The Workings
The Workings is Ivor’s weekly essay on how organizations actually run, written from the engine room – where shiny strategies go to die. Most business writing is composed in the boardroom and reads like it. This is the other view: messier, lower to the ground, and reported rather than imagined. The names are changed. Nothing else is.
Documentation by Capitulation
Why it pays off to host the argument your team has been avoiding
The one who clicks
Why enterprise software is almost never built for the actual user
Hidden processes
Unofficial fixes, spontaneous improvements, the residue of old feuds: the informal layer shapes your operations – and limits your options
What flowcharts can’t do
How “strategic” process maps make consensus easy – but control impossible
The valley of absolution
The Gartner Hype Cycle spins failed go-lives as anticipated detours. But the dip it claims as unavoidable isn’t destiny – it is politics
The system everyone mastered and nobody used
A rollout can succeed at everything it measures: timeline, training, budget, and still fail at the only thing that matters: actual use
The busy heroes
How organizations mistake structural fragility for company culture
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