The thinking behind the speaking. Long-form keynote essays in their full form, plus shorter pieces drawn from arguments I have been making on LinkedIn.
Each piece below is a keynote in long form — the argument in full, the slides that anchor it, and the working that doesn't fit into a forty-five minute room.
The SITS 26 keynote in full. ITSM was built to deal with change. Yet parts of the profession have become very good at resisting it. The opening that was ninety seconds of certifications. The CFO who closed her laptop after forty slides. A 98% SLA next to a user spreadsheet called "things IT can't fix." And what the next-generation service organisation actually looks like.
Read · ~16 minWhy service desks were really built. The behavioural science behind dread. The Uber map. The control room. Three moves that move us from coping to designing — and what changes when you stop optimising the desk and start designing the dread out of the service.
Read · ~18 minITSM sits at the heart of how every modern business runs. So why is it so rare to see one of us in the C-suite? Six habits that hold the profession back, the leadership skills already hiding in plain sight, and design thinking as the bridge to the boardroom.
Read · ~20 minA multinational retailer with plenty of suppliers and no outcomes. The CIO line that rewrote how I think about Professional Services. Six moves that rebuilt the offer around confidence, the digital twin moment, and what they delivered.
Read · ~14 minMost continual improvement programmes fail not because the ideas are bad, but because the improvements quietly become the new problem. The 2,800 touchpoint trap, hidden workloads, RICE scoring, and a model for getting it right.
Read · ~14 minQuick arguments and observations from LinkedIn — slightly expanded for the site so they land properly outside the feed. Each one links back to the original post and the conversation underneath it.
A new EV. A software update that should take three hours. A dealer process that takes three days, drop-off by 10:30, overnight stay. The mistake isn't the eight hours.
Read · ~5 minSDI Spark 26. Five hundred delegates. Twenty-eight countries. No notes, no script in front of me — just a pair of glasses doing the work nobody knew was happening.
Read · ~5 minA faulty ring, an AI chat, and a replacement shipped before the conversation finished. What good support actually looks like in the AI era.
Read · ~4 minSwitching to the iPhone Air. Two pairs of smart glasses. An Apple Watch slowly losing its job. The phone is still there. It is just no longer where the action is.
Read · ~5 minThree visits to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. None for the football. What a multi-purpose venue gets right when the digital and physical are designed together.
Read · ~4 minThey won't queue. They won't log a ticket and wait for a callback. The real risk isn't poor satisfaction scores. It's irrelevance.
Read · ~4 minThe long form is the argument written out. The keynote is the argument made — with the audience, the timing, and the friction in the room.
Book Mark to Speak