Every company runs on systems.
Not just the software – the way decisions get made, the way work flows, the way bad news travels (...or doesn't). Most were designed on purpose. Plenty just… accreted. Either way, someone built them, and nobody's really looked since.
When those systems are good, work feels easy. But when they're not, your best people end up delivering in spite of the place, not because of it.
And that costs you. Burnout, sure – but also the deadlines that slip, the reality the plan lost touch with, the same problem coming round again and again like it's on a loop.
And even if you think you've done 'the work' – you'll still have holes.
I've spent most of my career fixing the systems people work inside.
And that's exactly what House Rules is for.
You Don't Have A People Problem.
The details change. The shape of the problem usually doesn't. But stuff like this doesn't have to be normal.
Your systems are rewarding the wrong behaviour.
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.
Your organisation is losing touch with reality.
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.
You built the way you work for an imaginary employee.
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.
People are leaving for reasons you can't see.
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.
The House Rules Framework
House Rules for short.
Every organisation runs on systems. Every one of them was designed – usually for good reasons, often years ago, sometimes by people long gone.
House Rules is how I read that design. It scores the character of a place across thirteen Traits, works out what it can actually do with them, and names the Conditions coming down the line – the trouble you can feel, and the trouble still hiding behind it.
You bring the symptom. House Rules finds the cause.
See It Work
I pointed House Rules at InGen – yes, the Jurassic Park company – and scored it as it would have been, the day before things started going wrong. The verdict? Magnificent at doing, dangerously thin on the people holding it up, no slack for the day things go sideways. House Rules predicted:
Hidden Burnout: a skeleton crew running a park that should need an army. The output looks magnificent, so nobody's measuring what it costs to produce – until the reserves are gone.
Hero Dependency: the whole operation rests on four irreplaceable people. Lose any one and a capability leaves with them. No bench, no backup, no redundancy.
Resilience Deficit: tuned to run exactly as designed, with nothing held in reserve. Flawless right up to the first thing it didn't plan for, then everything downstream goes at once.
Introduce a rampaging Tyrannosaur into the mix, and well... we all know what happens.
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