Operational diagnosis
They break in the gap between two people who each assumed the other had it. I find those gaps, draw the system underneath and build what closes them.
Start a conversationUnresolved
001 / Diagnosis
Three questions. All of them asked before anyone mentions a tool.
Most operational failure is not incompetence. It is information that exists somewhere, in someone's inbox or head or spreadsheet, and never reaches the person who needed it to decide.
The first question is never which tool to use. It is what should be visible, to whom and at what moment. Answer that and most of the software chooses itself.
Every messy operation has a seam: the point where one person assumes another has it, and nobody does. Work falls through the seam quietly and is usually found by a customer.
Automation does not fix an accountability gap. It industrialises it. So the seam gets named first. Only then does anything get built across it.
A system is mostly a set of answers to one question, asked repeatedly: when this happens, what should happen next and who needs to approve it?
Written down, that question is an operating model. Left unwritten it is tribal knowledge and it walks out of the building at five o’clock.
002 / Background
Revenue operations first, then chief of staff. The job underneath was always the same. Find where information, ownership and decisions were breaking down, then build something around the failure.
The tools have changed a lot since. n8n, AI and small pieces of custom software make the building quicker than it has ever been. Knowing what to build is still the hard part.
003 / A worked example, on myself
Email, calendars, documents, commitments and follow-ups, running as one system. Each kind of information has a single home. Agents draft, file and reconcile. Anything they should not decide alone waits in a queue for me.
It is not a product and I am not selling it. It is the clearest way I have of showing how I think about an operation: what should be visible, what should trigger what and where a person still has to say yes.
Four rules it runs on
004 / Open to conversations
No pitch and no proposal on a first conversation. I would rather understand the problem properly and tell you honestly if it is not one I should take.
Or write to me directly
seb@sebteh.comReceived
Sent. Thank you.
It is in my inbox now. I will reply by email.
Not sent
That did not go through.
Your words are safe. Copy them and email me at seb@sebteh.com, or try again.