Author: Wayne Loke

  • What I Kept, and What I Only Thought I Valued

    What I Kept, and What I Only Thought I Valued

    It’s been a month since we moved into the new place. We’re still renting, and the floor area is bigger than the last house, though it has 3 rooms where the old one had 4, and less storage than we had before. We’ve settled and unpacked almost everything. The boxes I brought up from Wellington in 2022, 16 of them were unopened if I remember right, are down to 6, repacked with the things we don’t need to use yet. By any normal measure the move is done.

    Then my wife went on a spree. Donating, selling online, giving things away as freebies. I thought she was taking minimalism to the extreme, and I said so. She pointed back at something I’d told her earlier, which she hadn’t agreed with at the time: we’re paying rent for these things to be with us. We’re tenants. Every square metre of the house has a weekly price on it, and the box of things nobody uses pays the same rent as the couch. They were wants once upon a time, most of them.

    The list

    So I made a list, and the list is long.

    The toboggan went first, the snow sled we bought for my daughter when she was younger, for our first trip to Whakapapa on the flanks of Mt Ruapehu in Tongariro National Park, where we tried our best to enjoy the snow. The snow pants went with it. We sold both in the New Zealand winter, which is exactly when somebody else wants a toboggan.

    Then shoes, and here I learned something. Shoes can disintegrate sitting in a box. It’s called hydrolysis: moisture in the air slowly breaks down the polyurethane in the sole, over several years, whether you wear the shoes or keep them in storage for the right occasion. The sole cracks, or the material starts to fray. Those went into the dumpster, and a fair number of handbags went with them. You realise, eventually, that nobody needs that many handbags.

    Winter clothing was simple once we noticed the pattern. We keep wearing our favourites, winter after winter, and the rest hangs there. The unworn ones were sold.

    The kitchen was the big one. When the movers packed us up for Hamilton in 2022, one of them looked around our kitchen and said we had every kitchen appliance going except one: we didn’t have a hangi cooker. Lucky, we never got round to that. This month the rest went. The electric pressure cooker, the coffee maker, the soy milk maker, the blender, the food processor, the mixer, a new wok, pots, plates, cutlery and utensils, sold online or given away. Every one of them was a good idea the day we bought it.

    The old mobile phones, the older electrical appliances and the electronics went to the recyclers, where they can be disposed of properly. The technical books on IT, Agile, Lean and process went. Some furniture went to people who’ll have more use for it than we do. And the lawn mower and the trimmer have gone too, because the new place has no lawn at all.

    Why the buckets stopped working

    During the packing rush, deciding was easy. I wrote about the three buckets in Knowledge is Cheap Now, and with a moving truck booked they do their job, because the deadline makes the call and there’s no time to argue with yourself. Now there’s no deadline. Nothing has to be gone by Friday, so every object gets to make its case again, and the case it makes usually sounds reasonable.

    So we changed the question. We look back over the last 12 months and ask whether we used it. If we haven’t, it has no utility for us, and it goes.

    Each thing we keep costs us attention. It’s one more thing to remember we own, to maintain, to store, to move next time, to notice on a shelf and feel faintly guilty about. Once we asked the question that way, the other arguments stopped carrying much weight. Some things sold for decent money and some went for nothing, and what we’d paid didn’t change a single decision; the thing still has utility for somebody who needs it, and they’ll pay what it’s worth to them. We have more floor than we used to, so space wasn’t forcing anything either. Every time, it came back to the same three reasons for keeping something: emotional value, utility, or money. We tried to name which one we were really leaning on.

    Compare that with a car. A car has upkeep too. You service it, maintain it, pay the insurance, and you do it without a second thought, because the car gives you convenience and the long drive, which for us is the trip to Auckland every few weeks to see our daughter, one of the real pleasures of this stage of life. The soy milk maker had upkeep and gave us nothing back. Morgan Housel has a name for this in The Art of Spending Money: negative returns, the things you pay for that quietly make life worse, his example being the boat that always needs something done to it. Our kitchen cupboards were full of small boats.

    Housel’s book kept coming back to me while we did this, because it pushed me to the less comfortable question. Why did we buy these things in the first place? Because we could afford them and we were able to buy them. Buying something with your own hard-earned money is a small hit of happiness, and at the time each one looked like a good idea as well. A pressure cooker is a promise to cook more slow food. A toboggan is a promise of more snow trips. Every purchase was a guess about the life we were about to live, and a few years later a lot of those good ideas turn out to have been wishful ones, things we thought we might use and ended up not using, and we’d been paying to keep them close ever since.

    Did we regret any of it?

    Not really. I’ve asked myself frankly, and so has my wife. I guess most of it was already out of our minds before it left the house; out of sight, out of mind, and it stayed that way. We can recall things we sold or gave away, but there hasn’t been a moment where one of us wished we’d kept something because we need it now. When one of us does think of something, we ask whether there’s an alternative, and whether we need it or only want it.

    My wife is heading towards minimalism faster than I ever expected. Somewhere in the middle of her spree, I did what I’ve learned to do when two people see the same thing differently, at work or at home. I asked her: what is your lived experience, that I haven’t lived, that makes you believe in what you’re doing?

    She said nothing. I took the silence to mean she was thinking, and I left it as it was.

    The answer came later, and it didn’t come to me in words. She was telling her sisters and her mother what she’d been getting rid of and why, repeating the idea back as though she’d thought of it first, when she’d disagreed with it the first time I said it. Her action said everything the silence hadn’t. That’s when I knew she’d taken it seriously.

    It’s a powerful question, because it makes both people step back and find the extra information they were missing, and that makes more difference than any argument. Once you’ve found it, some of the rules you’ve been living by, rules built out of your own past, stop holding. That’s what happened with her disposing, and as it turned out, it happened with me too.

    We enjoy the simplicity of how we live now, and it doesn’t take many things. So we’re letting go of what we thought we’d want and value, sentimentally or practically, once it’s clear it doesn’t fit the life we actually have.

    What’s still worth carrying

    When you’ve accumulated a lifetime of things, the useful question at this end of it is what’s still worth carrying.

    For me it’s a short list. My journals and notes, and anything that helps me write here. And a very old book I found in my collection: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, the Hamlyn edition from 1984. I’m keeping it because reading those stories and watching the reruns on TV aren’t the same thing.

    Then there’s the bicycle.

    It’s a Navajo, and it looks something like a cruiser, with a seat that has a proper backrest, a shock absorber under the frame and a 3-speed hub gear, and I’ve kept it for many years. It’s the one in the photo at the top of this piece. It has outlasted the others: the Avanti Discovery 8 I serviced myself and sold on TradeMe in 2011, and the folding bicycles I gave away. I find it unique in how it looks, the hub gear is useful, and I enjoy riding it. Maintenance is low, and I’ve always done my own. I think it’s the right bike for Hamilton, and I can already picture riding it along the river path beside the Waikato, just enjoying being outdoors.

    My wife wants it gone.

    Here’s the uncomfortable part, and I’d rather say it myself than have a reader point it out. By the rule I’ve spent this whole piece describing, the bicycle fails. The straight answer to the 12-month question is no. My entire case for keeping it is about rides I’m going to take, and a few paragraphs up I called that exact argument a wishful idea when it belonged to a soy milk maker. I held every cupboard in the house to the rule and let my own bicycle off.

    What this month has taught me is that the utility argument, however rational it is, loses to some things. They carry an emotional weight that no 12-month rule reaches, and when that’s true I’d rather admit it than keep insisting the rule holds. And on this one I have a piece of lived experience my wife hasn’t lived yet. The minute I start riding that bicycle regularly, she’ll want one too, so she can ride along.

    Ask me again in 12 months.

  • The Forecast I Asked For in 2014

    On 22 July, at 10.44 in the morning, the hospital systems across the Waikato stopped answering. Waikato, Thames, Te Kūiti, Tokoroa and Taumarunui, five hospitals back on pen and paper for about 11 hours, with 68 appointments and 15 theatre cases deferred at Waikato Hospital alone. The cause was connectivity failure between its network and main data center,1 which means the systems themselves were running perfectly well and nobody could reach them, and for some time afterwards Health NZ could say which part had failed without being able to say why.

    I live in Hamilton, so this one happened close to home, and it took me straight back to Inland Revenue and the 33 priority one incidents we logged in 2013 on infrastructure IBM had stopped supporting. I’ve written about what the whiteboards did to that number, 33 to 7 to 3, in Two Kinds of Visibility, and about the 2am reboots we scheduled off our own data in Arcane by Necessity, and I promised in the first of those to come back one day to how we sweated those assets. This is that piece, and it turns on a tool I asked for and didn’t get.

    The question I put to GKC

    In 2014, our second year, we took a Splunk subscription. The New Zealand supplier was GKC, and David Anso and Glen Patrick spent a good deal of time with us, setting up the 45 inch monitoring TV our Director for IT Operations had bought, getting us through the training, teaching us to scrape and analyse the logs coming off the estate. What came out of it was a dashboard on that TV showing the WebSphere servers, the load, and whatever else we could feed it. Good piece of work, and genuinely useful.

    The limit was data ingestion. Ingestion cost money, the budget didn’t stretch, so we were capped on how much we could take in at any one time, and when we hit the cap we culled what we were feeding in to protect the trends we cared about most. We were rationing our own visibility, which tells you something about the era we were operating in.

    Somewhere during that training I asked the question that has stayed with me for 12 years. Why can’t we use this data to forecast the time to impact? The logs already hold the behaviour, we already know the shape of a server heading for trouble, so why can’t the system tell us what will fail, and when, before it does?

    The answer was polite and it was correct. Great idea, they said, and it’s possible, but the technology and the algorithms are limited right now, and you’d have to supply the algorithms yourselves. Not one of us had a major in maths or statistics. Nobody in that team could have written them. So the idea died there, filed under too early, and we went back to doing the job by hand: benchmarks for when each server needed its cache cleared, thresholds watched by people, restarts scheduled for the hours the country was asleep.

    Teru, my Senior IT Consultant, carried a spreadsheet that did the analytical half of this. Everything the tool would have done automatically, he did in columns.

    Give 2014 the tool it asked for

    The what if sets itself up. Drop today’s capability into that room. AI ingesting the logs without a cap, taking over Teru’s spreadsheet, doing the maths none of us could do, producing the sequence of failures instead of a picture of the present.

    Splunk ships this now. IT Service Intelligence runs machine learning over historical service data to predict a service’s health score, and the horizon it offers is roughly 30 minutes, given a service with more than 5 good indicators and more than a week of history. The thing I sketched out loud in 2014 is a product feature in 2026. Hold onto that 30 minutes, because it matters more than it looks.

    So: if we’d held that tool at Inland Revenue in 2014, would we have kept sweating those assets, and would the $1.5 billion transformation still have gone ahead?

    We’d have sweated them longer

    My answer surprised me, because I wanted the tool badly at the time and I assumed I’d say it would have made us braver about replacing things. I think the opposite.

    Look at where we sat. A government department spends taxpayers’ money, and the obligation running underneath everything, the one my boss quoted whenever things went wrong, was the integrity of the tax system under the Tax Administration Act. Nowhere in that obligation does it say the servers have to be new. If the estate keeps running and the operating cost stays low, the return to the taxpayer improves, and a forecast that tells you precisely when each machine needs attention makes that arithmetic better. Sweating stops being a nervous gamble and becomes a scheduled, costed decision. We were already running a manual, low resolution version of exactly that, and holding 99.9 percent availability through tax peak season while we did it.

    Which is worth putting next to what the transformation eventually reported: 7 of 10 measures achieved, digital uptake at 99 percent, and system availability of 99.9 percent.2 The same availability number a team of 11 to 12 was already holding by hand, on kit two versions behind, three years before the programme started. Availability was never the argument for spending $1.5 billion. If forecasting had been the deciding variable, the case for replacement would have got weaker.

    Better forecasting, longer sweating. That’s the half of this that’s true.

    And the world wouldn’t have let us

    Here’s the other half, and it took me some time to see it properly.

    A forecast tells you when the thing you have will fail. It’s silent on when you have to replace it, because that clock sits outside your system, set by people who aren’t consulting your dashboard.

    New Zealanders understand this through houses better than through servers. In Japan a house has an expected lifespan, and at the end of it you demolish and rebuild, so the clock is explicit. Here you maintain instead, and the maintenance isn’t optional, because the exterior paint goes, the piping goes, the wiring ages, the timber can rot, moisture gets in, appliances die, and the building code keeps moving underneath all of it, so what counted as a sound house 20 years ago needs work today to still count as one. The weather, the wear and the standard set that timing, and the house has no say in it.

    Our estate had the same problem, and I could see it while we were congratulating ourselves on the reboot schedule. WebSphere was two versions behind and out of vendor support. We had an Enterprise Content Management System that had to be upgraded whether it was healthy or not, because without it the documentation and the correspondence Inland Revenue generates would eventually stop working with everything around it. Demand kept climbing, the agents’ bots hammered the portal harder every peak, and the expectations of what a tax administration should do online kept moving. None of that shows up on a failure curve. A perfect time-to-impact forecast would have told us the servers were fine until Thursday, and nothing at all about the debt we were building out of knowledge that lived only in the heads of the people running it.

    That last part is the expensive bit. Sweat something long enough and the replacement bill is mostly the reconstruction of everything the old system knew and nobody wrote down. Transformation programmes are partly that invoice arriving.

    The other failure mode

    There’s a mirror version of this in the news here, and both belong in the same frame, because I don’t want to be read as saying that spending is the problem.

    MBIE’s Biometric Capability Upgrade ran for seven years and was stopped in December 2025 having delivered nothing usable. By September 2026 the ministry had confirmed $50.7 million lost across it and a related project,3 and Parliament’s Privileges Committee had found that the ministry deliberately misled a select committee about it, a contempt of Parliament. Ministers in two governments were, on the Minister’s account, managed rather than informed, and that detail is the tell that this isn’t a story about one party or one minister.

    The root of it looks structural to me. A programme of work that never fixes its answer to two questions, who is this for and what is it for, will drift for as long as the money lasts. Business process improvement, cost reduction, something the public actually needs: pick one and hold it. If the specification moves every time the market ships something newer, there’s no outcome to measure against, only a target that keeps walking away, and years pass, and everyone involved can say honestly that they worked hard the whole time.

    So one organisation deferred replacement for a decade under an absolute obligation, spent $1.5 billion, and delivered most of what it promised. Another spent tens of millions chasing a capability and delivered nothing. Neither outcome was decided by how well anybody could forecast a failure.

    What the 30 minutes tells you

    Which brings me back to Splunk’s horizon.

    30 minutes is an operational number and a good one. It’s enough to move traffic, warn the service desk, get somebody to a keyboard, take a controlled restart instead of wearing an uncontrolled outage. In 2014 it would have made us better operators, saved Teru some late nights, and possibly taken 3 priority ones down to 1.

    The same 30 minutes is silent on whether to spend $1.5 billion, on when the vendor stops patching, on when the regulation changes, and on when the last person who understands the batch schedule retires. Nobody reading that dashboard learns anything about the decision that actually mattered.

    I asked for the tool in 2014 because I thought better visibility would improve the decision. Twelve years on, I think it improves the operation, and the decision was always being made on a different set of facts, most of which sit outside the building.

    What I do with my own

    I should admit that I sweat my own assets thoroughly. I’m running a 10th generation i5 laptop well past the 3 years the industry likes to quote, and when I replace it I’ll be looking at a refurbished 13th generation i7 rather than a new machine, because the value is better and the dollar stretches further. There’s a 2012 Mac Mini in the house doing duty as a NAS under Linux, more than 10 years old and not complaining. I keep an old laptop purely because it has a DVD writer and I haven’t digitised the discs yet. Linux on hardware Windows has given up on buys years, and for the work I do the performance difference is nothing I can feel.

    I can do all of that because when my laptop dies, the consequence is my own inconvenience. No tax return, no surgery, no statutory obligation. The moment other people depend on it, the calculation changes, and the calculation was never about the hardware.

    Everything has a best before date and an expiry date, and the gap between them is where the sweating happens.

    I’d still have taken the tool in 2014.

    1. Waikato hospitals’ outage of 22 July 2026, its duration and the appointments and theatre cases deferred: RNZ, 23 July 2026, RNZ. ↩︎
    2. Inland Revenue’s final report on its business transformation outcomes: 7 of 10 measures achieved, digital uptake 99%, availability 99.9%: Inland Revenue Annual Report 2023–24, Reseller News. ↩︎
    3. Correction, 27 September 2026: the paragraph on MBIE has been corrected. The first version reported $33 million spent and a further $6 million surfacing afterwards. The cost is later confirmed by MBIE’s chief executive on 23 September. MBIE’s Biometric Capability Upgrade, the Privileges Committee’s finding of contempt, and the cost confirmed in September 2026: Privileges Committee report, 25 August 2026, MBIE, RNZ. ↩︎

  • The Number I Choose to Watch

    On the morning of Thursday 27 August I opened my dashboard to see what the Americans had published overnight, and the inflation panel stayed green. Headline PCE 3.7% for July, core PCE 3.3%, both up 0.2% on the month. My threshold sits at 3.5%. Green, because the series I decided to feed that panel, back when I was building the thing, was core PCE, the number the Federal Reserve uses to set policy. Had I fed it headline PCE instead, the same release, the same morning, the panel would have gone red and I would have been working down my guardrail checklist instead of making coffee.

    A macro-economic dashboard showing six panels that monitors if the existing economic condition is inflation, deflation or stagflation.

    The gap between those two numbers is 0.4 percentage points. The decision that produced it took me about 1 minute, somewhere in a weekend of building, and I had not looked at it again until that morning.

    I have no salary. I finished up in November 2024 and I now run a household on savings, dividends, interest and rent, against annual expenses that are mostly fixed and mostly not negotiable. So the panel is not an academic exercise; it is the thing that tells me whether to change what I am doing. Which makes the choice of series a real decision, and I want to be clear that I made it fast and I made it by copying somebody else.

    Why the Fed leaves out the things I actually buy

    Core inflation exists for a defensible reason, and I want to give it its due before I criticise my own use of it.

    Food and energy prices swing hard on weather, on geopolitics, on shipping and on global commodity markets, and most of those swings reverse. Monetary policy works with lags of 12 to 24 months and often longer, so a central bank that moved the cash rate every time petrol jumped would be tightening into a shock that had already passed and easing into one that had not yet arrived. Stripping the two noisiest categories gives policymakers a cleaner read on the slower-moving pressures they can actually influence: labour costs, capacity, services demand. The formal target in both countries is still the full basket over time. Core is the working instrument, not the destination.

    Picture a smoke alarm wired to ignore the kitchen, because the kitchen sets it off every time somebody browns onions and the false alarms train the household to pull the battery out. Ignoring the kitchen is the right engineering choice on 99 nights out of 100. It is the hundredth night that concerns me, because the fire usually starts in the kitchen.

    What the kitchen looks like here

    New Zealand’s CPI rose 4.1% in the year to the June 2026 quarter, and 1.5% in the quarter alone. That is a two-year high and the third straight quarter outside the Reserve Bank’s 1% to 3% band. Underneath it: petrol up 27.5%, other vehicle fuels and lubricants, mainly diesel, up 71.0%, electricity up around 12%, local authority rates up 8.8%.

    Now the part that should stop anybody using a core measure in this country. Stats NZ published the counterfactual: take the fuel moves out and CPI rose 2.9%, comfortably inside the band. Which means the entire breach of the target, the whole of the gap between “on track” and “three quarters over”, sits in the category that core measures are designed to exclude.

    Against that, wages. The Labour Cost Index came in at 2.0% for the year, average ordinary-time hourly earnings around 2.8%, median hourly earnings 2.7%. All of them well under 4.1%. Real incomes are falling for most people who work for a living, and for those of us who do not, the equivalent arithmetic is similar. The real return on anything held in cash or short deposits is negative once you use the number that reflects what you actually spend. The OCR went to 2.50% in July, its first rise after sitting at 2.25% since November 2025, and deposit rates are still nowhere near the 4.1%.

    And the labour market kept doing what I said it would do. When I posted about unemployment reaching 5.6% in the June quarter I noted that I had bet on a further rise, and the 3-quarter and 8-quarter moving averages I run were the reason I was willing to say it out loud. The June print came in worse than every major bank’s pick; BNZ and Westpac had 5.4%, ANZ and ASB had 5.5%, Kiwibank had 5.3%. Underutilisation went from 12.9% to 13.8%. Rising unemployment with 4.1% inflation and a central bank that has just started raising again is an uncomfortable combination for anybody drawing down capital, and it is the reason I have panels at all.

    The variable most people are not watching

    Diesel, up 71% in a year.

    Petrol is the price everybody sees, because it is on a sign at head height on the way to work, and when it falls people relax. Diesel is the one that moves through the system. It runs the trucks that bring food to the supermarket, the tractors and the harvesters, the coastal shipping, the generators, the excavators on every construction site, the freight that sits inside the price of a fridge before anybody puts a margin on it. A sustained rise in diesel does not stay in the transport line of the CPI; it turns up months later in groceries, in building costs, in the price of getting anything repaired.

    We are a small open economy and a net importer, so a good deal of this arrives at the border rather than being made here. A stronger New Zealand dollar takes some of the sting out of it for a household like mine, at the cost of the exporters who earn the foreign income the country runs on. Sitting where I sit, drawing on savings and buying imported goods, I would take the stronger dollar. I recognise that is my position talking, and that the farmer down the road would tell you the opposite with equal justification.

    What I changed

    The panel now runs both series. The PCE threshold stays where it is, one number, at 3.5%, and headline PCE is what has to clear it from here, because the threshold exists to tell me when my own cost of living has moved enough to change my behaviour. Core sits alongside as context, because core tells me something different and something I still need: what the Reserve Bank and the Federal Reserve are likely to do next, which drives my deposit rates, my bond ladder and the discount rate on everything I own. One threshold, two series, two questions.

    The rest of it is unglamorous. I plan the driving instead of taking trips as they occur to me. I shop differently, and I have become the sort of person who reads the catalogues and checks the online prices at Pak’nSave, Woolworths and New World before leaving the house, and who runs the fuel coupons, and who knows what a kilogram of chicken thighs costs at each of them. Every three weeks or so we drive up to Auckland to see our daughter, and the Costco run and the Asian grocery shopping are planned into that same trip, Foodie, Tai Ping, and now Stacks, which opened recently at Sylvia Park. One drive, the visit and the shopping both, because the fuel is being spent either way. I hold the fixed annual expenses under review even when nothing appears to be wrong, because rates, insurance and electricity have all gone up faster than the average and none of them respond to being negotiated with. And I watch diesel, weekly, the way other people watch the exchange rate.

    This is not financial advice, but this is what I did.

    The broader point is the one I would have missed if the July release had come in at 3.4% instead of 3.7%. A dashboard is only as good as the question you asked it, and the moment where you choose which series to plug in is the moment you decide whose question that is. I had unthinkingly adopted the Federal Reserve’s question, which is a good question, carefully constructed by people who understand the lags better than I do, and which is about managing an economy over two years. My question is whether the money lasts. Those are not the same question, and the number that answers one of them will quietly answer the other one wrong.

    Most of us build our measurement systems by copying whoever seems to know what they are doing, and then we trust the output because we built it ourselves.

    I changed the series this week. That took about 1 minute too.

  • You Heard Me, and You Kept Nothing

    You come home late. The day has been long, the last meeting went sideways, and something you sent at 4pm is still sitting in your head unanswered. Your other half starts telling you about her day. You are sitting right there in the same room, close enough to touch her. You nod at the right moments, you make the small agreeable noises, and your eyes are pointed in her direction.

    Then she stops and asks you what she just said.

    You cannot answer. Not one line of it. You heard every word and you kept none of them.

    I have been on both sides of that, and the uncomfortable part is that nothing misleading happened. You were not pretending. The sound arrived, your ears worked, your face did what faces do. What did not happen was the other thing, the expensive thing, the part where you put down what you were carrying and pick up what she is carrying instead. Hearing costs nothing. Listening costs attention, and attention is a fixed amount that has usually been spent before the conversation starts.

    A comic rendition of three people arguing that no one is listening to each other, especially themselves.

    That gap does not stay empty. This is the part I did not understand for a long time. When someone does not spend the attention, they do not sit there with a blank space where your meaning should be. They fill it. They fill it with the reading that costs them the least, the one that fits what they already believe and what they were already planning to do. And then they carry on, quite genuinely, believing they have understood you.

    So the frustration most of us call “not being heard” is not silence. The words arrived. Somebody nodded. Something even happened afterwards. It just was not the thing you were asking for, because what travelled was your sound, and what got acted on was their assumption.

    The month the celebration became the problem

    At Stats NZ we ran a programme we called DBS 2.0 inside Digital Business Services, and we measured how people felt about it every single month from 2018 onward. Not annually, not at the end, every month, with the score plotted on a chart so we could see whether the process had genuinely changed or whether we were reading noise. The first measure came back at -14. We were not popular, and the number said so.

    It climbed in steps over the next three years. Not smoothly, and not because of any single intervention, but it climbed, and by February 2021 the top reading was 50. In August 2020 we were named a finalist in the CIO Awards for Best Team Culture. When I ran the Schneider Culture Model survey the shape of the place had moved into Collaboration and Cultivation, which is a long way from where a group of information technology people usually sit. The senior leaders around me celebrated, and they were right to. We had broken something that had been stuck for years.

    What I said at the celebration was that culture is the accumulated friction of everyday decisions, which is the argument I made in Designing Team Culture, and it is why it moves so slowly and slides back so easily, which is Why Is Changing Culture So Hard?. You do not finish it, tick it, and file the certificate. It has to be fed, and the feeding never stops, and a programme that runs 2 years is no longer a programme anyway, it is just how the place works now, or it is nothing.

    That fell on deaf ears.

    Except it didn’t, and this is where my own part comes into it. Nobody in that room dismissed what I said. They heard it, several of them agreed with it out loud, and then Monday came and they went back to their day jobs, because they had day jobs, with their own deadlines and their own people and their own problems flowing down from above them. Calling it deaf ears is Wayne taking Wayne a bit too seriously. The message landed in a room full of people whose attention had already been committed elsewhere, and in that condition the cheapest available reading of “culture needs continuous work” is “culture is good now, well done us.”

    Through the second half of 2021 the score settled back to roughly half of where it had been. Not a crash, not a scandal. It simply stopped being held up, and it went back down to about the level that the actual daily behaviour of the place could support without anybody carrying it.

    Because that was what I had been doing, and I did not know how much of it was me until it stopped. I had been retelling the story. Over and over, in every forum that would have me, what the number meant, what it had cost people to move it, what would happen if we treated it as finished. That retelling is real work. It is tiring in a way that does not show up on anybody’s plan, and there is no line item for it, and the moment you stop, the story goes quiet, and quiet gets filled with the easy reading again.

    The board that said one thing and meant another

    At Inland Revenue we did the visible version. I have written about this before in Two Kinds of Visibility, and about what it actually took to keep those platforms standing in Arcane by Necessity, so I will not retell the whole thing here, but the short version is that we put everything on the wall. A kanban board. A 45-inch TV. Priority one incidents, how many were open, how many we had closed, when the next scheduled reboot was going in. Anyone walking past could see the state of the platforms without asking a soul.

    The message we thought we were sending was this: these platforms are old, there is no further investment coming, and we are keeping the tax system standing by sweating assets that should have been replaced years ago.

    The message that got received was: Business Platform Services has it under control.

    Which is, if you look at it coldly, a completely reasonable reading of a board full of falling incident counts. It was even flattering. And it was heard by people who were not being lazy or unkind, who were deep in their own transformation programmes with their own targets, and who now had one fewer thing to worry about. So the transformation work carried on at pace, and the platform work carried on being absorbed, and nobody upstream ever had to do the arithmetic on what absorbing it cost.

    What it cost was people. They got tired, and then they got burnt out, and then they worked out that the future being described in all the transformation material did not have a version of them in it. Their job, as they understood it, was to keep the old world breathing until it could be switched off, and then presumably they would be switched off with it. Some of them left. In the end I left too.

    Nobody misheard us. They heard us clearly and converted us into reassurance, because reassurance was the reading that let everyone else keep going.

    The version you can watch happen in 10 seconds

    I have been using these AI tools daily for a while now, and the thing that keeps stopping me is how familiar the failure feels.

    You type a request. In your head sits all the context: what you are actually trying to do, who it is for, what you have already tried, the constraint you did not mention because it is so obvious to you that you have stopped seeing it. None of that goes into the box. What goes into the box is the request.

    The model does not sit there confused. It fills the gap from generalisation, produces something confident and well-formed and aimed at the average version of what people usually mean by those words, and hands it back. It heard you. It did not listen, because there was nothing there for it to listen to.

    Then you look at the output, feel that small flare of irritation, and rewrite the prompt with the context you should have given in the first place.

    That is the same failure I have been describing for 30 years in organisations, running at a speed where you can actually observe it. Seconds instead of quarters. And it is cheap to fix, because the machine cannot take offence and there is no relationship to repair. With people the same mistake takes a year to surface and somebody has usually burnt out by then.

    The list I wrote, and what is left of it

    A couple of years ago, while I was at Te Pūkenga, I wrote a LinkedIn post with 10 tips for getting your message heard by busy leaders. Keep it short. Lead with the benefit. Bring data. Tie it to their goals. Pick your moment. Follow up in writing. Tell a story. Ask for feedback. Be persistent. Listen yourself.

    I wrote it because it looked to me like nobody was listening to the real issues in front of us, and writing the list was easier than saying that out loud.

    Reading it now, it is decent coaching material. If a junior person asked me how to get a hearing in a large organisation, I would still walk them through most of it, and it would help them, and none of it is wrong.

    It also would not have changed a single thing I have described above. Every one of those tips is a technique applied to the sending. The failures were all on the receiving side, in rooms full of people whose attention was already committed, where the gap got filled with whatever cost them least. You can compress your message, evidence it, time it, and follow it up in writing, and a person with no attention left will still convert it into the reading that suits them.

    One of the 10 survives, and not in the form I wrote it. Stay persistent, yet patient. What I meant back then was keep trying until they cave. What I mean now is that being listened to is a thing another person gives you, at a cost to themselves, and it cannot be extracted with technique. So you keep retelling the story where there is presence in the room, and where there is not, you stop spending yourself on it and carry on with the work. That is not giving up. It is knowing what you are paying for.

    And it goes the other way first. If I want that from someone, I have to have paid it forward: sat there, put my own day down, listened to somebody’s problem all the way to the end without reaching for a solution, and acknowledged that they have a voice and I heard it. Just that. Most of the time nobody wants the solution anyway.

    So the tip I would give now is not on the list at all. It is a sentence you say before you start.

    Can I have your attention for a moment? I need you to listen to this. You do not have to fix anything.

    I still get it wrong at home. But I ask now, and that has been enough.