You don't need another framework, another tool, another transformation. You need to stop pretending the busyness was the work.
A decade ago, every company decided it had to become Agile. Standups appeared. Story points were assigned. Retrospectives were scheduled, then cancelled, then scheduled again.
The methodology was supposed to free people from process. Within a few years it had become the new process — heavier than what it replaced, performed for the org, visible on dashboards, measurable in ceremonies. Most of it had nothing to do with shipping anything. It had to do with looking like you were shipping.
AI is following the same arc. Faster. Compressed. Same anxiety, new tooling. Copilot bolted onto the workflow. AI strategy decks bolted onto the all-hands. Pilot programs, working groups, councils. Nobody is sure what they're doing or why. Everyone is sure they need to be doing more of it.
What's underneath is simple, and almost nobody is willing to say it out loud: most of the work people perform in modern organizations was never actually the work. It was the proof that they were working. The meetings, the slides, the rituals, the ceremonies of effort.
A machine can now do all of that. Faster. Cheaper. Without the meeting. The performance layer is being commoditized in real time, and people who built their identities on it are panicking. They're trying to perform harder. They're adopting more tools. They're attending more summits about the future of work.
It will not save them. It was never saving them. They just had cover.
You are doing some work to feed the people you love and to fund the things that are actually yours. That is the whole arrangement. Everything else was added later by people who needed you to keep producing receipts.
The strange grief of this moment, for anyone paying attention, is that the machines are making us materially freer and we feel more enslaved than ever. Because the thing that was supposed to free us was never the tooling. It was the willingness to stop performing.
Most people will not be willing. They will keep performing, with better tools, until the performance no longer works and someone tells them they're done.
A few will quietly stop.
This page is for those few.
Two decades inside the machine, mostly fintech and AI engineering. I started as the kid teaching himself to code so he could build websites for people who paid him in gaming vouchers and Warhammer figures, and ended up in the rooms where strategy gets decided.
What I learned along the way, mostly the hard way, is that I see patterns earlier than the people I work for. Not always. Often enough that it became a thing. I would name something, be told I was being negative, and then watch the same conclusion get reached by the room six to eighteen months later, with credit going to whoever said it second.
I am no longer interested in repeating that. The cost of being right early inside someone else's organization is too high. The value of being right early for someone, on a clear arrangement, is much higher.
Across one stretch of work I was responsible for fifty million euros of revenue over six years, most of it from changes made before anyone had agreed they were a good idea. Apologizing afterward, when it worked, was usually faster than asking for permission and being told to wait until the moment had passed. Some of those calls cost me politically. None of them cost the business.
Before that, and alongside it, I was the person operators called when they could not quite tell which product features made sense to ship now and which ones could wait. The work was not telling them what to do. It was helping them hear what they were already thinking, sharpened. Some of the products that came out of those conversations are still in market. A few of the people who made the calls would now describe them as their own, and on most days I am fine with that.
So this is what I do now. I sit alongside people who already sense the thing they cannot yet name, and I help them name it before the rest of the room does. Sometimes that thing is an AI decision. Often it is not. Often it is the decision underneath the AI decision, the one nobody is willing to put in the deck.
(There is also a book. Written by the part of me that knew this earlier than I did. You'll find it below, if you're curious.)
Three ways in, depending on how close you want to be. None of them consulting. None of them coaching. All of them from someone who has spent two decades inside the machine and is no longer willing to pretend.
A monthly relationship. You bring whatever is actually on your mind: the decision you keep deferring, the AI bet you're not sure about, the team dynamic nobody will name, the strategy that looks fine on paper.
What you get is sharper questions, earlier diagnoses, and the occasional uncomfortable sentence that reorders the room. When the situation calls for it, I write — not a deck, but a rethink of what you were already thinking, sent back to you in a form you can actually use.
Twenty years of pattern recognition, a refusal to flatter you, and the specific kind of clarity you cannot get from anyone whose incentives depend on telling you what you want to hear.
A quieter version. Lower cadence, asynchronous, for people who want a standing line of sight rather than active engagement.
Currently held to a small number of people. If it sounds right, write to me and I will let you know when there is room.
A small book (Coming July 2026). Forty-two rituals for focus, mischief, and survival inside systems that were never built for the way you actually think.
Written from the perspective of the part of me that always knew. For people who suspect they have a goblin of their own.
Operators who are already paying senior people to tell them comfortable things and have started to suspect they are getting expensive agreement. Founders who can feel the gap between the strategy in the deck and the decision they actually have to make on Monday. People who have outgrown their current advisors but have not yet built the next version of how they think. People who do not need to be told they are smart and are slightly tired of meetings that exist to confirm it.
Not for people who want a framework, a deck, or a five-step plan. Not for people who want to be told they are ahead of the curve. Not for people who are looking for a coach to make them feel better about the decision they have already made. Not for anyone who needs the engagement to look impressive on a slide. If you would describe what you want as "thought partnership" without irony, we are probably not a fit.
No discovery call. No deck. Write a few sentences about what is actually going on. If it fits, we'll talk. If it doesn't, I'll tell you.
marcel@goblinand.coSend me an email with the subject GOBLIN and I will add you to a small group that gets occasional letters when there is something worth sending. No newsletter, no list, no funnel.