by Ferne Eliz King | Oct 21, 2026 | taking action
AI Has Sped Up the Ideas. Has Your Portfolio Kept Up?
In 2018, in Melbourne, I was the portfolio delivery director on one of the largest transformations NAB had run: Right Customer, Right Banker.
We sat in front of the data models for weeks. Around mid-afternoon, late in a particularly long week, the Senior Business Lead said, “We’ve cracked it. We’ve got the ratios right.”
That was the moment we understood how to solve the problem we’d been given. Then we worked out how to show the banker and customer ratios so people could see them.
Last month I watched a similar piece of work finish before my coffee was cold. The answer was good. But nobody had to work out the problem first. Nobody had to fix and refix the assumptions, or ask why the answer didn’t feel right.
I’m sharing this because those slow days were doing something for us. That’s where the thinking happened, and where we collaborated. Now ideas, experiments and outputs reach portfolio leaders faster than we’ve ever known.
Imagine if the speed was only half the story.
What Mik Kersten says
Mik Kersten, author of Output to Outcome, eloquently describes this shift. Once AI removes output as the limiting factor, the constraint moves to how an organisation is structured and run. His warning: “Either we find a scalable way to manage AI, or it will manage us.”
He wrote the book himself, every word, with no AI for the ideas or the writing, because the process helped him slow down and think. That’s what our slow days did.
I keep coming back to Mik because he puts into words what experienced portfolio leaders do by instinct. Across 50+ projects I’ve been involved in, one habit has separated the good from the rest: look at the constraints and work with them, not around them. Start from the future and work backwards. Together they tell you how fast you can really go.
AI is an opportunity. It’s also a reason not to take our eyes off the constraints. Identify them. Decide which can be fixed. Plan around the ones that can’t. Use that to prioritise which ideas are ready to become experiments: the ones whose constraints are gone or managed.
Where energy comes in
Portfolios need energy. People who try things, speak up, are heard, and stop early when it isn’t working. AI makes trying cheaper, and sends more ideas to our desks every day, every week. Silent voices kill a portfolio’s outcomes and its speed. What are you doing to make sure voices are heard and experiments can happen? And do we celebrate the idea that works, and what we learned from the ones we stopped?
Four questions for your own practice
- Is our calendar built for this pace? I favour one rhythm across the year, quarter, month and week, so teams can reprioritise without a new meeting for every idea. When things get really bumpy, go to a daily or weekly cadence for a while to deal with the crisis – then back to your regular cadence.
- What did the slow work give us that we need to keep? A pause. A sketch. A conversation. Have you built thinking time into your week?
- New questions. Not “what did we produce?” but “what changed because of it?”
- How we run the portfolio. Do we track how long ideas wait, not only what gets done? Is your operating model, whether PMO or VMO, set up for this pace?
Our role in Portfolio Director or Portfolio Manager hasn’t changed
Prioritise. Sequence. Know the constraints and the opportunities. Tie the choices back to the outcomes in the strategy. In Formula One terms, the Pit Wall doesn’t drive faster because the car got quicker. It decides when to pit, and what the race needs. It is accountable for decisions made at speed, knowing the constraints, with the podium in sight.
Try this
This week, ask your team: if ideas arrive three times as fast, what breaks first?
Track first, engine later.
Ferne Eliz King helps executive teams and boards turn strategic complexity into clarity, and clarity into results. Get in touch, or subscribe to the newsletter for more.
Consulting: If inertia is costing you pace, let’s fix that. Button: Book a Call.
KingFramework: Curious how KingFramework could sharpen your value? Discuss KingFramework.
Speaking: Want me on stage or in the room, driving the conversation? Let’s talk keynote or facilitation. Enquire About Speaking.
by Ferne Eliz King | Oct 13, 2026 | figuring it out
The recurring issues I keep seeing and what can change them
I’ve sat in a lot of rooms discussing business problems. Different industries. Different deals. Different sizes.
Similar problems turn up. You may recognise one. You may recognise all four.
1. Strategy with no steps
The strategy is clear on the slide. Then someone asks what happens on Monday, and the room goes quiet.
Without steps, a strategy is a wish. Teams fill the gap with whatever is most urgent, and the direction slowly drifts.
What changes: a prioritised roadmap, and clarity on what it will take and clarity of WHY these particular priorities. If you cannot explain why this is a priority, you’ve found a gap.
Try this: take one strategic goal. Write how do you know you have got there, what does success look like? Write the first three steps around figuring it out: setting direction, shaping and a unified lens; assign an owner; ask to bring back at a check point before taking action to execute. If you can’t, you’ve found a gap.
Found a gap? Talk to an expert: a strategic portfolio management specialist.
2. Decisions that stall, and value that goes unmeasured
Smart people. Plenty of data. Still waiting for the perfect answer while the moment passes. And everyone is busy, which is not the same as valuable.
A good decision made now beats a perfect decision made too late. Hesitation costs pace.
What changes: timely decisions, backed by experience and judgement, with value tracked as you go, with clarity of consequences if no action is taken.
Try this: pick one decision that has been waiting. Ask what you would need to know to decide it this week. Then agree how you will check, later, that it was right. Insert a key indicator into your dashboards. How long is it taking to make decisions. Target 3, 6, 9, 12 days depending on complexity and governance. But measure! Issues raised date. Variance to time of resolution. Or decision required date. Variance to time of decision.
3. Change that does not stick
The launch goes well. We celebrate. Six months later, people are back to the old way.
Too often the change was announced, but never built into how people work day to day.
What changes: sustainable change, the first time.
Try this: look at the last change you launched. Who is doing something different today, and how do you know? When executing a strategy the board asks for metrics on its success, when we ask for change be as diligent – what is the change expected and how will it be measured.
4. Output that is not value
AI makes output cheaper. It doesn’t make it more valuable. More reports, more code, more content, produced faster. And still no change you can point to.
“With the Project Operating Model, AI makes it faster to do the wrong things.” — Mik Kersten, Output to Outcome (IT Revolution, 2026)
What changes: effort goes to what matters, and is measured by what changed, not what was produced. Number of releases does not necessarily = value.
Try this: choose one piece of work in flight. Write down what should be different because of it. If you can’t, ask why you are doing it. And if you can, is it in the right priority to your service design improvement roadmap?
Why the track comes first
Formula One doesn’t start with the engine. It starts with the track.
Business is the same. Look at your services before your enablers. AI makes the engine cheaper every month (depending on the cost of tokens!). Direction, priorities and decisions are still yours.
That is the thinking behind KingFramework: four steps to figure it out, four steps to take action, with mindset and storytelling running through every one. Sixteen practices in all, and they work on top of the methods and tools you already use.
The prize, every time: sustainable outcomes.
Which one sounds like you?
Tell me in the comments, or send me a note.
If inertia is costing you pace, let’s fix that.
Ferne Eliz King helps executive teams and boards turn strategic complexity into clarity, and clarity into results. Get in touch, or subscribe to the newsletter for more.
Consulting: If inertia is costing you pace, let’s fix that. Button: Book a Call.
KingFramework: Curious how KingFramework could sharpen your value? Discuss KingFramework.
Speaking: Want me on stage or in the room, driving the conversation? Let’s talk keynote or facilitation. Enquire About Speaking.
by Ferne Eliz King | Oct 5, 2026 | My Work
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein
I’ve written about curiosity four times in six years. Not because I ran out of ideas — because I keep circling back to it. Every time I think I’ve said what needs saying, I notice it again, sitting under some other problem I’m working through with a client. So this time, one piece, properly. Here’s the question underneath all four of those earlier posts:
Can curiosity actually be learned — or do you either have it or you don’t?
The car isn’t the driver
Picture a Formula One car on the grid. The chassis, the engine, the aerodynamics — all of it locked in months before the race, built to a spec that can’t meaningfully change once the lights go out. That’s IQ. Fixed. Whatever ceiling you were built with, you’re racing with it today.
What decides the race isn’t the spec sheet. It’s what the driver and the Pit Wall do with the car once the lights go out, reading the tyres, reading the gaps, reading what’s changing lap to lap and adjusting the plan before the moment’s gone. That’s EQ. That’s trainable. It’s a set of habits, built through practice and debrief, and it can be built in anyone willing to do the work.
Curiosity sits with the driver and the Pit Wall, not the chassis. It’s not a fixed trait some people are lucky enough to be born with. It’s a habit of attention, noticing what’s changed, questioning what you assumed, staying alert to the read rather than defending the plan. And like any habit, it strengthens with use and goes quiet with neglect.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. If curiosity were fixed, the advice would be “hire for it.” Since it isn’t, the advice is “build it”, in yourself, and in the people on your team.
What curiosity actually buys you
Here’s the plainest way I can put it: curiosity is what makes you want something different tomorrow than what you have today.
Every car on the grid is streaming telemetry, tyre temperatures, fuel load, gap to the car ahead, all of it, constantly. None of it means anything on its own. Data becomes drag, not drive, if it never reaches the Pit Wall, and the Pit Wall only earns its seat by staying curious about what the numbers are actually saying. The teams who win aren’t the ones with the most data. They’re the ones who keep asking “what does this tell us that we didn’t know a lap ago” — and act on the answer before the moment passes. That’s the undercut nobody saw coming. That’s strategic traction, not just tracking.
It’s no accident that “Curiosity & Quality Questions” is a named practice at two separate points in KingFramework — once in Shape & Prioritise, once in building the Unified Lens. It’s not a soft add-on to the model. It’s load-bearing. Without it, a leadership team optimises — gets better at what it’s already doing, tighter and faster, lap after lap of the same line. With it, they ask a different question entirely: not “how do we do this better,” but “should we even be on this line.”
So how do you “get it”?
This is where most advice on curiosity falls apart, because it assumes you’ve already got the headspace to be curious. Most people don’t. Flat out on the straight, all you can see is the wall in front of you — the inbox, the deadline, the fire that needs putting out before lunch. Curiosity needs a bit of space to operate in, and pressure is the first thing that takes that space away.
So the real question isn’t “how do I become more curious.” It’s “how do I choose the moment to lift, before something forces me to.”
A pit stop isn’t a loss of control — it’s a deliberate, planned pause to gather more information and change the plan before the race decides it for you. That’s the model. A few ways I coach people into that pause on purpose:
• Ask one extra question before you act. Not five — one. Before you approve, respond, or move on: “what am I assuming here that I haven’t actually checked?” Thirty seconds. Highest-leverage habit I know.
• Protect five unstructured minutes a day. No inbox, no meeting, no task. Just watch where your mind drifts when nothing’s demanding it. That drift is where the good questions live.
• Notice when you’re defending instead of reading. If you catch yourself explaining why a decision was right rather than testing whether it still is, that’s the moment to call the stop.
• Take someone else’s line through the corner. Ask the question a client would ask, or a competitor, or the newest person on the team who hasn’t yet learned “we don’t do that here.”
The bottom line
You don’t need a higher IQ to lead well through complexity — the chassis is what it is. You need the discipline to keep reading the race when everything about your day is pulling you toward certainty and speed instead. That discipline is learnable, in you and in the people around you, which means it’s something you can build, not just hope you were lucky enough to hire.
Whichever is greater will win — fear or curiosity. Choose curiosity, on purpose, today.
Ferne Eliz King helps executive teams and boards turn strategic complexity into clarity, and clarity into results. Get in touch, or subscribe to the newsletter for more.
Consulting: If inertia is costing you pace, let’s fix that. Button: Book a Call.
KingFramework: Curious how KingFramework could sharpen your value? Discuss KingFramework.
Speaking: Want me on stage or in the room, driving the conversation? Let’s talk keynote or facilitation. Enquire About Speaking.
by Ferne Eliz King | Oct 5, 2026 | My Work
“Doing differently to enable growth” isn’t a slogan for me. It’s the thread I keep pulling on, project after project.
Here is what I mean.
Three conversations that should be one
Most organisations treat these as separate conversations, often with different people in the room:
• Service design. What do we deliver to clients, and how do they experience it?
• Operating model. How does the organisation run to deliver it? Who decides, how does work flow, who does what?
• Unit economics. What does each unit of that service cost, and what does it earn?
Each conversation makes sense alone. The trouble starts when they never meet. The service is designed without checking what it costs to deliver. The operating model is built around the org chart, not the services.
The numbers are reviewed after the fact, when it’s too late to change the design.
One line of sight
The real unlock is connecting them into one line of sight.
It runs like this. Start with the value the client receives. Follow it back through the front stage and back stage services that create it. Check the operating model supports those services, and doesn’t get in their way. Then put numbers on it: what it costs, what it earns, and where the blockages and loops are draining value.
When you can trace that line from the client to the numbers, decisions get easier. You can see what to scale, what to fix and what to stop.
From clarity to growth
Growth doesn’t come from working harder inside the same design. It comes from doing something differently, and knowing which difference matters most.
Clarity gives you that. When service design, operating model and unit economics tell one story, you can see where growth is being held back, and where an investment will pay off. Then technology, automation and AI can support the change, instead of driving it blind.
Try this
Pick one service. Ask three questions:
1. What value does the client actually get from it?
2. Does our operating model help us deliver that, or slow us down?
3. Do we know what it costs and what it earns?
If you can’t answer all three with confidence, you’ve found your thread to pull on. A good place to start is drawing your service design on paper. I wrote about how in [Draw Your Service Design].
What’s next
This is the work I keep coming back to, and the work I’m looking for next. If that’s a conversation worth having, let’s talk.
I’ve also cleared out the historical blogs from my website. I’m refreshing some of them and writing new ones.
I haven’t written my newsletters for a while. They’re starting up again soon. Subscribe to the newsletter to receive the next series, full of richness via LinkedIn.
Ferne Eliz King helps organisations connect service design, operating model and unit economics into one clear line, and turn that clarity into growth.
Consulting: If inertia is costing you pace, let’s fix that. Button: Book a Call.
KingFramework: Curious how KingFramework could sharpen your value? Discuss KingFramework.
Speaking: Want me on stage or in the room, driving the conversation? Let’s talk keynote or facilitation. Enquire About Speaking.
by Ferne Eliz King | Oct 5, 2026 | My Work
Formula 1 teams don’t start with the engine. They start with the race: what are we built to win, and what does the whole car need to do it?
The same order works for any organisation: service design, then operating model, then workforce, then technology. Each one shapes the next. Most organisations do the opposite. They add technology first and hope people and processes catch up.
Here is a simpler way, and it starts with a pen and paper.
Step 1: Draw your service design
Get a pen and paper. Draw a grid with five rows.
1. Phases of the customer journey. The columns across the top. From first contact to ongoing relationship, what are the phases your client moves through? Together they show the flow of your business architecture.
2. Client Actions. Front stage services: the direct interactions with the client or customer.
3. Back Stage. The services that drive the back stage actions, which the client does not directly see.
4. Enablers. The people, skills, information, tools and rules that support rows 2 and 3. Describe them in plain words, not product names.
5. Blockages and loops. Where work stalls, repeats or goes round in circles.
Fill the empty boxes with bullet points. Keep it rough. Don’t polish it.
Count the cost of the blockages
Row 5 is where the insight is. For each blockage or loop, ask what it costs you in:
• value
• growth
• client satisfaction
• staff satisfaction
• results
Most teams already know where the drag is. They’ve just never added up the cost.
Step 2: Design the operating model
Now step back. Look at what your clients need (demand) and what you provide (supply) as if you were starting fresh.
If you could design the service from scratch, what would it look like? From that picture, design an operating model that fits your business architecture: how decisions are made, how work flows, and how money follows outcomes. That’s your ideal world.
Step 3: Shape the workforce
The operating model tells you what people need to do. Now ask:
• Which roles does the new model need, and which change?
• What capability and skills do we have, and what are we missing?
• How will people work differently day to day?
This is your pit crew. Everyone knows their job and their handover. Capability and ways of working matter as much as the technology.
Step 4: Measure the gap
How different is that ideal from your operating model today?
Then the honest question: how much of that gap can you actually manage? All of it, or part of it?
If it’s part, follow one rule: take on more than 50%, or don’t start yet. Below half, the organisation slides back to the old way. Wait until you can commit to at least half, then go.
Step 5: Prioritise the technology uplift
You’re unlikely to be starting from zero. Most organisations already have technology. So the question isn’t what to buy. It’s which technology uplift to make first.
Look at your blockages and your operating model. Which uplift removes the biggest blockage or enables the biggest gain? Start there. Automation and AI come in as support, not the driver.
Think of it as telemetry. It gives the team clear information, removes repeat work and speeds up decisions. It doesn’t decide where the car is going.
A great tool in untrained hands, inside an unchanged process, is an expensive pit stop that goes nowhere.
Step 6: Share the vision and agree the measures
Before you start, two things:
• A shared vision among a few key people. Not everyone yet. Just enough to carry it.
• Success measures. How will you know it’s working? Decide now, in terms you can check later.
• How you make decisions. Test it as a team: learn, apply, reflect, refine.
Then start
Start. Small, clear and committed beats big and vague.
Try this on Monday
Pick one service. Draw the five rows. Spend twenty minutes on row 5. Put a number on what the blockages cost you.
That page will tell you where to begin.
What’s next
Next in the series: T3 — Implement It, where plans become outputs in motion and people are equipped for new ways of working.
Ferne Eliz King helps organisations build tangible plans that track to real results. Get in touch to talk about your next transformation.
Consulting: If inertia is costing you pace, let’s fix that. Button: Book a Call.
KingFramework: Curious how KingFramework could sharpen your value? Discuss KingFramework.
Speaking: Want me on stage or in the room, driving the conversation? Let’s talk keynote or facilitation. Enquire About Speaking.
