The systems shaping modern life
Understand the systems changing everyday life.
Clear, evidence-led writing on technology, work, money and institutions—and what those changes mean for people. Written for curious readers, whatever their background.
Read the latest essay →Where the questions lead
What The Operating Question explores
Technology & everyday life
How new tools reshape the way we live, work and make choices.
Work & organisations
Why change succeeds, stalls or shifts responsibility onto people.
Money & infrastructure
The networks and resources behind services we depend on.
Institutions & power
How rules, incentives and decisions shape everyday outcomes.
Featured essay
Technology & everyday life · 11 min
When Software Acts for You
A computer that can act on your behalf needs more than access to your files. It needs a way to understand and enforce the limits of permission.
Read the essay →Selected writing
A closer look at what is changing.
Essays that connect the headlines to the systems and people underneath them.
Evidence Is an Architecture
What organisations choose to measure becomes the reality they are able to govern.
Judgement Is a System
Good decisions are not instincts. They are practices, constraints and feedback.
The Quiet Work After Approval
Approval is a decision. Adoption is an operating condition.
What Organisations Teach Their Machines
Retrieval systems inherit an institution’s omissions, hierarchies and forgotten decisions.
When Software Acts for You
A computer that can act on your behalf needs more than access to your files. It needs a way to understand and enforce the limits of permission.
Research & practice
One question.
Two ways of knowing.
From practice
Organisations rarely lose knowledge all at once.
People leave, systems change and decisions lose their original context. Information may still exist, but the people who need it can struggle to find or understand it.
Explore the work →From research
Storage is not the same as meaningful availability.
An AI system can retrieve information without supporting its answer well. My research examines how the way evidence is retrieved affects the claims a system makes.
Explore the research →Experience behind the writing
The questions here draw on work with technology, people and change inside complex organisations.
More about my work →The Operating Question
Change has a way of becoming personal.
Understand what sits underneath it.
New essays on the systems shaping modern life, sent occasionally.
No weekly content machine. Just new work when there is something worth saying.