Distilled from twenty years of practice. When ready, it will be free to download — no form, no email required.
The guide that puts language around the thing the industry does not count — what gets lost in transformation, how to watch for it, how to design a programme that protects what matters. A reference you can keep on the desk, mark up, and return to when the pressure comes.
A word on why it's free
Most consultancy field guides are gated. You hand over an email address, and within a day you begin receiving a sequence of marketing messages the firm calls nurturing. When this one ships in May 2026, it will not be gated. Download it, read it, send it to a colleague if it is useful. I would rather be read than tracked.
What's inside
Chapter 01
“The four headline metrics we evaluate transformations against — cost efficiency, employee experience, future readiness, and data quality — are not wrong. They are simply incomplete. What they miss is a fifth column: the organisation's culture, which is to say the accumulated set of small agreements and rituals and workarounds through which people actually get their work done…”
How to design a ledger that includes the column the industry does not count.
Chapter 02
“It arrives a few weeks after go-live. It begins, ‘I know this is probably just how it works now, but…’ The email gets forwarded. It lands in a backlog. It is not, strictly speaking, a defect. But something was in the building that is no longer in the building, and the manager felt it first.”
How to build the instruments that detect, catalogue, and respond to these signals before the culture thins.
Chapter 03
“When the pressure comes — when the timeline slips, when the budget tightens, when the executive sponsor needs a win before the quarter closes — the things that are not on the ledger are the things that get traded away. Each trade is small. None of them, individually, is a scandal.”
The six most common trades, what they cost, and how to refuse them on the record.
Chapter 04
“Transformation is less a construction project — something you stand up, roll out, deploy — and more a cultivation, something whose success is measured partly by what grows in the soil afterward. It requires counting things the industry does not currently count, and protecting things the industry does not currently protect.”
A working model for running a transformation this way, and the small rituals that support it.
Chapter 05
“The current wave is going to make the old pattern more acute, not less. The efficiency gains are real. The temptation to spend them on more volume, more speed, more dashboards, will be enormous. Most of the market will take that path by default.”
How to spend the dividend differently — on depth rather than volume, on judgement rather than throughput.
May 2026. Leave your email and I will write to you personally when the guide is ready — one short note, no sequence, no tracking.
Notify me when it ships →If it landed
Invitation one
New essays, sent when a piece is ready. Never more than once a month. Long-form only — no roundups, no hot takes, no promotional material.
Read the Journal →Invitation two
Twelve questions that reveal whether your organisation is designing HR for the moment or for endurance. Ten minutes. Produces a short personalised reading.
Begin the diagnostic →No batch emails. No drip sequence. No tracking pixels. When the field guide is ready — May 2026 — you receive a single short message from me with the link and a quiet word of thanks for waiting.
Your email is used only to notify you when the field guide is released. It is never sold, shared, or added to any other list.