Good studios, and good projects, full of good people, can still go sideways, or be building hidden costs – and it's rarely the people. It's often the systems underneath – like a dev pipeline that was designed to be easy for the people making it rather than the people using it, or a flexible-working policy that doesn't take people's needs into account. The House Rules Framework – House Rules for short – is designed to shed light in places that haven't seen it in years. Here's the short version:
You might be metabolising people's wellbeing in order to keep the dashboards green, or be permanently stuck in firefighting mode, or be putting too much faith in process. Or, you mightn't even notice that sensible-sounding policies and practices are derailing some of your best people.
Best way to understand it is to try it for yourself. If you've not already seen it, there's a Self-Check quiz on the home page.
The details change. The shape of the problem usually doesn't. But stuff like this doesn't have to be normal.
Most people respond sensibly to the systems they're in. If the behaviour looks wrong, the incentives often are too.
Might show up as: defensive estimates, hidden risks, and a team that's stopped telling you the truth.
Projects rarely fail all at once. More often, the picture inside the organisation slowly drifts away from what's actually happening.
Might show up as: milestones that pass but don't quite land, and a growing sense that the plan stopped reflecting reality a while ago.
Real people have different strengths, constraints and ways of working. Good systems make room for that instead of pretending everyone is the same.
Might show up as: decent satisfaction scores alongside quietly persistent underperformance.
Good people rarely burn out overnight. More often, they slowly stop believing they can do their best work here.
Might show up as: your best people going quiet, burning out, or heading for the door.
These aren't four problems, they're symptoms – and House Rules is how I find the system underneath them.
House Rules reads any organisation across two layers – its Traits and its Capabilities – and from those derives a set of Conditions. Stuff like Hero Dependency, Institutional Rigidity, or Hidden Burnout. And – vitally – it tells you the engine driving each of them.
I deliver the results back as a Stat Block, and a full House Rules diagnostic. Here are Stat Blocks for some companies you might juuust have heard of; click through to see their full House Rules.
So what's House Rules actually reading? It's digging into the machinery underneath the gym perks and the duvet days – the actual nuts and bolts of how a business goes about its business. How decisions really get made, what happens to bad news, and whether one specific person getting hit by a bus will kibosh your output for a year.
It comes down to two layers interacting to create a third:
Traits: what an organisation is like. Its raw character, informed by systems design, culture, and trust: whether ownership is clear, whether people feel safe saying negative things, whether the company has a choice of responses or just wields a proverbial hammer.
Capabilities: how it does what it does. Every organisation executes across four Capabilities to do its actual work: Discuss, Deliberate, Decide, and Do. These are broadly separate from Traits, but interact with them to give the final layer.
Conditions: what goes wrong as a result. Put the Traits and Capabilities together and certain troubles become predictable: Hero Dependency, Hidden Burnout, Trust Debt. Some are obvious, some are hiding. All are fixable.
The Conditions worth worrying about rarely come from a single fault – they come from how these interact. A genuine strength can mask a weakness; some troubles only surface when two things slip at once. That's the part a checklist misses.
That's the whole engine: who you are, plus how you do what you do, produces the trouble you get.
So, in practice: you bring a symptom, or just a nagging feeling you could be doing better. I spend time in your company – pun intended – reading your Traits and Capabilities until we can see what's happening. Not just what Conditions you've got, or have lurking in the background, but where they're coming from and why.
You bring the symptom. House Rules finds the causes. Then I help you fix them.
I've done a lot of different jobs, at a lot of different scales, in a lot of different places.
But looking back, no matter where I've been placed nor what I've been doing, I make things work for the people on the other end. Human-centred, always. Because you get that right, and suddenly you're not fire-fighting, you're watering.
I don't really do off-the-shelf. Every company's house rules are different, so every job is too. But here's where I think I can be valuable.