Letters from the Discovery Phase

Letter One: Arrival

I’ve arrived in Discovery.

It isn’t marked on any map, though most organisations have a version of it. You reach it shortly after the kickoff meeting and just before anyone becomes entirely certain what’s going on.

From a distance, Discovery appears orderly. There are process diagrams pinned to walls, governance structures carefully assembled, and documents that promise to explain how everything works.

Closer inspection reveals a more interesting landscape.

The roads on the map are not always the roads people travel. Some paths have been abandoned years ago but still appear in the guidebooks. Others have been worn into existence by necessity, invisible to everyone except those who walk them every day.

The locals are generous with directions, though no two sets are quite the same.

Ask three people how a decision is made and you’ll return with four stories. Each is true, viewed from where they stand.

There are landmarks worth paying attention to. A spreadsheet that quietly holds together an entire operation. An inbox that has become a system without anyone noticing. A monthly meeting where decisions are remembered more accurately than they’re recorded.

The experienced travellers learn not to judge these places too quickly. Every shortcut has a history. Every workaround solved a real problem before it became someone else’s technical debt.

I’ve also learned that Discovery rewards patience.

The first answer is rarely the whole answer. The process described in the meeting isn’t necessarily the one followed on a Tuesday afternoon when a customer calls, a deadline slips, or an experienced colleague quietly says, “That’s not quite how we do it.”

So I’ll continue to send these letters from the road.

Not because I’ve found the perfect map, but because the journey itself keeps revealing something unexpected about how organisations really work.

If these letters have a recurring theme, it’s this: understanding comes before improvement.

And every worthwhile journey begins by looking at the landscape as it is, not as we hoped it would be.

Letter Two: The Kingdom of Spreadsheets

After several days on the road, I crossed the border into the Kingdom of Spreadsheets.

No passport was required. Only a shared drive and the confidence to open a file called Final_v8_UseThisOne_Updated_NEW.xlsx.

The kingdom stretches much further than any official map suggests.

Its settlements are rarely signposted. They exist in forgotten folders, tucked inside personal drives, or attached to emails that have outlived the people who first sent them.

The inhabitants speak a curious language of lookups, pivots and hidden tabs. They know that somewhere, buried beneath layers of conditional formatting, lies the answer to a question no database can quite provide.

Everything exists here.

Every customer.

Every adjustment.

Every exception.

Every decision that was too awkward to fit anywhere else.

If you ask where a particular piece of information lives, the answer is almost always the same.

“It’s in the spreadsheet.”

Which spreadsheet?

A pause.

“Well… one of them.”

The maps insist there is a single source of truth. The locals are less dogmatic. They know there are several sources of truth, each with its own history, and the real skill lies in knowing which one to consult on a Thursday afternoon.

Visitors often misunderstand this place.

They arrive declaring that spreadsheets are the problem.

The longer they stay, the more they realise the spreadsheets are usually the evidence.

Each workbook marks the place where the official system couldn’t quite accommodate reality. Someone needed the work to continue. So they built a bridge. Then another. Then another, until the bridges became a transport network of their own.

I met one keeper who had tended the same workbook for more than a decade.

It contained hundreds of formulas and thousands of rows. Nobody else fully understood it.

When I asked what would happen if they retired, they smiled politely.

“I suppose someone will have to figure it out.”

No kingdom lasts forever.

But I’ve learned not to laugh at these places.

A spreadsheet is rarely just a spreadsheet.

It’s a story about an organisation adapting faster than its systems could.

Tomorrow, I leave in search of the place where everyone assures me the process is fully documented.

I’ve packed sturdy boots.

Letter Three: Here Be Dragons

Every map has blank spaces.

The old cartographers dealt with this honestly. Where they didn’t know what lay beyond the edge, they simply wrote, Here be dragons.

The modern organisation has developed a different convention.

It draws the road anyway.

Today I reached one such place.

The entrance was well defended. There were approvals to seek, governance to observe and long-established ways of doing things. The guardians spoke with confidence.

“This is the process.”

It was said not as an opinion, but as a fact.

As travellers, we learn to be respectful. Every territory has its customs, and it is unwise to arrive assuming the locals are wrong.

So I watched.

I listened.

I asked people to show me, rather than tell me.

Something curious began to happen.

The process everyone described wasn’t quite the one everyone followed.

One decision was made by experience rather than policy.

Another relied on a conversation that never appeared on the map.

A critical step existed only because someone remembered to do it every Tuesday.

The further I travelled, the more the official route began to fade beneath my feet.

It hadn’t disappeared all at once.

It had simply drifted.

A shortcut here.

An exception there.

A temporary workaround that quietly celebrated its tenth birthday.

Until eventually the process became less a sequence of steps than a collection of shared habits, passed from one experienced colleague to another.

The dragons, it turned out, weren’t guarding the process.

They were guarding the memory of it.

And perhaps that’s understandable.

If you’ve spent years keeping an organisation moving despite changing systems, shrinking teams and impossible deadlines, it’s difficult to admit that the map no longer matches the landscape.

That isn’t failure.

It’s survival.

The real danger lies elsewhere.

One day the dragons retire.

They take the unwritten knowledge with them.

And the next traveller discovers that the treasure everyone has been protecting has already gone.

Tomorrow, I continue east.

I’ve been told that’s where the decisions are made.

Everyone points in a different direction.

Letter Four: We Automated the Wrong Thing

Today I left the path.

Not deliberately.

The locals had recommended a newer route. The old footpath, they explained, had been replaced by a smooth road. It was quicker now. More reliable. Less tiring.

So I climbed into the automobile.

At first, the journey was delightful.

The road was well maintained. The miles disappeared almost effortlessly. Villages became names on signposts. Rivers flashed briefly beneath bridges. Forests blurred into green at the edge of the windscreen.

I covered more ground in an hour than I had managed on foot all week.

And yet, by late afternoon, I realised I had no idea where I was.

I couldn’t remember the villages I’d passed through.

I hadn’t spoken to anyone.

I’d crossed rivers without knowing their names.

The landscape had become something to move through rather than something to understand.

Eventually I stopped beside an old footpath, almost hidden by the undergrowth.

An elderly traveller was sitting nearby.

“Does anyone still use this?” I asked.

“Only those trying to learn the country.”

We walked together for a while.

The path wandered in ways the road never would. It climbed hills that the engineers had cut through. It crossed streams where people had once gathered. It passed abandoned buildings with stories no signpost could tell.

Every twist had a reason.

Every pause revealed something.

The road had not been built incorrectly.

It had simply been built for a different purpose.

It was designed to get people to their destination.

The footpath was designed to help them understand where they were.

As dusk settled, it occurred to me that organisations sometimes make the same mistake.

We automate the journey before we’ve explored the landscape.

We replace curiosity with efficiency.

We arrive sooner…

…but occasionally discover we’ve reached the wrong place.

Tomorrow, I’ll be walking again.

I’ve begun to suspect that the longest route is sometimes the quickest way to understand.

Letter Five: Every Map Lies

Tomorrow I leave Discovery.

My notebook is full.

I’ve sketched the roads as carefully as I can. I’ve marked the places where the paths divide, the rivers that people cross without thinking, the bridges built in haste and the villages that don’t appear on any official chart.

I’ve done what travellers have always done.

I’ve made a map.

It isn’t perfect.

It never could be.

Because every map lies.

Not through malice or carelessness, but because the moment a landscape is captured, it has already begun to change.

A tree falls across the path.

A bridge is repaired.

A shortcut becomes the main road.

A trusted guide retires.

Someone discovers a better way over the hill.

The country moves on while the ink dries.

I’ve learned that organisations are much the same.

They are not collections of processes.

They are places.

They have seasons.

Their weather changes with new leaders, new priorities, new technologies and new colleagues. Their paths are shaped by habit as much as policy, by trust as much as governance.

No document can capture that.

No process map can faithfully record the conversation that happened after the meeting, the judgement quietly exercised by an experienced colleague, or the small act of kindness that kept the work moving on a difficult Tuesday afternoon.

Those things belong to the people who live here.

Visitors can only glimpse them.

Perhaps that’s why Discovery matters.

Not because it produces the definitive map.

But because it reminds us to walk the ground before we redraw it.

To listen before we simplify.

To notice before we improve.

When I arrived, I thought my task was to understand the landscape.

I leave with a quieter ambition.

To have understood enough.

Enough to draw a map that helps the next traveller.

Enough to know where certainty ends.

Enough to leave space for those who will walk these paths long after I’ve gone.

Tomorrow someone else will set out across this country.

I hope they find my map useful.

I hope they ignore parts of it.

And I hope, before they add their own notes in the margin, they pause for a moment and look up.

Because the landscape has already changed.