Agencies, restaurants, your Nan's quilting group. The work is rarely the problem, the space between it is. I find what is actually happening in there, then build the smallest thing that helps. Not more process. Less of the wrong sort.
A pixel-art desk and pinboard. Pinned to the board are a production board, a relationship map, an article proof and a personal archive file. On the desk sit a CRT terminal, a keyboard, an open sketchbook, a cafetiere, a desk lamp and a Nokia-style phone, with house plants either side. Some objects are shortcuts to pages listed in the navigation above.
Different environments. Same underlying question: what is the system actually doing?
I built Hype's Creative Services function from nothing: one shared record of the work, forward capacity, freelance forecasting and the first departmental P&L the team had. Negative margin to eleven consecutive profitable months.
I built the operating layer around a founder-led studio so it could take on programme work at scale, including a PepsiCo nutrition-sciences platform across markets, legal, IT and release dependencies.
A year running the operation behind a kitchen residency in a South London pub. Suppliers, storage, stock, menu economics, prep, service and training, rebuilt around the reality of a very old building.
Find the mechanism, not the nearest person to the failure. No process for process's sake.
See how I workEssays, working notes and field notes on creative practice, AI, decision-making and how organisations actually get work done.
Essay · 2026Visual Fluency Is Not Creative LiteracyEveryone can read images. Far fewer can write them.Working note · 2026How I actually use ClaudeMost people run a chatbot with amnesia. I run an operating system.Working note · 2026What creative ops actually isThe chaos was never a tooling problem. It was a decisions problem wearing a tooling costume.I grew up between the South Cotswolds and Ireland and have lived in South London for most of my working life. I have spent the last decade inside creative businesses, with a year detouring into a restaurant kitchen. I draw, paint, cook and build small digital things. I am creative, but I am not a creative. I am increasingly interested in the larger systems around the work: how structure, incentives, information and behaviour shape what organisations are able to do.
About BarneyDrawings, posters, food, jewellery, small digital things and the occasional object nobody asked for.
Open archiveLondon.