I help people and businesses remove repetitive work, use automation and AI more purposefully, and strengthen the systems that create value.
Scroll toCommercial strategy, practical automation and AI-enabled decision systems for retail and consumer businesses. Cape Town.
Some challenges need a wider systems view. Others need one repetitive task removed this week. Both can be valuable places to start.
Find the routine work consuming time and attention. Automate what does not require human judgement, prototype a better workflow and demonstrate value quickly.
Use what the quick win reveals to understand the wider system, identify structural constraints and create more enduring commercial and human value.
The difference between more activity and more value is often hidden in the relationships underneath the work.
We begin by looking beyond the obvious: how people, decisions, incentives, information and processes interact to create the result you see.
Patterns emerge. Friction becomes visible. We separate activity from value and identify the few relationships with the greatest influence.
With a clearer model of the system, we can strengthen what works, redesign what does not and make valuable outcomes more repeatable.
Selected examples from my work within different organisations. Details have been generalised to respect commercial confidentiality.
I modelled how collective and individual performance could be balanced across more than 50 teams and approximately 500 people. After validating the logic in Excel, I used AI-assisted development to build an adjustable tool that let decision-makers compare what different parameters recognised, the performance they encouraged and the cost they created.
A multi-year performance question needed more than a view of what was up or down. I built a first-principles framework that decomposed results across category, channel and customer type, then examined how acquisition, retention and mix moved together. It separated structural shifts from execution signals and made the choices clearer.
For a location and portfolio decision, I built a scenario model with editable assumptions rather than a single forecast. Decision-makers could test how risk, opportunity and commercial cost changed under different conditions, creating a shared basis for refining and owning the decision.
More than a decade moving through the system — from frontline operations to senior commercial planning. I’ve worked where customer behaviour, commercial ambition, operational constraints and human judgement meet.
Rigour has sources. These are some of mine.
“The quality of an idea is realised in its doing; until then, nobody knows anything.”That Will Never Work · Marc Randolph
We can never merely do one thing. Kolbert follows the higher-order consequences of our attempts to control nature — the interventions that fix one thing and set three more in motion.
From the moment we’re born we are wrapped in textiles. Postrel traces how thread and cloth shaped technology so completely that we stopped seeing it — techne means to weave, and the earliest computers ran on Jacquard’s punch cards.
A laser focus on the seemingly mundane, including an entire chapter on the pleasures of paper towels over air blowers. Proof that the ordinary repays attention.
Understanding noise and bias in judgement unlocks the compounding of better decisions — enough to shift the mean of outcomes.
Two books by different authors best read as a pair. Their genius shows in how simple and accessible they make the work.
A catalogue of inferences from behavioural science, worth a good deal of salt after the replication crisis. I still finished it more convinced that humans are only sometimes rational.
On the desire of every individual to unite our life and our life-story, and to answer the question of who we are. The one I keep returning to.
Ishiguro’s ideas about our essence resonate with Cavarero. It always comes back to Ubuntu.
Cruel and usual is the punishment of not being heard or seen as who we are and want to be. Taddeo asks how much care we take with other people’s life-stories, because it matters.
Start with a defined question, build the practical answer, or bring in an ongoing thinking partner as the work evolves.
A structured read of a process, commercial question or value system. You receive a clear written diagnosis and the few opportunities carrying the greatest potential.
A working automation, model, decision tool, business case or reporting layer that makes a recurring decision clearer and can be handed over without ongoing dependency.
Independent commercial and systems thinking for leaders navigating growth, planning, AI adoption, operational friction or a proposition that has stopped landing.
Essays on work, value, technology, systems and the human questions underneath them. Some may eventually become a book. For now, this is where the thinking lives.
On knowing when to wait, when to act and why momentum matters more than perfection.
What convenience, personalisation and innovation ask us to trade — often without noticing.
A reflection on busyness, balance and the stories we tell ourselves about meaningful work.
A repetitive task, an AI idea, a proof of concept or a system that is not creating the value it should — any of these can be a useful place to begin.
hello@brandonbydesign.co.za ↗︎