Don't square the triangle.

I first drew the Iron Square about ten years ago, as a joke.

Everyone knows the Iron Triangle: 'Quality, Time and Cost. Pick two.' I added a fourth corner. Wellbeing.

Pete Morrish game systems designer photograph

That old chestnut.
They say you can't have them all.

Pete Morrish game systems designer photograph

The common solution.
Good for capitalism, bad for us.

Pete Morrish game systems designer photograph

Start here.
Everything else follows.

The 'joke' was that it's always the first thing we sacrifice to keep the other three looking healthy.

Funny, until it's very very not.

It took me years to see the diagram wasn't about project management at all. It was about systems.

Wellbeing was just the first crack I noticed. Underneath it was everything else – the dozens of small, unwritten rules that decide whether a place holds together, or quietly eats the people inside it.

One symptom of many. A big one, but one of many.

So I stopped drawing squares, and set to work builded something that sees the whole picture.

The House Rules Framework

House Rules for short.

Every organisation runs on systems. And every one of them was designed – even the ones that feel like they just… happened.

Systems define how decisions actually get made, which bad news travels and which quietly evaporates, whether the clever fix outlives the person who built it.

Nobody sets out to do this badly. Every one of those systems made sense to someone, on the day they built it. But systems get stacked on top of each other. They outlive the reason they existed. The decision that was right three years ago becomes the thing quietly strangling you now.

When the cracks begin to show, workarounds begin to surface as folklore – the unwritten rules, the 'that's just how it works here.' A team that's fraying, or a dependency that's started to scare you, or a formerly good place that's quietly getting harder to work in. None of those are the problem. They're symptoms of a system doing exactly what it was accidentally built to do.

House Rules reads the design underneath. It works in three layers:

Traits: the raw character of the place. An unlucky thirteen of them at the moment. Stuff like whether ownership is clear, whether people feel safe saying the awkward thing, whether there's any slack left in the tank.

Capabilities: the nuts and bolts of how an organisation actually goes about its business. Strengths and weaknesses in the 4Ds – Discuss, Deliberate, Decide and Do – interact with the Traits, and result in Conditions.

Conditions: the actual trouble. Stuff like Hero Dependency, Hidden Burnout, or Trust Debt. The ones you can feel – and the ones hiding behind them.

So how does this all work? Well, I'd expect you to come to me with one or more symptoms. I score your organisation's Traits and read the Capabilities until we can see what's actually generating it – the Conditions you walked in with, the ones you hadn't spotted yet, and what's coming if nothing changes.

You get it as a Stat Block: the whole picture at a glance, then the detail underneath.

You bring the symptom. House Rules finds the causes. And I help you fix them.

Here's an example Stat Block, courtesy of a company you might just have heard of.

InGen

Stat Block

InGen – International Genetic Technologies – is John Hammond's bioengineering company, the one that cracked cloning and brought the dinosaur back to headline a theme park.

House Rules finds an organisation superb at doing and dangerously poor at questioning. It executes flawlessly, rests on a handful of irreplaceable people, and has almost no slack for the day things go sideways. The strongest predicted conditions are Hidden Burnout, Hero Dependency and Resilience Deficit – a place performing beautifully while quietly running its reserves down. Its failures aren't political; they're baked into assumptions no one thinks to challenge.

Traits

Ownership Clarity

Accountability sits with the right people. Hammond owns the vision, unapologetically, and everyone below him knows exactly whose patch is whose: Wu has the genetics, Arnold the systems, Muldoon the animals, Nedry the code. No ambiguity about where the buck stops.

Psychological Safety

People appear comfortable challenging leadership. Muldoon flatly says the raptors should be destroyed; Wu defends the science to a table of hostile experts; nobody softens their doubts to spare Hammond's feelings, and nobody gets punished for voicing them. The one dent is Nedry, whose real grievance never makes it into the open.

Information Flow

Knowledge moves effectively across the organisation. The control room sees the whole park, specialists brief each other without turf, and expertise crosses disciplines freely. When something is known, it travels.

Follow-Through

Commitments consistently become completed work. They said they'd bring dinosaurs back, and there are dinosaurs on the lawn. Whatever else is wrong here, this org finishes things – which is precisely what makes its blind spots so dangerous.

Feedback Fidelity

Bad news reaches leadership, but arrives softened. The warnings are all raised; they just get rounded down before they land. "We spared no expense" is the sound of a hard truth being smoothed into something more comfortable.

Resource Visibility

Operational fragility appears significantly under-measured. InGen knows precisely what it has built and almost nothing about how close to the edge it's running. There's a gauge for the assets and none for the strain.

Incentive Alignment

Opening the park appears to outweigh everything else. Every decision bends toward the gates opening on schedule. The organisation isn't optimised to run a safe park; it's optimised to open one.

Learning Rate

Solves problems without questioning assumptions. InGen is superb at how and allergic to whether. It will engineer a brilliant answer to a question it should never have accepted in the first place.

Adaptive Capacity

The vision adapts significantly more slowly than reality. Hammond's picture of the park updates grudgingly, always a step or two behind what's actually happening on the ground. Reality moves; the plan strolls.

Response Variety

Most problems receive the same kind of solution. More engineering, more control, more system. When your only instrument is a cage, every problem starts to look like something that needs caging.

Competence Distribution

Critical expertise rests with too few people. Wu, Arnold, Muldoon, Nedry – four irreplaceable specialists, each a single point of failure in a lab coat. Lose any one and a whole capability leaves with them.

Principle Coherence

Actions don't always match stated values. 'We spared no expense' sits awkwardly beside an underpaid, resentful engineer and a skeleton weekend crew. The values are stated with conviction; the ledger tells a different story.

Slack

Little spare capacity appears built into operations. The park is tuned to run exactly as designed, with nothing held in reserve. It works beautifully right up to the first thing that doesn't go to plan.

Capabilities

Discuss

People talk openly; action doesn't always follow. InGen is never short of candour: the dinner table, the control room, the tour are all wall-to-wall debate. But a lot of it stays talk – the concern gets aired, everyone nods, and the gates still open on schedule.

Deliberate

Technical decisions appear carefully reasoned over time. Where InGen does think something through, it thinks well: the genetics are worked out over years, with real rigour. The reasoning is sound inside its own frame – it's the frame itself that never gets deliberated.

Decide

Commitments are clear, but slow to be revisited. Hammond doesn't dither about what the park is; decisions get made, cleanly. The weakness is reopening them – once a course is set it hardens, and new evidence struggles to get a settled question back on the table.

Do

Exceptional execution, possibly hiding systemic weakness. This is the thing InGen is frighteningly good at: whatever it commits to, it delivers, at a scale nobody else has managed. Which is precisely the danger – execution this strong papers over every crack beneath it, right up to the day it can't.

Conditions

Hidden Burnout

Extraordinary execution sustained by concentrated expertise, minimal slack, and poor visibility into operational strain. The organisation keeps performing while quietly consuming its own reserves. High Do and Follow-Through sit on top of low Slack, low Resource Visibility and thin Competence Distribution, so the tank reads full right up until it's empty. A skeleton crew runs a park that should need an army; the output looks magnificent, so nobody's measuring the cost of producing it.

Hero Dependency

Critical knowledge and capability rest with a handful of individuals – Wu on genetics, Arnold on systems, Muldoon on the animals, Nedry on the code. Losing any one of them doesn't slow a capability down, it removes it outright. There's no bench, no documented second, no redundancy. The org runs beautifully because these few are exceptional, which is precisely the trap.

Resilience Deficit

Highly optimised for expected operation, with little spare capacity or redundancy. Robust until reality deviates from the plan — at which point failures cascade rather than absorb. Low Slack, low Adaptive Capacity and low Response Variety mean there's no give in the system and only one kind of answer when something bends. It holds perfectly, right up to the first thing it didn't plan for; then everything downstream goes at once.

Delivery Theatre

The gap between what's shown and what's actually running underneath. InGen is superb at the presentation layer — the polished tour, the branded jeeps, 'We spared no expense' – while the operational reality beneath is thinner and more fragile than the show implies. The demonstration is genuine, but it's engineered to reassure, not to reveal. What the visitor sees is a finished attraction; what's actually holding it up is a few key people and a lot of hope. Strong Do meets weak Feedback Fidelity and weak Principle Coherence: the spectacle is real, the substrate is oversold.

Commitment Inflation

Once leadership commits to a course, strong Follow-Through combines with weak Learning Rate and Adaptive Capacity to make those commitments unusually hard to revisit, even when new evidence emerges. The very trait that makes InGen deliver becomes a liability: a decision, once made, gathers weight, and reopening it starts to feel like betraying the mission rather than doing due diligence.

Institutional Rigidity

Excellent at solving implementation problems, comparatively poor at questioning its own assumptions. Adaptation happens within the existing worldview rather than by changing it. InGen will engineer a brilliant answer to 'how do we contain them' and never seriously entertain 'should this exist at all.' The frame is fixed; all the cleverness runs inside it.

Learned Helplessness

The ingredients are present – low Feedback Fidelity, a tendency for leadership to reinterpret rather than absorb concerns. But it hasn't set in. Muldoon, Arnold and Wu all speak up, repeatedly, which means the organisation hasn't yet reached the point where people conclude 'there's no point saying anything.' This reads as the precursor to Learned Helplessness rather than the Condition itself – the moment before the shrug.

Trust Debt

There are cracks – 'we spared no expense' doesn't match the reality on the ground – but they haven't fundamentally eroded trust between leadership and staff. People still argue openly, specialists keep collaborating, and there's little evidence of widespread cynicism or defensive behaviour. Frustration, yes; exhausted trust, not yet. The debt is accruing, not yet called in.

Politics

Almost absent. Clear ownership, good information flow, strong Discuss and obvious technical authority leave very little room for empire-building or informal power games. When people disagree, it's about substance, not status. InGen's failures are driven by flawed assumptions, not political manoeuvring – which is oddly what makes them so dangerous: there's no villain to root out, just a capable organisation confidently walking off a cliff.

Summary

None of InGen's problems need a genius to solve – they need someone to think to look. And the useful news is there are fewer of them than the Stat Block suggests: those three headline Conditions collapse into the same short list of causes. Too much rests on too few people, and the whole place runs at full stretch with nothing held back.

So the structural fixes are unglamorous and entirely doable. First, break the hero dependency: get what's in Wu's and Arnold's and Nedry's heads written down, cross-trained, and backed up, so no single resignation walks off with a capability. Second, build slack: stop running every system at full stretch, and hold something back for the day the plan doesn't survive contact with reality (or an escaped Tyrannosaur). Do those two, and all three headline Conditions lose their teeth.

But that only catches the fall; it doesn't explain why InGen built something so precarious in the first place. That's the third and hardest fix, and it sits underneath the rest: the Learning Rate. Install a real mechanism for questioning the assumptions beneath the work – because the organisations best at 'can we' are precisely the ones that forget to ask 'should we.'

Principles in Practice

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.

Nobody Is Average: Project CARS 2

Every team is different. Good systems don't expect people to conform to an idealised process; they adapt to the people doing the work.

pCARS2 had a large – and fully remote – multi-discipline team. And it had significant expectations. The creative direction was strong – but before production scaled, the underlying structure needed to match the reality of the people running it, not the idealised version of them.

Different disciplines needed different things. Some leads worked best with high-level direction and room to breathe. Others needed granularity – task-level clarity, tight feedback loops, someone absorbing the noise above them. I built production systems around how people actually worked, not how a generic model said they should.

The result wasn't just a smoother production. It was a team that could sustain pressure without fracturing. One clear signal: after the turbulence of the first title, Project CARS 2 passed certification first time. Not through heroics at the end, but because the underlying structure held.

And all with a production team one-tenth the size you'd normally see for a project like this.

House Rules lens: Response Variety. A system that only handles one kind of person can only handle one kind of day. I built the production around the people, so the team could bend without snapping.

The Plan Isn't Sacred: Fast & Furious Crossroads

A system's job isn't to reassure leadership. It's to tell the truth, especially when the truth is uncomfortable.

Deep into Crossroads dev, and I could see it coming. The planning approach being used looked clean on paper – capacity balanced, tasks assigned, boxes ticked. What it didn't account for was dependencies. Or critical paths. Or the gap between what the plan said and what was actually happening.

We in production couldn't do anything about it at the time. So instead, we built the right system in parallel – quietly, without interrupting anyone's workflow – and waited.

When the moment came, the switch took no time at all. No interruption, and infinitely better information. Which was, at that point, largely: yes, we're in trouble. But knowing you're in trouble, clearly and early, is the system working. Pretending you're not is the system failing the people inside it.

The game was an absolute disaster, but that's more down to the various egos involved, and a tale best told over a pint or two. But I made a promise that we'd deliver, and so I made damn sure we did, and 150+ people kept their jobs.

I shipped this and Project CARS 3, in the same calendar month, in the middle of a pandemic. Handed my notice in the very next day.

House Rules lens: Feedback Fidelity. A system that can't tell leadership the truth isn't a system, it's a comfort blanket. We built one that could — quietly, in parallel — and had it ready for the moment the truth mattered.

Convenience Isn't Good Enough: Timesheets

If a hundred people are each spending five unnecessary minutes a day on administration, the system has been designed for the convenience of the wrong person.

A client needed documented evidence of hours worked across projects. Not too much to ask, really. The standard solution would have been: ask everyone to fill in a timesheet.

Instead I built a system in an afternoon that defaulted each person to their correct project, logged a full standard day in a single click, and only asked for more input when something had actually changed. The heavy lifting – setup, processing, maintenance – sat entirely on my end.

The people exposed to it needed a second or two. Most days, less.

It's a small example. But it's the same logic at every scale: complexity belongs with the person whose job it is to absorb it. Not distributed across an entire team as a daily tax on their time and attention.

House Rules lens: Slack. Five wasted minutes a day across a hundred people is capacity the system stole, because it couldn't be bothered to absorb the complexity itself. So I made the system absorb it.

Humans Aren't Resources: Threkka

People don't produce their best work by ignoring how they function. They produce it when the work is designed around sustainable human rhythms. Not everyone's in the middle of the bell curve.

It started with six words scrawled on a sheet of paper: "Joe Wicks makes Clash of Clans." Five years later: a fitness app without precedent, live on the App Store, designed from first principles, and built entirely solo.

No team means no buffer. Every decision – game design, production cadence, technical architecture, behavioural science, App Store delivery – landed on the same desk. The challenge was to juggle all this, without getting lost, without losing momentum.

I designed my own days. What worked for me was – 0700 to 1030, hard at work. Then exercise, lunch, and a snooze; then an afternoon shift from 1400 until the work was done. Very much marathon; very much not sprint. Output-based, not tick-box task-based. No holidays, but – and this is super-important – no burnout either. The system was designed around the human running it, not the other way round.

What that bought me was years of sustained, high-level output. And at times I was outpacing entire teams I'd worked with in the past. Not because I'm exceptional, but because I wasn't fighting the structure I was operating inside.

The core lesson I can take from this? Treat people like grown-ups. Let them work closer to their ideal. Design the system around them. Get it right, and the output takes care of itself.

House Rules lens — Hidden Burnout, avoided. Design the days around the human, and you get years of high output with no wreckage at the end. Proof the framework works pointed inward, too.

Three Ways In

I don't do off-the-shelf. Every organisation's house rules are different, so every engagement is too. But people usually start in one of three places.

Fresh Eyes

- the read -

A defined block of time to get an experienced second opinion.

Bring me a specific problem, an awkward question, or just a nagging sense that something's off.

I'll give you a House Rules read on it: clear, specific, and exactly where I'd start pulling.

Get Close To The Work

- the diagnosis -

I come inside and follow the work as it actually happens – not as the process diagram claims it does.

Together we find out which house rules are helping, which are quietly costing you, and which are one bad week away from taking the roof off.

Stick Around

- the redesign -

Sometimes finding the problem is the easy bit.

I stay to help redesign the systems, support the change, and make sure the good ideas survive contact with reality.

The aim is to leave you needing me less than when I arrived.


If in doubt, we start small.

© 2026 Chock Hoss