilson’s piece “20:50”.

A tight grid of randomly colored concentric circles evokes a kind of chaotic, fecund substrate bubbling with synthetic, pre-sentient life.

This uplifting, high-energy track crosses between electro, dub, 80s, and hip-hop feels.

A nod to modernist Latin American abstract geometric design and institutional interior design of the 60s and 70s, this piece was rendered via custom image analysis software with lots of semi-randomized concentric rectangles using a palette that evokes wal…

Taken from a photo of Mitt Romney on the campaign trail surrounded by his supporters, this abstract geometric piece was generated via custom software which divvies up an image into a grid structure, determines the dominant colour in each square and re-gen…

An improvised piano cover of Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers”.

An abstract homage to one of my favorite hard-edge, minimalist painters, Ellsworth Kelly.

Created via a simple mathematical algorithm to join up randomly colored circles, these pieces evoke a kind of synthetic, abstract representation of organic processes such as bacteria growth, snake-like invertebrates, protein strands, or DNA sequences.

Imagine a long late afternoon drive in mid-autumn; a chill in the air as dry leaves fall on country roads; an orange sun slowly sinking behind the hills.

Orbitron (now offline) was a website which generated completely unique colored concentric discs that the visitor could share or purchase as a physical badge.

One evening in the spring of 2009, shortly before leaving the US to move to London, I sat down at the piano and improvised a series of short pieces.

Based on simple rules to define cycles of repetition and variation, this series creates artificial folds and layers in the same way sedimentary rock forms.

Algorithmically generated concentric circles in random locations, colours, and radii.

In 1999 I moved to New York city.