# Strategic Kata

> Thinking Shaped By Practice


## Posts

- [Two Ledgers](https://strategickata.com/thinking/two-ledgers): In 2008 I sent work from Wellington to ANZ's team in Bengaluru and nobody lost their job. This month the same bank is sending the same kind of work in the same direction, and more than 100 people are waiting to hear. The difference is the second book every manager keeps.
- [Does the Exit Interview Work?](https://strategickata.com/thinking/does-the-exit-interview-work): Two contractors turned up at the same fire alarm fault on the same morning, one from the company we were leaving, one from the company we had just moved to. I had 90 days to watch an exit interview's promises get tested, and this is what they were worth.
- [What I Kept, and What I Only Thought I Valued](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-i-kept-and-what-i-only-thought-i-valued): A month after the move, we're still letting things go, one question at a time: did we use it in the last 12 months? My own bicycle fails that test, and it's still in the garage.
- [The Forecast I Asked For in 2014](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-forecast-i-asked-for-in-2014): In 2014 I asked our Splunk supplier whether we could forecast a failure before it happened. The tool exists now, and it would have made us sweat those Inland Revenue servers for longer, not less.
- [The Number I Choose to Watch](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-number-i-choose-to-watch): My inflation dashboard has one threshold, 3.5%. When the US published its July PCE figures, core came in at 3.3% and the panel stayed green. Headline came in at 3.7%. Which of those two numbers sits behind the threshold was a decision I made in about 1 minute, months earlier, and it turned out to be the whole story.
- [You Heard Me, and You Kept Nothing](https://strategickata.com/thinking/you-heard-me-and-kept-nothing): Hearing is free. Listening costs attention, and when nobody spends it the gap does not stay empty, it gets filled with whatever reading costs them the least.
- [Why Is Changing Culture So Hard?](https://strategickata.com/thinking/why-is-changing-culture-so-hard): Two things decide whether culture moves: belief and fear. Here is why a senior leader who is only an employee never gets more than half the room.
- [The Merry-Go-Round](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-merry-go-round): Picture five team leaders in a room near the end of the year, working out an unwritten agreement: each of us will sacrifice one of our own people into the bottom performance rating, we will take turns so that nobody’s team bleeds twice in a row, and the deal extends upward too, because each year one of the five leaders themselves has to wear the bottom rating, regardless of how well their team performed. My senior leader at the time proposed it himself, openly, as the sensible way to run the year-end process. We called it the merry-go-round. The absurdity is […]
- [The Whiteboard I Love is Being Retired](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-whiteboard-i-love-is-being-retired): Microsoft is retiring the whiteboard app I've loved for years, and I'm exporting my boards to PDF before the door shuts. A reflection on renting permanence on someone else's cycle, and keeping your exit costs low.
- [Vibe Coding: A Macro Early-Warning Dashboard](https://strategickata.com/thinking/vibe-coding-a-macro-early-warning-dashboard): Four times a year I typed the numbers into a spreadsheet by hand. This year I tried vibe coding the early-warning panel instead, with Claude Code doing the typing; idea to a working dashboard, tested against live data, in under two hours.
- [What AI Exposes - Part 6 of 6](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-ai-exposes-part-6-of-6): AI is an extension of me in a machine. I was three iterations deep into a comic strip, watching Gemini put a collar on a character who’d never had a collar in any version, when I realised I was looking at the same problem I’d spent five articles describing in organisations with thousands of people. Style drift. Definition of done gone soft. The same dysfunction, just compressed down to one person, one laptop, one Friday afternoon. The difference was what happened next. I didn’t need a steering committee. I didn’t need to wait for a financial threshold to clear or a […]
- [Knowledge Is Cheap Now](https://strategickata.com/thinking/knowledge-is-cheap-now): I cut the tape on 4 years of sealed boxes and found a paper mountain of printouts I never once missed. The information was the cheap part all along; what held its value was what stayed in my head after the paper was filed and forgotten.
- [What AI Exposes - Part 5 of 6](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-ai-exposes-part-5-of-6): AI can read what’s written down. It can’t read the room. I was naive the first time I got close to real power. I was CIO for the Malaysian operation at ABN AMRO, and it was the first time I’d been anywhere near the corridors where decisions actually got made. Up to that point, I’d assumed that what happened in meetings was mostly what was happening. I learned quickly that wasn’t true. There were deals behind the scenes, agreements reached in rooms I wasn’t in, what I’d call horse trading, the kind of give and take between senior people that never […]
- [Arcane by Necessity](https://strategickata.com/thinking/arcane-by-necessity): At 2:00 am, just after the bots from the tax refund agents finished scraping the portal, we rebooted the servers. The servers were healthy. That was the point. By the time an out-of-support WebSphere Application Server tells you it’s unhealthy, you’re already inside a priority one incident, and a system serving every taxpayer in New Zealand is falling over with the whole country watching. So we rebooted while the country slept, on a schedule built from our own data, and nobody outside the team ever knew it happened. This was Inland Revenue between 2013 and 2015, and this piece is about […]
- [What AI Exposes - Part 4 of 6](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-ai-exposes-part-4-of-6): AI speeds up everything except the constraint. And the constraint is rarely the technology. Every executive board I’ve sat in front of, whether at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, Te Pūkenga, or earlier in my career, had the same shape underneath it, regardless of what the organisation actually did. Papers had to go in weeks ahead of the meeting. There was a format, usually one set by governance requirements flowing down from a central government agency, and the format asked the same kind of questions every time. What were the procurement options. What competing quotes did you receive. How did you arrive […]
- [Two Kinds of Visibility](https://strategickata.com/thinking/two-kinds-of-visibility): One morning in 2013, a senior manager stopped at our whiteboard at Inland Revenue while my team was running through the day’s incidents, looked at the columns of cards for a while, and said, “Wayne, we don’t do agile here.” I said, “No, we’re doing TPS. Toyota Production System.” She wasn’t satisfied with that. “Just remember, Inland Revenue doesn’t do agile.” Then she walked off. She ran ICT Solutions. She had sat on the panel that hired me. And she had carried Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development around during her MBA sometime later, which made the line even better. […]
- [What AI Exposes - Part 3 of 6](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-ai-exposes-part-3-of-6): AI can generate strategy decks. It cannot create organisational coherence. One of the things I’ve come to dread is sitting on a steering committee and watching a project go AMBER, sometimes RED, and knowing I can’t ask the question that actually matters. The programme manager or project manager gives the update. The status is AMBER. As a committee member who isn’t in the programme day to day, I can’t ask, “What’s the smallest next step that would move this from AMBER to GREEN?” because that’s not a question the report is built to answer. The answer to that question lives with […]
- [What I Left Off my CV](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-i-left-off-my-cv): I asked an AI if it could replace me. The honest answer was sitting in the two jobs I deleted. Back in 2024 I updated my CV for a role at Open Polytechnic, and I left two things out. ANZ. ABN AMRO. Two banks, real years, real work, missing from the page. I wasn’t job-hunting for sport. I was at Te Pūkenga while the whole thing was being unwound, and a good slice of the tertiary education sector was reapplying for its own jobs at the same time. The CV had to do real work, against a crowd, in a hurry. […]
- [What AI Exposes - Part 2 of 6](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-ai-exposes-part-2-of-6): AI inherits the operating system of the organisation. When I joined Stats New Zealand in October 2016, the technology staff were quick to set me straight. “Wayne, you don’t have to teach us Agile. We really know what Agile is.” They weren’t wrong, just years out of date about it. A senior leader had run a serious programme to introduce Scrum across the technology function sometime before March 2014, before the CDO I’d eventually report to had even started in the role. Staff were trained. They were immersed. They had the cadence, the ceremonies, the story points, the full picture. Everyone […]
- [When the World is Changing: How to Make Sense of It](https://strategickata.com/thinking/when-the-world-is-changing-how-to-make-sense-of-it): I watched the internet arrive. It landed on my desk as a working problem long before it was a headline, and it rearranged how the work got done while we were still looking the other way. One year we were faxing change requests and walking floppy disks between buildings, and the next we were arguing about whether email counted as a real record, whether you could trust a document that nobody had signed. Nobody stood up and announced it. It seeped in, and by the time we noticed, the old way of working had already left the building. Twenty something years […]
- [What AI Exposes - Part 1 of 6](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-ai-exposes-part-1-of-6): AI exposes organisational constraints faster. I’ve seen this with Agile adoption before. When Agile arrived in earnest, the promise was faster delivery, tighter feedback loops, smaller batches of work shipped more frequently. And to be fair, the delivery engine did get faster. Sprints ran. Stand-ups happened. Velocity metrics climbed. What nobody anticipated was what faster delivery would surface underneath. At ANZ, one of the wholesale development teams adopted Scrum to make their development work more productive. The sprints ran. The stories got written. The cadence held. And then the team hit the same wall, every cycle: the production team, the backend […]
- [The Coach Said Ageism is a Myth](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-coach-said-ageism-is-a-myth): I’ve been on both sides of this. At Stats NZ, at ANZ, I sat in rooms where hiring decisions were made, and I listened to managers explain, without much discomfort, why certain candidates had filtered themselves out before the conversation even started. Too old. Too expensive. Too set in their ways. I filed those observations away as a feature of how organisations work, the kind of thing you absorb without examining closely when you’re on the side where it doesn’t cost you anything. I never thought I’d be the person they were describing. Then Te Pūkenga restructured, and I found out […]
- [The Cover Story](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-cover-story): ABN AMRO ran a three-day programme for every officer at manager rank and above. The subject was this: what makes a bank a bank. I attended it in the early 2000s. The facilitator opened with a question, and answers came back the way they always do in a room full of experienced people who haven’t been asked this before. Deposits. Savings accounts. Housing loans. Payment transactions. The facilitator let the room finish, then said: No. The business of banking is brokering. You take money as intermediary, you lend long, you borrow short, and you extract the margin between. Every ratio the […]
- [I Trained an AI to Draw My Comics](https://strategickata.com/thinking/i-trained-an-ai-to-draw-my-comics): I’ve been drawing the same characters for a few years. Bald heads, no gender, no mouths, just eyes and noses. They live inside my previous Small Simple Steps blog, mostly as cover images. One of them is sitting inside a giant jar saying “I’m stuck.” A voice from outside says: “You’re not a tree. Get moving.” Dry humor, organisational observations, leadership absurdities. That’s the strip. The ideas are never the problem. I have 10 to 20 of them sitting on paper right now, thumbnails and notes, waiting to become strips. A professor explaining that innovation is Q+A (questioning plus action), then […]
- [The Four Unwritten Rules That Keep You Employed](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-long-game): The calendar invite arrives with no agenda and no attendees listed except you and your manager. By the time you notice the pattern in the building, it’s already happening. Someone in finance started the spreadsheet three weeks ago. That’s how economic cycles land at the individual level, and they’ve been landing that way for decades: after the 2008 financial collapse, when the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy triggered a cascade through the global banking system and redundancies spread across every sector; after COVID froze entire industries overnight; in every contraction before and after those, when credit tightened and executives started talking about efficiency […]
- [AI is a Bicycle](https://strategickata.com/thinking/ai-is-a-bicycle): When I was young, I walked to school. Then one day I got a bicycle. The bicycle didn’t replace walking. I still walked to the corner shop, still walked when the bike had a flat. But for the school run, it was faster and I arrived less tired. Then came the bus. Same route, no effort, could read on the way. And in adulthood a scooter for short stretches because it was quicker through the car park. None of these replaced the others. Each was a medium, a better fit for a specific job. I keep coming back to that image […]
- [The Same Hiring Mistake is About to Get More Expensive](https://strategickata.com/thinking/same-hiring-mistake-becoming-expensive): I published a version of this in 2021. It was about hiring Agile coaches. Reading it back, the argument is identical. The job titles have changed and the day rates have roughly tripled. Organisations are moving fast on “AI transformation leads,” “Chief AI Officers,” and consulting firms promising to compress a multi-year change into a 90-day sprint. Some of that money will produce results. Most of it will produce a very expensive lesson about organisational readiness that a two-hour conversation could have avoided. Four things to acknowledge before you start. One: No AI expert knows everything about AI transformation. They’re human, […]
- [What Nobody Talks About After A Restructuring](https://strategickata.com/thinking/what-nobody-talks-about-post-restructuring): On 19 May, Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the NZ public service will cut roughly 8,700 roles by 2029, taking headcount from around 64,000 down to 55,000. $2.4 billion in savings. Agencies merging. AI and digital tools named as part of how the remaining workforce will cope. The coverage since has been predictable. The PSA calling it reckless. Worried workers. The human cost, which is real and I won’t dismiss it. This is for the people who don’t lose their jobs. Post-restructuring is its own kind of hard. And almost nobody talks about it. I’ve been through enough restructures to know […]
- [The Slow Drain You're Not Watching](https://strategickata.com/thinking/slow-drain-you-are-not-watching): Energy sits at the base of everything. When global oil flows get disrupted, that disruption doesn’t stay in the energy sector, it travels through the whole system: into transportation costs, which feed into food prices at the supermarket, into manufacturing, which moves through supply chains before landing on retail shelves, into LNG, which New Zealand imports. Once energy rises, everything rises. That’s just how the mechanism works. I’ve been watching three macro scenarios for the New Zealand economy: stagflation, inflation, and deflation. They’re easy to conflate, and the confusion matters because the responses to each are different, sometimes opposite. The definitions […]
- [When Benevolent Hegemony Turns Awry](https://strategickata.com/thinking/when-benevolent-hegemony-turns): We all want to be the good guys. I’ve never met a person who genuinely thinks they’re the villain in their own story, not in organizational politics, not in international affairs, not anywhere. That instinct is mostly harmless. Where it becomes dangerous is when powerful states weaponize it as policy. The regime change fallacy For decades the tool has been the same: remove the bad actor, install something friendlier, let stability follow. The logic is clean on paper, and the intentions are often genuinely held. But history doesn’t support the clean version. Unintended consequences surface years later, sometimes catastrophically, and the […]
- [New Zealand Unemployment: The Slow Unwind](https://strategickata.com/thinking/nz-unemployment-slow-climb): For the past 2 years, I’ve been tracking New Zealand’s unemployment rate using 3-quarter and 8-quarter moving averages. Nothing sophisticated, just adding the last few quarters together to smooth out the noise and watch the direction of travel over time. I started doing this because headlines tend to swing emotionally from quarter to quarter, optimism one month, panic the next, while labour markets usually move much slower than people realise. The March 2026 unemployment rate came in at 5.3%. From my observation, the situation hasn’t changed very much. The curve has flattened slightly, but the broader trend still looks like a […]
- [Designing Team Culture](https://strategickata.com/thinking/designing-team-culture): A leader walks into a town hall and tells the room they want everyone learning Python, that upskilling is the future, the department is going all-in on capability. Someone raises their hand. “Can we get training funding?” Leadership checks the budget. Two seats approved, 150 people waiting. That’s the friction. And that friction, repeated across enough decisions, is what culture actually is. Most leaders don’t see it that way. When people complain about culture, they reach for the hygiene factors: more communication, better coffee, birthday celebrations, quarterly get-togethers. These matter, but they’re not what I mean by culture. Culture is a […]
- [The Banana Economy](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-banana-economy): I was walking through Universal Studios Singapore when a poster stopped me. Three Minions, fists raised, smiling like they had just unionised against common sense. “Join us. Free bananas for life.” The poster promised excitement, training, developmint, and fun. Yes, spelled that way. I stood there laughing for a while because, whether you like it or not, most organisations eventually produce their own version of this poster. Different branding, better spelling, more polished photography, same underlying proposition. Join us. The bananas are free. It sounds ridiculous when Minions say it. Less ridiculous when corporations do. The thing about perks, culture, and […]
- [The Redistribution Reflex](https://strategickata.com/thinking/the-redistribution-reflex): Picture a company as a car. The executives look at the fuel gauge during a downturn, panic a little, then decide the fastest way to save money is to remove parts from the engine, a few mechanics from the workshop, maybe one of the drivers as well. On paper the numbers improve immediately, operating costs go down, shareholders relax for a quarter or two, everyone congratulates themselves for being “decisive.” Then the car starts rattling. I’ve been through four restructures personally. The first I remember clearly was at ANZ, where I was asked to reapply for my own job, then appointed […]

## Pages

- [What AI Exposes](https://strategickata.com/what-ai-exposes): Not long after I stepped back from full-time work in November 2024, I asked myself a simple question: will AI replace what I spent thirty years doing? The answer that came back, the more I thought about it and the more I wrote, was that AI doesn’t remove the constraints sitting inside an organisation. It speeds everything up around them, until the constraint is the only thing left standing still, and everyone can finally see it. This series traces that idea across six pieces, a production bottleneck at ANZ, an immunity system deciding which ideas an organisation actually accepts, the steering […]
- [Notes](https://strategickata.com/notes)
- [Small Simple Steps](https://strategickata.com/small-simple-steps)
- [Economy & Society](https://strategickata.com/economy-society)
- [Systems & Operations](https://strategickata.com/systems-operations)
- [Leadership](https://strategickata.com/leadership)
- [Strategy](https://strategickata.com/strategy): The Redistribution Ref
- [Practice](https://strategickata.com/practice): After enough years working across different organisations, you start seeing the same patterns repeating, even when the logos, systems, and leadership teams change. These are the principles that held up. Clarity before activity.Direction first. Effort without clarity is just noise that looks productive. Trust shapes performance.The ceiling on any team’s output is set by the trust within it, not the talent. I’ve watched high-trust teams with ordinary people outperform low-trust teams with exceptional ones, consistently. Complexity grows naturally.Left alone, systems accumulate. Processes layer on processes. The work of simplification is never finished and never glamorous, and it matters more than most […]
- [Connect](https://strategickata.com/connect): Thanks for stopping by. Strategic Kata is mainly a place to write, reflect, and document ideas drawn from experience. But I still enjoy good conversations with people working through leadership, technology, operational, or organisational challenges. I’m no longer pursuing traditional executive roles, although I remain open to occasional mentoring, advisory work, collaboration, or conversations where experience is genuinely useful. You can reach me at: hello [at] strategickata.com or connect on LinkedIn It’s worked for me.
- [Thinking](https://strategickata.com/thinking): Thirty years of direct organisational experience, written out as I understand it. Pick a topic. Strategy Why organisations choose what they choose, and why good intentions often collide with reality. Leadership Trust, accountability, culture, and the realities of managing people. Systems & Operations Complexity, flow, process, platforms, and the unintended consequences of design decisions. Economy & Society Labour markets, productivity, New Zealand, and the larger forces shaping organisations. Small Simple Steps Practical reflections on progress, reinvention, and personal discipline. Notes Short observations, working ideas, and patterns that haven’t yet become essays.
- [About](https://strategickata.com/about): I’m Wayne Loke. I spent most of my career leading technology, infrastructure, operations, and transformation work across large organisations in New Zealand, including banking, government, and tertiary education. The environments were rarely simple. Large platforms stitched together over decades, competing priorities across business units, restructures every few years, leadership changes halfway through delivery, pressure from above, fatigue below, and good people trying to hold things together while still delivering the work in front of them. Some of the challenges were technical. A lot of them weren’t. Over time I became more interested in the patterns underneath organisational performance; how trust affects […]
- [Home](https://strategickata.com/)
- [Privacy Policy](https://strategickata.com/privacy-policy): Who we are Our website address is: https://strategickata.com. Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. Media If you upload images to the […]

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