I keep a lot of knowledge in my head. Not on purpose, and not because I’m precious about it: it’s just hard work to get it out. Explaining something I know well, in a way that actually transfers, takes more effort than doing it myself. So it stays where it’s easiest to keep it: in…
People often ask me that, and the honest answer starts long before I had a name for any of this. I’ve been translating since I was a child: moving between languages, between symbols, between the ways different cultures choose to express the same idea. Long before I encountered the word semantics, I understood, instinctively, that…
Do you run your mind like you run your browser? Many tabs, all restoring on reopen? Do you ever have those moments where you have a realisation: the perfect thing to say, the perfect way forward, a solution to a problem you’ve been battling with? And do you find that they always come at the…
By 2010, “quality management” mostly meant one thing: hoping a number typed into a spreadsheet three shifts ago was still there when you went looking for it. I was quality manager at a growing fuel cell manufacturer in Sussex, and growth had quietly outpaced the tools we were using to run the factory floor. We…
After 15 years in Quality Management, I left for Southeast Asia with no plan except to stop. I spent 9 months in Thailand doing something I had never really done before: nothing in particular. For the first time in my adult working life, I was genuinely unproductive. I discovered, slowly, reluctantly, and then with some…
I recently found an article I published in 1999 in Ingeniería Química, a journal for chemical engineers, about the internet. Reading it felt like receiving a letter from my younger self. The article warned that the real challenge wasn’t access to information. It was making information mean something. No perfect directory existed. No single index…
