Over the past two years I’ve worked on ten engagements as an independent consultant. On paper they look varied. Some were interim roles, where I stepped into an organisation for a period. Others were advisory, delivered directly or as an associate of Remit Consulting. The clients ranged from a listed REIT and a global investor to a family-owned estate and a youth arts charity. Looking back across them, the variety is smaller than it first appears. The same few questions kept

Most businesses are about to sit down and write next year's plan. Growth targets, new contracts, bigger ambitions. Very few will pause first and ask what this year actually left them standing on. What's been quietly deferred. What's still missing from the risk register. What is it that only one or two people actually understand. None of that shows up in a growth plan. It just sits underneath it, unexamined, waiting to be found out at a worse time than now. The stocktake isn't

The most expensive risk in any transition isn't usually the one on the register. It's the one walking out the door. I've seen it play out more than once: a business goes through a period of change - a contract handover, a restructuring, a change of provider - and loses one or two people along the way who happen to hold knowledge nobody else wrote down. Not because anyone was careless. Because that knowledge was never treated as an asset in the first place. It just lived in so

Most risk registers are written by people imagining what could plausibly go wrong. The problem is the things that actually go wrong are often the ones nobody thought to write down. Earlier this year, a CRM platform used by well over a thousand UK charities was breached. Attackers got in using compromised login credentials rather than anything technically sophisticated, and copied the underlying database backups. The charities themselves hadn't done anything wrong. They'd simp

I was working on a fast-moving contract handover recently - the kind of situation where everyone wants to move quickly. We still took the time to build a risk register before anything happened: what could go wrong, who's responsible for catching it, how we'd know early. Around the same time, I was talking to a business that's genuinely ambitious about growth. No risk register. No contract register. No real sense of their own portfolio - what's expiring, what's exposed, what's

Change doesn’t fail at the start. It fails at the exit The plan is delivered. The work is done. Momentum is visible. Then the engagement ends and that’s when you find out whether anything actually stuck. Does the organisation pick it up and run? Or does it quietly drift? Is a contract extension a sign of genuine appetite, or is it filling a gap that nobody wants to name? The honest version of this is that exit design rarely gets the attention it deserves. From either party. I

In law firms and hospitals around the world, a quiet crisis is unfolding. Real estate should pay attention. When AI document review arrived in law firms, the efficiency gains were celebrated. Junior associates were freed from tedious e-discovery work. What nobody noticed was that the work also taught junior lawyers how to think. Recent research confirms the damage: 72% of legal professionals now cite deep legal reasoning as the biggest skills gap among junior lawyers. Radiol

In most boardrooms, the issue isn’t capability. It’s the decision no one quite wants to take while everything already feels stretched. There may be a structure that isn’t working, but changing it feels disruptive. A strategy that sounds coherent but isn’t translating into action. A senior performance issue everyone can see, yet the timing never feels quite right. Each delay is understandable. Taken together, they alter the organisation. Deferral rarely feels risky in the mome

Over the last few years, moving between executive roles, advisory work and trusteeship has changed how I experience decision-making. In senior settings, decisions are usually sound. Financial implications are modelled. Risk is documented. Trade-offs are articulated. The logic is rarely casual. A few weeks later, in operational meetings, that same decision often shows up as an additional reporting cycle, a new approval step, a tighter deadline or a resource assumption that

In boardrooms, decisions are rightly debated. Options are weighed. Risks are considered. Trade-offs are analysed. That is governance doing its job. But once decisions move beyond the boardroom table, they are no longer abstract. They shape workloads.They influence morale.They alter priorities.They signal what matters. Teams rarely experience decisions as “strategic adjustments.” They experience them as changes to daily reality. This gap between debate and lived experience is

I still remember the email landing in my inbox 5 years ago. 1 February 2021. Middle of the pandemic. Lockdowns. Loss everywhere. That low-level hum of uncertainty beneath daily life. “Out of thousands of applicants, you have been chosen to participate in the TED Mystery Experiment…” Click the link. Decide within a week. No pitch. No expectations. Just one extraordinary sentence: You’ll receive $10,000, and how you spend it is entirely up to you. At the time, it didn’t feel

When was the last time you stopped, not because you’d finished, but because you chose to? How often do you keep going, simply because you can? I’ve just finished reading Mental Health UK Burnout Report 2026 - midweek, when most of us are still pushing through. What struck me wasn’t a headline statistic. It was how ordinary burnout now sounds. Not dramatic collapse. Not crisis moments. Just people who are tired in ways that rest doesn’t quite touch. Reading it, I kept thinki

This weekend, over half a million people took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch. One hour. One garden. A few birds. On its own, one person’s list doesn’t mean much. Put them together, and suddenly you can see national trends - what’s declining, what’s shifting, what’s quietly disappearing. And the lesson is…...it has similarities to how organisations work One late rent payment. One awkward customer email. One offhand comment from someone junior that never quite makes the meeti

Some of the most disciplined leadership I see right now is in the arts. Not because conditions are favourable but because they aren’t. At a time when UK arts organisations are operating under sustained funding pressure, clarity becomes non-negotiable. Purpose sharpens. Trade-offs are named, not disguised. There’s little room for performative leadership. What strikes me is how often this produces better judgement, not poorer. Decisions are slower where they need to be. Faster

Earlier this week I read thoughtful comments by new RICS President, Nicholas Maclean, on the importance of learning, standards and professional development in a changing environment. It landed, and it prompted a related reflection. Learning matters.But learning alone doesn’t move organisations forward. Adaptation does. Across real estate, governance and the arts, I see highly capable professionals constantly learning - qualifications, frameworks, best practice. Yet the ope

The New Year doesn’t always bring energy. Sometimes it just hides burnout. January creates momentum. New plans. Reset targets. Renewed urgency. From the outside, it looks like energy. But for many leaders, myself included, what shows up isn’t renewal. It’s adrenaline. A temporary lift driven by motion, structure, expectation. It feels productive. It looks committed. And it can be misleading. When the pace eases, what remains isn’t motivation. It’s fatigue that never went away