On structure and soul

Most organisations are built outside in.

Start with what you want the world to see. Design the product, write the pitch, build the brand. Then, somewhere in the rush, wonder why it doesn’t feel quite right. Why the culture is harder than expected. Why decisions take longer than they should. Why the vision that was so clear at the beginning is getting blurry at the edges.

The problem is rarely the surface. It almost never is.

The problem is the shikumi — or rather, the absence of one.

Shikumi (仕組み) is a Japanese word that means the underlying structure. The mechanism. The architecture beneath the architecture. It is the thing that holds the visible thing up. An organisation’s shikumi is the structure of its decision-making, the way power actually flows, the unspoken agreements that shape behaviour, the values that are either baked into how things work or merely printed on a wall. It is the difference between a business that works beautifully and one that merely operates.

What I believe

I believe that how you build matters as much as what you build.

That the structures you put in place at the beginning carry the values — or the absence of values — of the people who built them. That organisations are not machines to be engineered but ecosystems to be tended. That complexity cannot be simplified away, only understood well enough to move through it wisely.

That a founder’s vision, if it is to survive contact with reality, needs to be held in the architecture itself — not just in the founder’s head.

I believe that beauty and function are not in tension. The most effective organisations I have encountered are also the most coherent — where the why, the how, and the what are in alignment. Where walking through the door, you feel something. That is not an accident. That is the shikumi working.

How I work

I work with a small number of founders and purpose-led organisations at a time. Always at the beginning of something, or at a point where something has lost its coherence and needs to be re-found.

The full arc: from the idea that is not yet quite formed, to the ecosystem that can stand on its own.

The work begins with sensemaking — sitting with the actual nature of the situation before deciding what to build. This takes longer than most people expect. It is also where most of the value lives.

Then comes the shikumi: designing the underlying structures — the operating model, the decision-making, the culture as architecture, the governance — with the same care that goes into the visible surface. This is not a framework I apply. It is something we build together, specific to you, to your vision, to the people you are building with.

And then stewardship: tending what we built as it grows, because living systems require care, not just construction.

The other half

The rest of my time, I make things.

I paint, and I write poetry, and occasionally I make music. Not as a hobby and not as a break from the work. As the other half of the same practice.

I do not believe you can hold the whole arc of building something without both halves being active.

The thinking that goes into strategy — the holding of complexity, the attention to what is underneath — is the same thinking that goes into making something. I have always moved between the two. I have never found them to be separate.

If this feels like your language

Then perhaps we should talk.

I work with founders and leaders who are building something that genuinely matters to them — not just commercially, but actually. Who understand that the organisation they are building is, in some real sense, a reflection of how they think and what they value. Who are willing to go slowly enough at the beginning to build something worth inhabiting.