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The Centaur’s Crossing
Kasparov lost to Deep Blue and drew the more interesting conclusion: the question was what a person and a machine could do on the same side of the board. Why the decision, not the plan, is the deliverable of a planning process; why AI-native platforms move the bottleneck from calculation to the organisation’s capacity to decide; and what the planner’s job becomes. The opening essay of the series.
Starting in the Right Direction
How a transformation’s framing decides how it ends, and the six or seven weeks of discovery that belong before any budget is committed: reading the organisation from its own artefacts, Senge’s shifting-the-burden trap, Argyris’s two columns, and a preconditions check in which the absence of any one can be fatal. With a section for programmes that have already stalled.
The Anatomy of Decisions*
The working parts of a planning cycle: owners, lead times, home cycles and deferral costs; decision debt; the several problems hiding inside “adoption is low”; how much autonomy a decision can carry; and a review in which overrides are data rather than sins. A register and a habit, with a first pass that takes about thirty days and no new software. (*With thanks to Joseph Story of o9 for the phrase.)
Successful Integrated Planning: The Short Version
The 2018 book condensed and run back to front: the four-platform method first, then why it works, then the diagnosis it treats. Written before AI-native planning platforms existed; the technology dated, the argument hardly at all.
AI Projects Deserve Project Management
Why AI pilots stall, what disciplined phasing looks like with PMI’s CPMAI method, the question to ask first (is this an AI problem, or an automation problem in disguise?), and how the machine-side discipline and the human-side method run as one process: the Centaur Protocol. The closing essay of the series.