Square One
On governed work and the modern operating model

Groundwork

Occasional papers on how organisations keep their work, and their judgement, on the record while everything around them speeds up.

Paper 11 · November 2026Your best people are leaving with the answersWhen an experienced person retires, the organisation loses more than their time. It loses why things are done the way they are, and usually finds out too late.Read the paperPaper 10 · October 2026Approval is the productAI has made drafting cheap. The scarce thing now is a person willing to put their name to the result, and most AI tools skip that step entirely.Read the paperPaper 09 · October 2026Don’t draft on moving groundMost document rework isn’t bad writing. It’s good writing done against a brief, a price or a scope that changed underneath it.Read the paperPaper 08 · September 2026The AI bill nobody budgeted forAI costs are arriving the way cloud costs did: a few subscriptions, then a team plan, then an invoice nobody can explain. It doesn’t have to go that way.Read the paperPaper 07 · September 2026What exactly did we send?Months after a proposal goes out, someone will ask what it said and what it was based on. Most organisations can only answer the first half.Read the paperPaper 06 · August 2026AI should not change who can see whatYour organisation spent years deciding who may read which files. An AI tool that answers from everything quietly undoes that work in a sentence.Read the paperPaper 05 · July 2026Don’t marry a modelThe leaderboard changes hands every few months. The gate is permanent; the model behind it is replaceable.Read the paperPaper 04 · June 2026The confidence premiumWhen intelligence is everywhere, confidence is the advantage. Intelligence you can rent; confidence you have to build.Read the paperPaper 03 · May 2026Shadow AI is a symptom, not a crimeYour best people are already using AI in personal accounts. The fix isn’t policing: it’s a governed path that’s easier than the workaround.Read the paperPaper 02 · April 2026AI isn’t your competitive advantage. Your organisational memory is.Models become commodities every few months. Twenty years of your organisation’s judgement doesn’t.Read the paperPaper 01 · March 2026Standing still is also a decisionTwo businesses start in the same place and drift five years apart without a single dramatic event.Read the paper
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