Chapter 22 of Come Prepared to Die: An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing gives you a checklist for vetting practitioners like me. (The book is serialising now at two chapters a week; if chapter 22 hasn’t reached you yet, the checklist below is quoted from the manuscript.) It would be odd if I were exempt. So here are my answers in writing, before we ever speak. If you’ve fed the book to an AI and asked whether to hire me, these are the questions it should tell you to ask me.

From the manuscript, a coach who can be in this room has, at minimum:

My answers follow. Please, hold me to them.

I sell two things that travel together: redesign of your operating model (the design and the hands-on rollout both), and developmental coaching for the leaders carrying the change (usually the CTO or VPE and their direct reports, not only the leader who owns the whole structure). I also hold a small number of standalone coaching places for senior leaders; how that practice runs is public. I’m a solo practice, and you should know what I get from the relationship: my income, the practice itself (client work is how I stay honest about the book’s claims), and, only with your written approval, case material. The retainer is openly where the diagnostic can lead. That is exactly why the diagnostic is fixed-fee, standalone, and portable: every framework I use is published and cited in the report, so you could take it and execute with someone else. Some clients should.

If you need an army (a bench of coaches, trainers at scale), I’m not it, and I’ll say so on the first call along with names of people who are. Implementation itself is in scope: I roll out the redesign myself, LeSS where it fits or a bespoke SDLC where it doesn’t. I’ve done it as the sole practitioner across several dozen teams, with my own tooling carrying the mentoring load and the CTO holding the authority the design needed. Even with the tooling, a good team- or programme-level coach alongside can speed things up, and past a certain size I’d say so in the proposal. I know good people to bring in, and they’d work directly for you, not through me.

Nor am I the next framework instalment. If the ask is ARTs stood up and a transformation announced, plenty of consultancies will rename your project managers Release Train Engineers and call the new vocabulary the change. Larman’s Laws, which the book leans on, name that move: terminology overloaded to mean the status quo, coaches delivering the false impression that the change has been done. My new book exists partly because I stopped being willing to pretend that superficial terminology, tool, and process changes would make a significant difference for clients.

If you want transformation on a timeline, the book tells you to treat anyone promising one as a red flag, and I don’t get an exemption. If the people who control funding and rewards or set headcount and governance aren’t ready to change the rules holding the present system in place, don’t buy embedded work: buy periodic advisory if it helps, or spend the money elsewhere. The book’s own argument is that one leader’s resolve doesn’t outrun those constraints: the new pattern lives inside one team until the next reorg or budget cycle pulls it back, and no coach outruns that either.

My earliest work is as a pragmatic, evidence-based Buddhist: years of formal study and lay ordination under my late teacher, and his authorisation to teach the meditation system he developed, certified with 150 hours of meditation instruction in that training alone. I no longer practise in that lineage, but I’ll name my teacher and the fuller history on a call if you like. My practice now runs rimé—the Tibetan term for a deliberately non-sectarian approach, drawing across schools—with Alētheia as the working container.

The coaching training: Alētheia with Steve March, in training continuously since August 2023 and now halfway through the second year of Level 3 (a two-year programme with twice-yearly practice retreats and private supervision with March; my own session archive counts 44 two-hour live sessions so far across the three levels, 88 hours of live teaching, before the practice sessions, home groups, retreats, supervision, and individual study around them; the school’s published pace is 5–6 hours a week all-in), with parts work (IFS) and somatic method taught inside that lineage; Radix training in a body-based somatic method, ongoing since August 2025 (six training days and a four-day residential so far, with the full training ahead); Co-Active‘s five-course intermediate sequence (September 2022 to January 2023), 104 ICF contact hours by CTI’s published count; motivational interviewing (eight weekly 90-minute classes); ICAgile’s Coaching Agile Teams certification (ICP-ACC, a 21-hour course, June 2017); and MindTime, whose founder I’ve known for over a decade (I briefly served as CEO of his company). The organisational work: Certified LeSS Practitioner, taken three times on purpose: with both of the framework’s co-creators, who teach it very differently (Bas Vodde, 2019; Craig Larman, 2024), and in between with Venkatesh Krishnamurthy when I brought him in to train a client of mine (2021). Org Topologies Practitioner (July 2025) and Consultant (September 2025). I also have training in the Scaled Agile Framework and have given certified SAFe training. From the product side: Pragmatic Marketing certification to Level III (PMC-III, October 2015, certified in three courses of the Pragmatic Framework), and the two-day in-person Crucial Conversations workshop. The formal education: a UCLA Anderson MBA (fully employed programme, class of 2011, top 15% of my class) with exchange coursework at Seoul National University and HEC Paris, and before that a liberal arts + economics BA from Occidental College (Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude).

I do developmental coaching, not therapy. There is a clear boundary that I enforce. My practice is supervised the way I’d demand of anyone working near your CEO: peer supervision available to me at any time, and a senior supervised line I can escalate to whenever a session warrants it. The trainings named above are the continuing inner work the checklist asks about; all of them are still under way. When material surfaces that belongs with a clinician, I can call on a standing referral relationship with a licensed counsellor whose practice includes trauma work and who sees clients online. I can also help you look for in-person support in your locale, though your own health system or EAP will likely identify a suitable local provider faster than I can from New Zealand.

Ask me what evidence would make me conclude your org design is not the problem (the question any good buyer should run on a consultant whose thesis says it is). My answers, in advance, are the book’s own instruments turned on their author. Where the message-level cheap test closes the gap, there was no immunity and there is no diagnosis. Where ownership, funding, regulation, market commitments, or existing contracts rule out the proposed change, I name that limit before I recommend work; coaching does not turn an unavailable choice into an available one. Where the pole you claim and the pole your team would report roughly align, that axis isn’t your constraint, and I leave it alone. You can decline an axis without me logging it as resistance. And part of every diagnostic is naming the places where I recommend you change nothing. A consultant whose thesis is “your org design is the constraint” will reliably find that your org design is the constraint, so the diagnosis has to survive your finance function and your named colleagues, not my read of the room.

Coaching a leader’s reports while advising that leader on structure puts one person near both the psyche and the org chart, and you should be suspicious of that on principle. Here is how I ran it for 15 months, with the rules named in writing before anyone told me anything. Mentoring and advisory conversations ran under the Chatham House rule: I could carry what I learned upward as pattern, never with a name attached, and I preferred to hear a thing from more than one person before I carried it anywhere. Coaching ran under the Vegas rule: what was said in a coaching session, and in the communication around it, stayed in the room. The one exception, which I set out in writing before we started and have never needed to invoke, is an indicated intent to harm someone, to commit an unlawful act, or to put people or the organisation at serious risk. The design held: the patterns the organisation needed surfaced through the mentoring channel from more than one voice, and nothing left the coaching room. Every coachee gets these rules in a written welcome agreement before the first session; the practice terms—method, both confidentiality rules, clinical boundaries, recording consent—are public at how coaching works in my engagements.

A long engagement doesn’t worry me. I held a standing seat beside a CTO for years and would gladly hold one again (a general coach, the way some companies keep a general manager). What I won’t sell is dependence: if progress requires my presence because capability never transferred, you are renting a constraint, not building one. I learned that distinction by getting it wrong: in that same engagement I became the single point of failure for the instrument I built, and the data discipline underneath it needed my constant re-establishment to survive. So the protections hold regardless of tenure: every practice I install has a named internal owner before I call it installed, each month of embedded work leaves behind an artefact your organisation runs without me, and after the first 90 days either of us can end the engagement on 30 days’ written notice. No lock-in and no renewal ritual: staying is a choice you keep making because the work keeps earning it, and leaving costs you one month’s notice, not a negotiation. The book’s closing line on this is the standard I accept being held to: “the work asks for the constellation, not the saviour.”

The two diagnostic tiers carry fixed fees, published on their own page. For embedded and advisory work I don’t publish a rate card; I charge a fair rate for my skills, training, and experience, and you’ll have the full fee and terms in writing before you decide whether to hire me. Embedded work runs a 90-day trial first, then continues on a flat monthly fee until either of us ends it on 30 days’ written notice. I work from New Zealand, and I’ve delivered this shape before: 32 hours a week embedded with a global firm across four continents, Tuesday to Saturday New Zealand time, which lands Monday to Friday afternoons US Pacific, with 60 travel days a year written into the contract. Here’s the overlap visualised.

If some of this lands and you’d like to run the rest of the checklist live: