Happy New Year (and something I've been realising)

Hello my friend, and welcome to 2026!

I’ve been thinking about what to write to you, and I decided to just tell you something true about where I’ve landed.

I hope you find it useful - especially if you’re good at coming up with clever ideas, but struggle to get others to use them.

Here it is: I’ve realised I’m actually very good at something I spent years thinking I was bad at.

Let me explain.

The detective part

For a long time I thought of myself as a Theory of Constraints beginner. An apprentice. I was learning this stuff, and sharing what I learned as I went.

But over 15 years or so of doing that - studying, applying, writing, teaching - I slowly built up the confidence to call myself the bottleneck guy. To trust that I really did know this stuff. That I wasn’t just borrowing other people’s ideas anymore.

And that part - the detective work - did come naturally to me. Solving problems. Especially big-picture problems. The kind where you ask: what’s strangling this business?

Finding the bottleneck was never the hard part.

The other half

But there’s another half to this work. The part where you actually help people make the change. And that didn’t come naturally at all.

Let’s roll back to the early 2000s.

I’d just moved to Scotland. I left behind whatever credibility I’d built in New Zealand and started fresh. And I realised, pretty quickly, that I lacked a lot of what people called “soft skills”.

I was awkward. Rough round the edges. Clever, but clumsy with people. With a kind and generous heart, I like to think - but without the skills or the credibility, in a new country, to help anyone see the solutions I could so clearly see.

I’d like to say I had a deliberate plan. I didn’t. I was making it up as I went along. But I started filling in the gaps - the soft skills others seemed to be born with, but I was missing. I kept learning the hard stuff too, of course. Theory of Constraints, Agile, all of that. But I began paying attention to the other side. Learning how to help people. Learning how to help them cause the change.

(Some of it came from surprising places. When I wrote my business novel, Rolling Rocks Downhill, I had to learn how to write dialogue. And completely unexpectedly, that skill transferred. These days, when I’m coaching or mentoring, I often end up writing dialogue on the fly - helping clients find the right words so they can say the right things. It’s a strange skill to have. But it turns out to be shockingly useful.)

And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing, I got good at it. Good at causing the change. And helping others do it when I wasn’t there.

The weird bit: Despite loads of evidence that I’m especially good at working with people, a huge part of my brain still thinks it’s living in the early 2000s. Not fitting in. Standing out for being clever, but socially clumsy.

One of the reasons I’m sharing this admission, is that by writing it out in black in white, I’m convinced my brain will start to believe it.

The wall

These days I mostly work with leaders. CEOs, founders, senior managers. Not because I got bored of teams - I loved that work - but because I noticed something.

There’s a wall.

Teams can make many improvements on their own. But eventually they hit a point where they need leaders to make changes. And they can’t get through. They’re standing on one side of the wall.

What surprised me is that leaders are standing on the other side of the same wall, looking at it, not knowing quite what to do about it.

They want to make changes too. But they don’t know how to do so safely. They’re worried about resistance, politics, chaos.

I found myself drawn to that side of the wall.

It turns out that the soft stuff is so much more fun! Yes, playing bottleneck detective is thrilling. But then guiding people to do the slower work of earning trust, bringing people along, have the hard conversations … that makes me buzz. I don't have the words to describe how much fun it is, of all of us.

Why I think I’m good at it NOW

It’s precisely because I wasn’t always good at it.

My former awkwardness - and my need to overcome it - gave me an angle that more polished consultants never had to develop. They fit easily into the traditional role. I had to figure it out the hard way.

Here’s a parallel. If you wanted to lose weight and keep it off, whose advice would you trust?

• Probably not the naturally skinny person who never struggled, (and thinks they’re skinny because they’re morally superior to you!)

• No, you’d want someone who’d been there. Who understood the struggle from the inside. They know something the skinny person doesn’t¹.

That’s how I think about my work now. I’m not the naturally polished consultant. I’m the one who had to learn how to cause change - because it didn’t come easily.

Two things, then

1 - Finding the bottleneck, and then,

2 - The slow work - earning trust, bringing people along, helping the change happen without triggering the immune system.

It took me a long time and a lot of evidence to realise I’ve gotten good at both.

---

So that’s where I’ve landed in my head. Thought you should know. Hope this is useful, and that it doesn’t sound like I’m bragging (about being incompetent for much of my career 😬).

A question for you:

• Has your brain caught up with who you've become?

• Or, is it still stuck somewhere in the past?

These realisations can be painfully slow.

The passage of time changes us.
But noticing it?
That sometimes takes years.

Happy New Year.

Clarke - who’d just love it if you hit reply and said hello!

1. Speaking of losing weight. I’ve lost 2kg (4.5 pounds) a month, each month, for the last 6 months (with no injections), and in another 3 months I should hit my preferred weight. It’s been really easy, it’s stuck, I’ve not suffered … and it’s all because I made a mistake. I’ll share more later.