April and May are turning out to be months I’ll remember for a long time. A lot has happened, more is coming, and I’ve been bad at writing about any of it. So here’s the field report.
VikingPLoP. Earlier this month I was in Jerisjärvi presenting my first academic paper — Finding Your First Client: A Pattern Language for Early-Stage Consulting Startups — at VikingPLoP 2026. After 40 years in the industry, writing an academic paper was genuinely new territory, and I found I enjoyed it. The conference itself brought together researchers and practitioners who take the craft of documenting patterns seriously, and the conversations were worth the journey. The paper is available here, and the pattern work will continue — I expect to develop it further in the coming weeks.
Where BilboConsult is heading. The strategy has evolved considerably. AI governance and transformation — helping organisations move from AI adoption to actual AI-driven change — is the work I’m building toward. There’s a framing I came across recently that captures the problem well. George Sivulka, writing in a16z News, puts it this way: “AI just made every individual 10x more productive. No company became 10x more valuable as a result. Where did the productivity go?” That gap — between individual AI productivity and institutional transformation — is where the meaningful work is, and where real value can still be found. Most organisations I talk to are somewhere in the middle of exactly that gap.
What’s ahead in May. The next few weeks are full and exciting. A few days in Lapland with old colleagues to kick things off. Then I’m travelling to deliver a leadership workshop at a company retreat — in Paro, Bhutan, which was something of a surprise development and is obviously super exciting. En route, I’ll be stopping in Delhi for a day on each leg of the journey. Then back to Helsinki in time for a wedding in Tampere and a funeral — May holds both, and that’s just how life is sometimes.
More coming soon. I have a piece in the pipeline on something I’ve been building quietly in the background — something that I think will resonate with more than a few of you.
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