I treat architecture, organisation design, and engineering culture as one problem. Currently focused on how engineering organisations adopt and scale AI.
Latest Writing
View all →Four trend contributions to InfoQ's annual report: AI transformation frameworks and maturity, ethical and safe AI as an engineering practice, the natural selection of ways of working, and the existential crisis facing the pre-AI developer and manager.
Aug 2026
A companion piece to the VirtualDDD podcast conversation — on how hidden coupling hides in plain sight, how the language a team uses shapes the architecture it builds, and what it takes to lead people through an architecture transformation.
Aug 2026
The annual InfoQ architecture trends magazine — my Holistic Engineering article opens the issue, framing the year's themes around sociotechnical thinking and organic problem solving.
Dec 2025
Why treating engineering as a purely technical discipline creates invisible failure modes — and how expanding your model to include the organisational and social systems changes everything.
Nov 2025
Flagship Work
It's a sociotechnical problem: ADRs gave technical choices real weight and credibility, but the organisational side of the work, the decisions teams make but rarely document, never got the same treatment. Social Decision Records exist to close that gap, bringing the same respect to engineering management decisions, the kind that shape the work just as much, but are too often forgotten. Later extended with Matthew Skelton, co-author of Team Topologies, into a pairing with Team APIs. Read the original writeup on Medium for examples.
Also
Featured in Facilitating Software Architecture (O'Reilly, 2024), where I also served as technical reviewer. Since then, the practice has been discussed on the VirtualDDD podcast and referenced across the architecture community.
Featured Talk
All talks →QCon London · 2025
Why treating engineering as a purely technical discipline fails — and what happens when you include the human, organisational, and social systems in your engineering model.
If you're navigating a hard problem at the intersection of engineering and organisation design, I'd like to hear about it.
Get in touch