Michael Gray

We’ve got this habit, especially in work and leadership, of turning complex, messy, human stuff into clean, objective metrics. It makes things feel manageable, like we’re in control.

It’s easier to follow a familiar metric than to re-engage with the messy, complex reality it once tried to represent.

We’ve got this habit, especially in work and leadership, of turning complex, messy, human stuff into clean, objective metrics. It makes things feel manageable, like we’re in control.

“Data-driven decisions” sound smart, but too often it just means letting incomplete or poorly framed data make the decision for us. We forget data is only ever a piece of the picture, useful, but never the whole story.

We’ve got this habit, especially in work and leadership, of turning complex, messy, human stuff into clean, objective metrics. It makes things feel manageable, like we’re in control.

Just spent way too long on the phone with EE renewing broadband. The classic story: new customer deals vs. renewal pricing games. But what really stood out? How long it took them to even find my account. Turns out, I’m on their “legacy” system, it took a good 30 minutes of my time.

Maybe the answer isn’t big bang migrations but an evolution over revolution approach, gradually modernising and integrating systems instead of assuming a clean break will ever be realistic.

Just spent way too long on the phone with EE renewing broadband. The classic story: new customer deals vs. renewal pricing games. But what really stood out? How long it took them to even find my account. Turns out, I’m on their “legacy” system, it took a good 30 minutes of my time.

It’s a pattern I see all the time. A company merges, or a new system is built. “All new customers will be on the new platform!” But what about the existing ones? Migration is always underestimated in complexity, cost, and risk. So it drags, or never happens.

One of my former colleagues asked how important it is for staff/principal engineers to be tech agnostic. My opinion is we should be and largely already are. The real value is understanding fundamentals, they translate to any technology.

Code is the easy part, especially now that AI is getting better and better at generating it. But AI still can’t fundamentally reason, no matter what the latest ChatGPT claims. And here’s the thing, writing the code was never the hard part.

One of my former colleagues asked how important it is for staff/principal engineers to be tech agnostic. My opinion is we should be and largely already are. The real value is understanding fundamentals, they translate to any technology.

Psychological safety is at an all-time low in organisations, largely driven by a macroeconomic climate resulting in a challenging job market. When people are more focused on keeping their jobs than challenging the status quo, innovation and continuous improvement become significantly harder.

Organisations that take advantage of this fear to squeeze more out of their people might see short-term gains but will ultimately be left behind. Now is the time to double-down and invest in fostering trust, encouraging challenge, and creating a culture of safety.