Daniel's blog
of org design.
Notes on organisation design, culture, complexity and the frameworks I've found useful along the way.
Recent — Tortoise blog
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Oct 2026
TortoiseAI Is Making Coding Cheap. Software Engineering Is the New Bottleneck.
We're building agents that can write code faster than ever. But writing more code and engineering better systems are fundamentally different problems.
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Oct 2026
TortoiseThe State of Agentic Memory in 2026: Recall Is Measured. Learning Isn't.
Why recall is the measured part of agent memory and learning is not: the eight memory types, what epistemic memory adds, and how to test whether your agent revises beliefs.
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Sep 2026
TortoiseAgents don't need more memory. They need a world model.
Agent memory isn't a filing problem — it's a reasoning problem. Agents need to track what's true, why we believe it, and how beliefs change with evidence.
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Sep 2026
TortoiseA Practical Guide to Agent Memory: From Context to Long-Term Learning
Agent memory is more than a database: it is how information is ingested, stored, and retrieved. The three layers of a memory system and the eight types of agent memory.
Archive — 2018
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Sep 2018
2 Simple Hacks To Delegate and Avoid Miscommunication
A poster gets designed, delivered ahead of schedule, and then has to be redone. The effort was fine; the brief wasn't. Two hacks that close the gap.
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Sep 2018
3 Layers of Company Culture You Need to Know About
Culture starts as the founders' decisions and then takes on a life of its own. Artefacts, values and assumptions, and why changing the first without the third never sticks.
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Sep 2018
Beyond Design Thinking: The Systemic Design Thinking Framework
Design thinking is a fantastic tool until the problem has many stakeholders and no single user. Where systems thinking picks up, and how to use the two together.
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Sep 2018
Beyond Teams: How To Collaborate Amidst Constant Change
Constant reorganisation and increasingly short-lived teams mean the static team is the wrong unit of collaboration. What takes its place.
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Sep 2018
Brands in a polarised society: from celebrities to philosophies
Brands used to be built on a function or a place. In a polarised society they are built on what they believe — and that changes what a brand has to be.
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Sep 2018
Ethical Disruption is possible
Most industries are being disrupted, with the privileged benefiting while the vulnerable suffer. It is possible to do better than that.
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Sep 2018
Governing Complex Collaborations: a Framework
How do you govern trade-offs between stakeholders who have a lot to win by working together and their own needs to serve? A framework built from four real cases.
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Sep 2018
How to scale an organisation and not lose your job trying
Founders rarely fail from competition or cash. They fail because growth is not linear and the organisation has to change between stages. A roadmap for the transitions.