Build the Capability into the Organisation

Colleagues not long in the business often ask: who taught you to work this way?

It is not an easy question to answer. Nobody taught us. It accumulated over eight years, one after-action review at a time. And where should all of that be kept? Let me state the view up front: only when a method becomes one line everyone can follow has it really settled into the organisation.

A New Generation of Tools Means a New Generation of Organisational Method

Start with the old rule: better tools of production always change the relations of production. Toyota had TPS and lean production, Motorola had Six Sigma, Intel had OKRs, Haier had Rendanheyi, Amazon had the flywheel. Five companies, five organisational methods, each standing on a generation of new tools. This time it is AI's turn.

So what is the method for the AI generation? We are still writing it. It has a name: the Glacier Model (Orchestrator Model), still being defined. An orchestrator arranges human judgement, the speed of tools and the sequence of a project into one schedule. In other words, the tools handle fast, and people handle right.

The most practical use of AI is distillation: reproducing at speed the good things you have already seen. But distillation needs a premise: a ruler that tells you which one counts as good. Taste comes before tools. Otherwise what comes out is only faster mediocrity. On this we are fairly confident.

People Give the Organisation Its Frame, the Organisation Feeds Them

For us this comes down to two concrete things.

First, put the best young people in the load-bearing positions. Colleagues one or two years in can follow three to five projects through a full cycle. Why? Because eight years of method, sequence and standards have settled into the organisational model and hold them up first. As things stand, the new generation running projects comes in stronger: better training, sharper tools, and a clear-eyed read of a market that no longer hands out easy multiples. What the organisation can give is not multiples but method, tempo and positive feedback. The organisation is an amplifier.

Second, turn judgement into a public asset. Price-band data and front-line market feedback are recorded straight away as an organisational asset available to everyone. It does not stay in one person's head, where only that person can use it. The plainest component of the Glacier Model is the Stop Doing List (the subtract-only list): whatever should no longer be done, written down as a prohibition and reread by everyone at every review. Methods can iterate; boundaries only grow. The list only takes entries; it never gives them back.

Why Write It Down at All

Someone will ask: if the methods are all written out, what is the point? The point is that they last.

Writing it down is dull work. Only when a method becomes one line everyone can follow has it really settled into the organisation. Getting a piece of experience from one person's instinct to a line like that takes many drafts, and some have been under revision for three or four years. Troublesome, but worth it: what is on paper stays through the comings and goings.

This is also why the partners stay on the front line running projects. Judgement and relationships stay sharp only where the work happens. The bosses sit at the table.

In this round of tool change we do not only want to use them well. We want to answer the organisational question behind them. That question has a name. Next piece: the name.