Stop fighting fires. Fix the system.
Build an organization that can handle the challenges you face today. GenAI, tariffs, floods and supply chain disruptions arrive faster than your plan updates itself. You fix one problem, only to have its sibling reappear somewhere else. It’s whack-a-mole. Instead of applying band-aids one at a time, I help you find what keeps creating the problems. Surprises will still come. The goal is to handle them without a crisis.
Common situations
“We had a strategy and then…”
We spent a year crafting a strategy. Less than six months later, it was dead.
“No one is following our strategy”
Some departments just seem to work on whatever they think is urgent. They act as if the strategy doesn’t exist. Others see the same strategy with different eyes, and each finds its own way to “follow” it. (This is one of the most frequent problems, outside of software development.)
“People are afraid”
Layoffs are already being blamed on GenAI. Many fear they’re next. When the edict says, “Use AI”, naturally people use it. In some cases they use it so much that they drown people downstream in their output. Meanwhile, your best people look for the exits.
“We keep spending money on more AI, but we can’t prove the value”
GenAI produces more output. Is the output helping to deliver more value?
“When someone tells me there is a problem, it’s already too late”
The weekly status report says everything is “green”. No one reports the problems until they’re too big to hide.
Working harder won’t fix it
These challenges aren’t limited to software development. They show up in every industry that involves humans working together. Most people are working hard and doing their best. The problem isn’t the people. It’s the system they work in.
More meetings or a new tool won’t fix a system problem.
Solving a problem feels good, until it comes back somewhere else. In the Canadian criminal justice system, a case that runs past its time limit must be thrown out, because the accused’s rights have been violated. The obvious solution is “hire more judges”. When I looked at the whole system, I found that most of the time is spent waiting between steps. Hiring more judges is the most expensive way to “fix” the waiting. Read more
In most workplaces, 80-90% of the time is spent waiting between steps: a feature waiting for review, or a decision waiting on a busy manager. Speed up any step before the queue, and all you’ve done is make the queue longer.
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
What resilient organizations do
Finding the underlying problems improves the system. Building resilience takes more:
Work towards a common goal
Everyone understands the vision and strategy the same way. We know this is working when people agree on decisions and priorities across departments.
Get feedback early and often
Get direct feedback from the people who use the system. More frequent feedback means more opportunities to adjust.
Try small changes you can undo
A small experiment shows what works before you bet big.
Keep some spare capacity
A team that is 100% busy can’t respond to anything new. Spare capacity keeps work flowing when surprises arrive.
Decide close to the work
Leaders provide the direction and boundaries. The people on the ground make day-to-day decisions without waiting for approval.
Hear bad news fast
Bad news doesn’t get better with age. In a workplace where people feel safe, raising red flags early is easier.
Leadership said they had a plan
I worked with one client for over a year and never saw the strategic plan. Stakeholders kept changing the team’s direction, and work waited months for a steering committee. We set up a short meeting every six weeks. The stakeholders and the people who set the team’s priorities decided together what came next. It’s not perfect, but most decisions now get made without waiting for a steering committee.
When your key business assumption changes overnight
In 2024, the federal government cut international student permits by 35%. Many Ontario colleges had just finished multi-year plans. They were out of date overnight. Most never updated them again. Only one college reviewed and updated its plan regularly. It was set up to adapt with less pain than the others.
When people are afraid
One of the biggest messages I’ve heard this year is that people are afraid. Will I be replaced by AI? If that happens, how long will it take to find a new job? People who are afraid protect themselves. They hoard information, bury problems, avoid risks and wait to be told what to do.
Under pressure to show productivity gains from AI adoption, people do what they can to demonstrate “productivity”. They use GenAI to churn out volume, because they think that’s what’s expected.
Whether people hide or churn out volume, nothing meaningful changes. And your best people don’t wait. They have options, so they leave.
Is GenAI paying off?
Use GenAI in the wrong place, and it creates waste on an industrial scale, faster than anyone can check it. Picture a slide deck full of AI-generated images that don’t make sense. The person who created it is proud, because they used a lot of AI. That deck is a work-shaped object: it looks like work, but it delivers nothing. Worse, if someone else needs to read it, it wastes their time too.
GenAI can be useful, but it’s not the magic bullet claimed by the people who sell it. Before you invest more, you need to measure how your system works today, and then see the impact of these tools, both on the work and the people doing it.
Are you using GenAI in the right place?
Some work goes faster with GenAI. Some goes faster but with lower-quality results. Some work shouldn’t exist at all, and doing it faster is still waste.
Do you know what happens downstream?
Faster work on one task can create new problems further down the line. GenAI writes code faster, but the code still waits for a person. Only a person can decide whether it’s the right thing to build. The same happens outside software. When GenAI churns out more reports, someone later has to check them for usefulness and accuracy. Are you watching for it?
Is it delivering the value you expected?
Measuring tool use doesn’t tell you whether the work was valuable. Making the wrong thing go faster is not productivity.
It feels like AI adoption is repeating the mistakes of failed IT projects such as the Phoenix pay system:
- GenAI is being adopted one department at a time. There is limited consideration of the effects on the next group along.
- Success hasn’t been defined, so the organization can’t tell if it is working.
- Miracles are promised, yet no one looks to see how the tool stacks up against the promise.
These are all system problems.
What are the steps for working together?
Free Call
30 to 45 minutes. We talk about what you want to achieve, how you’d measure it and what difference it would make.
Strategic Review
Some problems are bigger than one conversation. When that’s the case, I will suggest a paid review of your organization, looking at how the work flows, in reality. The result: a summary of what I discovered, recommendations for where to focus and a proposal. Even if we don’t work together, you can use the recommendations to start on your own improvement process.
Consulting Work
We start by making sure everyone shares the same understanding of the vision and strategy. Then we focus on reducing wait times for work, improving quality and, eventually, increasing throughput.
Business Strategy Workshop
Leadership together with people from the front line. We look at the current reality and where you intend to go. We select the top few items so that people leave the workshop knowing what the focus is. After 2-3 days, we replace a strategy based on hope with one based on the current reality of the work. In addition, because people from across the organization were present, there is real agreement about next steps. All without using fancy language around things like “alignment”.
Three-Month Start
We pick two or three measures that match your problems. For example, are day-to-day decisions following the strategy? Is GenAI improving results, or just adding volume? Then we run the first experiments together and decide what to keep. By the end, you have a template to continue.
Ongoing engagement
A few days a month. I work alongside your leaders and teams. As your people take over, I step back.
About me
Earlier this year, Claude helped me design a set of experiments for my own business. They looked like a real plan, complete with target dates. I forgot about them almost instantly. When the dates had passed, I was told the experiments had failed. None of them had ever run. (I know, I tell people to run experiments, and I didn’t run the ones Claude invented for me.)
GenAI is very good at producing work-shaped objects: things that look like work but deliver nothing.
Instead of promising magical change, I focus on making regular improvements throughout the organization. I don’t parrot the claims made by frontier AI labs or tool vendors. I look for what is working for others, and I read the research. Before you make a change, I look at the whole system to see where it’s likely to lead.
I’ve run Agile Pain Relief for over 16 years and trained over 8,000 people. In the process, I’ve seen most of the mistakes that organizations can make.
Common questions
I can’t help organizations that aren’t interested in making deeper changes. I won’t help organizations that are trying to replace people en masse with GenAI.
No. After an initial ramp-up, most engagements are a few days a month until your team is self-sufficient. We know you’re self-sufficient when your organization is designing and measuring its own improvements.
Yes. If your team needs training rather than consulting, see private training.
No, I come from the world of software development, and that is an advantage. For over 50 years, this industry has been making mistakes faster than any other. I can help you learn from these mistakes.
No, and be wary of anyone who says they can. What I can do is help you respond faster when it arrives.
This isn’t surprising. Many organizations have laid off large numbers of people. Instead of being honest about strategic missteps or overhiring, they say: “AI replaced these people”. Worse, some CEOs have belittled their staff for being cautious, saying: “That’s loser thinking”.
For any change to happen without creating fear, we need the people who are involved in planning the change. This isn’t rocket science. Instead of edicts telling people: “You must use AI”, ask them to help in the process of discovering where it helps. People who have a voice in the change are far less afraid of it.
Further, don’t assume GenAI can replace people. It changes work, but so far it can’t replace taste and human judgment.
Remember, I said no magic. Under the best circumstances, we can find low-hanging fruit in the first month. However, when the problems cross departments, expect it to take two to three months to see real change.
What people say
I’ve had a fair amount of success thus far introducing and implementing the concepts at the agency I work for. … We identified quite a few issues with our systems within the first couple of days and are now radically overhauling how we assign budgets to projects.
Mark is a good facilitator who is honest and understanding about the technical and organizational challenges.
I loved how interactive and applicable it was, especially for myself outside of the software industry. … I am excited at how it can improve the value we offer to clients at my organization.
Mark is very knowledgeable on the subject and always had good arguments to overcome the “we couldn’t do this in our organization”.
Crises happen. The question is only what happens in response. If nothing changes, then each crisis just makes all the existing problems worse. In a software company, that might be a growing GenAI bill while quality drops. Outside software, the list of challenges keeps piling up; soon it will reach the ceiling.
The alternative? Teams that handle surprises without waiting for adult supervision. They tell you what is going on proactively and ask for help without needing to be prompted. You move from being involved in every decision to providing direction.
Tired of everyone relying on you as the hero? Let’s talk it through.
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