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  <title><![CDATA[Vault Mind CoreShift]]></title>
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  <description><![CDATA[Vault Mind CoreShift is a consulting practice for leaders facing decisions their current thinking cannot solve. Based in Newcastle, working remotely.]]></description>
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  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[On the particular difficulty of deciding in summer]]></title>
    <link>./</link>
    <description><![CDATA[There is something about July that makes decisions feel both more urgent and less tractable. Clients often arrive in summer with a problem that has been building since February. This is a note on why that happens and what to do about it.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-07-07</pubDate>
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  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[What I learned from a client who was wrong about their own problem]]></title>
    <link>./</link>
    <description><![CDATA[A founder came in certain that the problem was their team. After three sessions, it became clear the problem was the question they had been asking the team to answer. This is a note on how that shift happened and why it matters.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-05-19</pubDate>
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  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[A note on the quarterly letter, and why it is ending]]></title>
    <link>./</link>
    <description><![CDATA[The twenty-third issue of the Vault Mind CoreShift quarterly letter was the last. This is an explanation of why, and what will replace it.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-03-03</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Why the problem you have named is probably not the problem you have]]></title>
    <link>./notes/named-problem-vs-real-problem.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of meeting that I have sat in more times than I can count — the kind where a leadership team arrives already certain of what the problem is, and where the rest of the session is spent debating solutions to that named thing, never once pausing to ask whether the name is right. The named problem has a kind of authority by the time it reaches a working group or a strategy offsite. It has been repeated enough that it feels like a fact rather than a hypothesis. And yet, in my experience working with organisations across sectors, the named problem is almost never the actual problem — it is, instead, the symptom that was most visible, most politically safe to name, or most recently complained about by someone senior. This matters enormously, because the energy, money, and goodwill that organisations spend on wrong problems is not recoverable, and the damage done by solving the wrong thing with great competence can persist for years. What follows is not a methodology deck or a process checklist — it is an attempt to think carefully, in writing, about why this happens, how to notice it, and what a more honest kind of problem-naming might look like.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-01-26</pubDate>
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  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[How to write a decision memo that actually helps you decide]]></title>
    <link>./notes/how-to-write-a-decision-memo.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of document that circulates in organisations — long, formatted, impressively footnoted — that nonetheless leaves everyone in the room less certain than they were before they read it. I have read hundreds of them over the years, and I have written my share of bad ones. What they share, almost without exception, is a confusion between the act of documenting deliberation and the act of actually deliberating. The decision memo, as a form, is supposed to do something quite specific: it should take a person who has not been living inside a problem and move them, in a single reading, to a point where they can make a defensible choice. When it fails — and it fails often — it is usually because the writer has unconsciously prioritised one of three other goals instead: demonstrating effort, hedging against blame, or performing thoroughness. This essay is about how to write one that does the real thing, using the format we have refined through Vault Mind CoreShift engagements, with worked examples drawn from the kinds of problems we encounter most — resourcing decisions, structural changes, build-versus-buy questions, and the always-difficult "do we stop this or don't we" moment that most organisations handle badly.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-08-15</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[What the Camino taught me about thinking slowly]]></title>
    <link>./notes/camino-slow-thinking-lessons.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[I left Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the second of January, which is not when most people leave. The pilgrim office was half-shuttered, the woman behind the counter looked at me the way people look at someone who has made a mild but irreversible error in judgment, and the mountains above the village were carrying a thin skin of ice that the guidebook politely describes as "challenging in adverse weather." I had a pack that was too heavy, boots that were adequately broken in but not gloriously so, and — this is the part that took me the longest to understand — absolutely nothing I needed to solve. No deliverable. No deadline. No one waiting on a decision from me. I had taken six weeks from my practice at Vault Mind CoreShift, told my clients the truth about where I was going, and walked out into the kind of cold that makes your thinking very simple and very immediate. What I did not expect was that the simplicity would not stay simple — that somewhere around Burgos, or maybe before that, maybe on the meseta between Logroño and Nájera where the light goes flat and prehistoric, something would shift in the way I was thinking, and I would come home understanding something about cognition and creative work that I had been telling clients for years without quite believing it myself.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-07-07</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[The assumption underneath the assumption: mapping what you do not know you believe]]></title>
    <link>./notes/mapping-hidden-assumptions-strategy.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of meeting I have sat in many times — the kind where a leadership team is debating a strategic decision with real seriousness, genuinely trying to stress-test their thinking, and yet somehow the most important thing in the room goes unspoken for the entire two hours. Not because anyone is hiding it, but because nobody knows it is there. The assumption underneath the assumption is not a secret; it is something closer to wallpaper — so present, so load-bearing, so obvious to everyone in the building that it has ceased to register as a choice at all. This essay is about that layer, how to find it, and why the process of finding it is almost always the most uncomfortable and most useful thing a team can do together. I want to be specific about method, because vagueness is the enemy of this kind of work, but I also want to be honest about why the method gets skipped — and the answer there is less about time and more about what it costs to look clearly at what you have been taking for granted.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-05-04</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Organisational forgetting: why institutions lose what they once knew how to do]]></title>
    <link>./notes/organisational-forgetting-institutional-memory.html</link>
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    <description><![CDATA[There is a particular kind of institutional grief that nobody names at the time. A long-serving nurse retires, or a production manager takes redundancy, or a team is quietly restructured after a merger, and with them goes something that had no line on any balance sheet — a feel for when the machine was about to fail, a memory of why a particular client relationship needed handling with unusual care, a knowledge of which shortcut through the system worked and which ones caused problems three months down the line. I have sat in enough post-merger workshops and strategy away-days to have watched this happen in real time, and what strikes me each time is not the loss itself but the organisation's almost total unawareness that anything has been lost. The filing systems are intact. The org chart has been updated. The new leadership team has a hundred-day plan. And somewhere in all of that confident reconfiguration, something essential has quietly left the building, and no one is quite sure what it was or when exactly it went.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-06-21</pubDate>
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