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What the Pope’s AI Encyclical Says to Anyone Trying to Live Faithfully
Why I’m writing this

In my first post here, I described what I’d been building quietly for several months: a Personal Operating Model — a structured system for living intentionally, applying the same enterprise architecture thinking I use with clients to the question of how to actually follow through on what matters. The core problem it addresses isn’t time management. It’s the gap between good intentions and consistent action. The core question it asks every day is: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be?

Since that post, I’ve stopped calling it a Personal Operating Model. The name that fits better is the Faithfulness Coach — because the question the system is actually designed to answer isn’t how productive am I? but am I being faithful to what I said matters most? That’s a different standard, and it deserves a different name. I’ll use it from here on.

On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas — On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It was released ten days later and has been widely discussed since. I am not Catholic. I don’t read papal documents as a matter of course. But when I read this one, I kept stopping — not because it surprised me, but because it kept articulating, in principled and precise language, things I had arrived at intuitively while building the Faithfulness Coach.

That convergence seems worth writing about.

The same week the encyclical was released, Cal Newport — computer scientist, author of Deep Work, and a fellow at Georgetown’s Digital Ethics Institute — published a short essay called “On God and LLMs.” Newport is not Catholic, and makes no reference to the encyclical. He is working from Rabbinic commentary on the same Genesis 2 passage the encyclical draws on. Onkelos, a Roman-era Torah scholar, translates the Hebrew nefesh chaya — usually rendered “living being” — as ruach memalela: speaking spirit. Rashi reinforces it: speech is not merely central to the human person, it is what makes humans unique among all creation. From that foundation Newport asks whether we should be so quick to extend the ruach memalela to machines — letting them write and speak on our behalf. He calls it, simply, profane.

Two writers, different traditions, the same Genesis text, the same week. That convergence also seems worth noting.

I want to be clear about what this post is and isn’t. It isn’t a theological endorsement or a commentary on Catholic teaching. It’s a practitioner reading a carefully argued public document about AI and human dignity — and recognising the argument. If you’ve been thinking about how to use AI tools in your life without being quietly reshaped by them, the encyclical has useful things to say whether or not you share its theological premises.

I’ll take five statements from the document and show where each one lands in the context of a Faithfulness Coach.

What the encyclical actually argues

The encyclical’s central concern is what Leo XIV calls the technocratic paradigm: the tendency, once efficiency and control become the dominant standard, to measure everything — including people — by output, performance, and utility. It traces this logic through AI systems, labour markets, autonomous weapons, and the erosion of genuine human relationships. And it asks whether we are building toward something good, or just building faster.

The document is grounded in Catholic social teaching, but its diagnostic framework is accessible to anyone. It draws on the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem as two archetypes of how communities respond to transformative change. It borrows Paul VI’s distinction between having more and being more. It applies the principle of subsidiarity — that higher systems must never absorb the responsibility of lower ones — to the digital realm in a way I hadn’t seen done before.

You don’t have to accept the theological argument to find the analysis valuable.

Two ways to build: Babel or Jerusalem

The encyclical’s governing image is two building projects. Babel: a tower built on self-assertion, efficiency, and homogenisation — a single language to master everything, a monument to human capability, built without asking what it is for. Jerusalem under Nehemiah: rebuilt from rubble, relationships restored before stones, each household assigned its own section of wall, strength acknowledged as coming from a source beyond the builders.

Leo XIV calls the Babel failure mode the “Babel syndrome”: the pretence that a single system — even a sophisticated digital one — can translate the mystery of the person into data and performance. It’s not a failure of ambition. It’s a failure of purpose.

I wrote in my first post that the biggest risk in building this kind of system isn’t that it fails — it’s that it works perfectly while pointing at the wrong thing. Tasks done, areas managed, progress visible, soul running dry. I called it the good-idea cycle’s quieter cousin. The encyclical names it more precisely: a flawless system built on efficiency logic, without a prior question about what the efficiency is for, is a personal Tower of Babel.

The Jerusalem alternative isn’t less sophisticated. It’s differently ordered. Relationships before structure. Purpose before productivity. The governance question isn’t how do I optimise this? but toward what end?

The novelist N. Scott Momaday, writing about the dilution of language in the modern Western world, described the Babel pattern from the outside: “He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language — for the Word itself — as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.” Momaday was writing about print culture. He could have been writing about generative AI. Multiplying output is not the same as building something that matters.

The Faithfulness Coach application: before you automate a single workflow or build a single dashboard, name what the system is for. Not what it does — what it serves. That question has to be upstream of every design decision, or you’re building Babel.

Having more without being more

Paul VI wrote this in 1967. Leo XIV quotes it because it describes something that AI makes newly urgent: the possibility of accumulating capability — speed, reach, information, output — while the person doing the accumulating remains exactly as they were, or becomes less.

This is the encyclical’s most direct challenge to the optimisation mindset. More productivity tools, more automation, more AI assistance — none of it answers the prior question: is this making you more the person you want to be, or just making you faster?

The Faithfulness Coach turns on exactly this hinge. The core governance question I’ve built into my monthly review is: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be? Not how much did I accomplish? but am I moving in the right direction?

That’s a different question from anything a task manager asks. Productivity systems optimise for throughput. A Faithfulness Coach — if it’s designed correctly — optimises for faithfulness to purpose. Efficiency in service of the wrong things is just faster drifting.

Newport’s ruach memalela argument sharpens this further. It is possible to have vastly more output — AI-generated words in your inbox, AI-written posts under your name, AI responses to emails you signed — while becoming less of a speaking spirit. More words does not mean more voice. If your system is producing more while your own articulation, reflection, and genuine communication atrophies, it has solved the wrong problem.

The encyclical gives this distinction a name and a principled argument. It also makes the stakes clearer: the same dynamic that plays out in individual lives plays out at civilisational scale. A society that measures human worth by productivity and utility has the same design flaw as a personal system that mistakes activity for progress.

The Faithfulness Coach application: audit your review cadence. Does it ask how much? or toward what? If only the former, the system is optimised for Babel.

The tool should support you, not replace you

This is the idea I found most generative — and the one least discussed in the public reaction to the encyclical. The encyclical gives it an old, slightly forbidding name: subsidiarity. But the principle underneath is simple.

It says a decision should be made at the lowest level that can make it well, and that bigger systems exist to support the smaller ones — never to take over what they can do for themselves. A good manager doesn’t do their team’s work for them. Decisions are better made close to the people they affect. The higher level’s job is to help — the Latin root, subsidium, simply means help — not to absorb.

Leo XIV applies this to the digital era with a sharp move: in modern life, the de facto “higher level” is no longer the State or the institution — it is the platform, the model, the algorithm that quietly sets the terms of what we see, decide, and expect. When these systems take over human judgment instead of supporting it, they break the principle even when they “work.”

Turned inward, this becomes a design rule for any system like the Faithfulness Coach:

The automation-and-AI layer may handle the mechanical. It must never take over judgment, discernment, or genuine conversation. Where it replaces your own deliberation — even efficiently — it has crossed the line.

I didn’t have a name for this when I wrote my first post, but it’s what the three-tier AI strategy I described is doing: simple deterministic scripts for routine processing, a smaller model for classification, a frontier AI reserved for the dialogues where being challenged is the point. The principle behind that design is that AI should strengthen my capacity to decide — not replace it. A tool that makes you a better thinker keeps the decision where it belongs — with you. One that thinks for you takes it away, even if the output is good.

The clearest case of crossing that line is also the most intimate: letting AI speak for you. Newport’s ruach memalela argument names why this feels wrong in a way that the efficiency critique doesn’t. It is not merely that AI-written emails are impersonal. It is that speech — the alchemisation of your state of mind into words that land in another person’s mind — is constitutive of what it means to be human. When you delegate that upward, you are not saving time. You are ceding something that cannot be recovered by working harder on something else.

None of this is an argument against using the tools. I use AI constantly, including in my writing — this post included. The line is not whether a machine helped shape the words; it is where the idea, the judgment, and the accountability sit. If the thinking is mine, if I own what goes out under my name and stand behind it, the tool has done its job. What must never move to the machine is authorship in the deeper sense: the source of the idea, the creative ownership, the responsibility for the result. Use the tools freely. Just keep those.

This is also the right test for any AI personal assistant product: does it strengthen the user’s own discernment, or does it quietly become the discernment? The answer matters both ethically and practically — a product that creates dependency isn’t a product that serves its user.

The Faithfulness Coach application: for each AI tool in your system, ask honestly: is it handling the mechanical so I can focus on the meaningful, or is it absorbing judgment I should be exercising myself? And specifically: is your voice still yours?

Technology takes the character of its makers

This is the encyclical’s sharpest empirical claim (§9, §104): technology is never neutral. It embodies the choices, priorities, and anthropological vision of those who designed, financed, regulated, and deployed it. When efficiency, control, and profit are the dominant values in a system, the technology that emerges from that system carries those values — regardless of what its makers intended.

For someone building a personal system using enterprise tools — and I am drawing on TOGAF, ITIL, Wardley Mapping, and GTD — this is a genuine caution. Those frameworks were designed to optimise large organisations. They are instruments of efficiency logic. Importing them wholesale into a personal system imports that logic too.

My response has been to strip them — ruthlessly — and subordinate what remains to a purpose order that predates the tools. The frameworks are useful; they’re not in charge. The governance question I described earlier (is the system helping me achieve my goals, or am I just enjoying building it?) is exactly the antibody the encyclical’s diagnosis calls for: a deliberate check on whether the technocratic logic has quietly taken over.

The Faithfulness Coach application: examine the tools and frameworks you’ve adopted. Whose values do they carry? Are those values upstream or downstream of your purpose? If your system was designed by efficiency logic and you’ve placed your purpose inside it, the hierarchy may be inverted.

Accountability cannot be delegated upward

The encyclical insists that conscience is irreducibly personal. No system, however sophisticated, can hold it on your behalf. When an AI makes a wrong call, a human in a role still owns it. When a decision affects real people, the fact that an algorithm made it does not distribute the moral weight — it concentrates it in whoever deployed the algorithm and structured the choice.

For the Faithfulness Coach, the application is more intimate. The system surfaces information, tracks commitments, asks questions. It does not decide. My morning AI conversation is structured around questions, not answers — the point is to be challenged toward my own judgment, not to receive the judgment pre-formed. Whatever the system recommends, I still own the choice.

That’s not just an ethical stance. It’s what makes the system worth using. A system that decides for you is a system you cannot trust, because you don’t know whose values it’s actually serving.

The Faithfulness Coach application: look at where your system makes choices on your behalf. Are those choices ones you’ve genuinely delegated — or ones that have quietly drifted outside your oversight? Accountability follows design.

What this means in practice

I’m not suggesting you read a papal encyclical to build a better morning routine. But I am suggesting that the encyclical surfaces something real: AI tools are not neutral productivity accessories. They carry a logic, they shape how you think, and they can gradually supplant the very judgment they were meant to support.

The five principles above are, in my reading, the diagnostic toolkit the encyclical offers:
- Babel or Jerusalem — what is your system actually for?
- Having more without being more — are you optimising for throughput or for faithfulness to purpose?
- Support, don’t replace — does each tool strengthen your judgment or quietly take it over?
- Technology takes the character of its makers — whose values are built into the frameworks you’ve adopted?
- Accountability cannot be delegated — where your system decides, you still own it.
None of these require a theological commitment to apply. They require honesty — which is harder.

Newport frames digital ethics as being where bioethics was fifty years ago — before norms crystallised around transplants, genetic testing, and end-of-life care. The encyclical is one of those early crystallisations. The questions it asks are not going away. Better to work through them deliberately than to have the technology answer them for you by default.

There’s more to come in this series — including why I stopped calling it a Personal Operating Model and what that change is really about, and a closer look at the review cadence that makes the system work in practice (getting the cadence wrong is the most common way a good system quietly fails).

This is the second post in an ongoing series on the Faithfulness Coach. The first post, The Intentional Living Engine — Why Your Life Needs an Operating Model, introduces the framework. References: Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas* (15 May 2026), Vatican.va. Cal Newport, “On God and LLMs,” calnewport.com (25 May 2026); “The Pope vs. Silicon Valley,” calnewport.com (1 June 2026).*

Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant based in Helsinki. He helps organisations with transformation, service integration, and governance — and is applying the same thinking to the question of how to live well and intentionally.

Get in touch at martin@bilboconsult.com or connect on LinkedIn.

PS — I’m exploring whether the Faithfulness Coach becomes something others can use. If you’re working through similar questions and would want something like this, I’d be glad to hear from you.
June 1, 2026
An Unexpected Journey: People Development at the Foot of the Himalayas

It is a curious thing about adventures: they do not arrive as adventures. They arrive as a phone call from a friend — on an April afternoon, on the road between Rovaniemi and Muonio, driving north through Lapland to a conference at Jeris Lakeside Resort.

Ilya called on the 9th of April. His brother Valentin works at a software company in Bhutan, he explained, and there was a team retreat coming up in Paro in May, in the foothills of the Himalayas. They were looking for someone to come and work with the developers on people development and values. Liisa and I listened together, leaning in as the picture took shape. By the time Ilya rang off, we were already half decided.

Anyone who has read Tolkien will recognise this moment. Bilbo Baggins was perfectly happy in his hobbit-hole when adventure came knocking — and perfectly certain he wanted nothing to do with it. I cannot say the same. But the shape is familiar: a door opens without warning, and what lies behind it is far bigger than the ordinary day suggested. That is also, of course, the name of this company. BilboConsult has always carried a quiet promise: the best journeys are the ones you never planned to take.

By May, Liisa and I were at Kichu Resort in Paro, with the Himalayan foothills outside the window, about to deliver BilboConsult’s first international engagement.

Kichu Resort, Paro, Bhutan — May 2026

Who is DTB?

Developer Tools Bhutan is the local entity of FIIT B.V., a Dutch software company. Their product, ComponentOne, is a UI component library used by enterprise development teams at Microsoft, IBM, IKEA, Tesla, Ford, ESPN, and Toshiba. The Paro team of 20–25 Bhutanese developers are technically excellent — and on the cusp of growing to 50 with 15 new joiners arriving imminently.

Managing Director Val gave me creative latitude and genuine trust from our very first conversation. That trust shaped everything that followed.

The Sessions

We designed two 75-minute interactive workshops, built around DTB’s own values and the team’s real challenges.

Session 1 — “The Craft You Make Your Own”: Job Crafting

Drawing on Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton’s research, this session explored three ways any developer can actively reshape their work: through the tasks they take on (task crafting), the relationships they build (relational crafting), and the perspective they bring to it (cognitive crafting). The session built on what DTB’s team had already learned in a 2025 session on clean code — which participants still referenced a year later. The question at its heart: how do you own the quality of your work, regardless of what’s on your ticket?

Each participant left with a signed 30-day commitment card — one concrete thing they would do differently.

Session 2 — “A Team Worth Joining”: Values in Action

DTB has four written core values: Integrity, Innovation, Customer Success, and Community. Beautiful words. But what do they actually look like on a Tuesday afternoon, when you’re debugging at 4pm or welcoming a nervous new colleague on their first day?

Working together, the team surfaced the behavioural expressions of each value — the specific, concrete actions that bring these principles to life in daily work. The most tangible outcome: onboarding material for the 15 incoming developers, written entirely in the team’s own words. Authentic, grounded, theirs.

We also opened a deliberate conversation about artificial intelligence — not as threat or hype, but as an innovation in service of quality, anchored in the values the team had just articulated together.

The Experience

DTB Training Retreat 2026 — Kichu Resort, Paro, Bhutan

I was accompanied by my wife, Eeva-Liisa. Bhutan is not a typical business trip destination, and having her alongside made this a shared adventure as much as a professional engagement.

The country does something to you. The philosophy of Gross National Happiness — measuring progress by the wellbeing of people, not only by economic output — turns out to be a perfect frame for conversations about craft and purpose. The team’s warmth, curiosity, and genuine commitment to each other made every session feel alive.

What I valued most was the people themselves. These were not a team that needed to be built — they were already relational, already committed, already caring about their work. They needed permission and language to name what they were already doing well, and tools to take it intentionally further.

What the Team Said

The anonymous feedback cards from Session 2 told their own story. Participants described the retreat as insightful, exceptional, engaging, inspiring, fulfilling. They asked for more time, longer sessions, and more Q&A. One developer noted that the activities helped them “gain deeper insights into work they had previously considered mundane.” Another reflected on how meaningful it was to speak with international professionals “who were actually present when modern programming was born.”

Val published the team’s own reflection on the retreat — “Cultivating Our Craft: Reflections on the 2026 DTB Training Retreat” — and described the session output as authentic onboarding material born directly from the team’s own words.

Feedback specifically noted my “playful yet concrete activities” — a balance I care about deeply. Learning should be rigorous and enjoyable at the same time.

What This Meant to Me

This was BilboConsult’s first international engagement. But the significance went beyond that milestone.

I have built this practice around a single purpose: to help people and teams develop their best selves — not through frameworks imposed from the outside, but through genuine conversation and discovery. Bhutan gave me the rare gift of living that purpose without compromise. I could focus entirely on people development. I could follow my curiosity across a completely new context. I could work across languages, cultures, and worldviews without once losing the thread of what matters.

And I could do it with Liisa by my side.

The title of this piece borrows from Tolkien — and from the name of this company, which is itself a nod to Bilbo Baggins, the reluctant adventurer who discovers that the journey he did not plan for turns out to be the one that defines him. It really was an unexpected journey. It really was an adventure. And it was one of the most successful and fulfilling things I have done as a consultant.

What’s Next

The relationship with DTB and FIIT continues. As the team grows toward 50, there are conversations about annual retreats, manager onboarding for the new cohort, and deeper work on the human side of software development. I’m looking forward to what comes next.

And I’m grateful to Ilya for the unexpected phone call on an ordinary Finnish evening that started all of this.

BilboConsult helps individuals, teams, and organisations find clarity about who they are and how they work — through facilitation, coaching, and leadership development. If your team is growing and you want to make sure the culture you’re building is worth joining, get in touch.

May 27, 2026
The Intentional Living Engine — Why Your Life Needs an Operating Model

I’ve spent 40 years helping organisations design operating models — the systems, processes, and governance that make things actually work. A few months ago, I started applying the same thinking to my own life. Not because my life was broken, but because I kept noticing a pattern: I’d have a good idea, make some progress, get busy, and then quietly move on to the next thing. The ideas were fine. The follow-through wasn’t.

So I built what I now call an Intentional Living Engine. It’s an operating model for my life.

What I Mean by Operating Model

In IT management, an operating model answers a straightforward question: how does this organisation actually run? What processes exist, what systems support them, how does information flow, and who is responsible for what?

A Personal Operating Model asks the same question about your life. It makes visible the systems you already have — whether you’ve named them or not — and the ones you’re missing. Where does your information live? What happens daily, weekly, monthly to keep things on track? What gets automated, what needs your judgment, and what needs a real conversation?

Most of us have informal versions of this. A calendar. Some to-do lists. Maybe a journal. What I found is that making it explicit and intentional changed how I relate to my own commitments.

Starting with Purpose, Not Tasks

Here’s what I got wrong at first: I started with productivity. Better task management, more automation, smarter inbox processing. And those things matter — but they’re not the point.

The point is purpose.

For me, that purpose is rooted in faith. Living close to God. Being fully present with my wife, my family, my friends. Serving my community. The operating model exists to help me actually do those things consistently — not just think about them or plan to do them.

But the framework works regardless of what your purpose is. The core question the system asks every day is the same: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be?

That’s a different question from “what do I need to get done today?” Productivity systems optimise for throughput — how many tasks can you check off. An Intentional Living Engine optimises for faithfulness — are you living the life you actually want?

What I’ve Built

After a few months of building, testing, and honestly also overbuilding, here’s what I’ve found matters. There are ten dimensions to a Personal Operating Model, and I’ll share the headlines here. I plan to write more about each one.

Vision and purpose come first. Without clarity on what the system is for, it becomes a treadmill. I use a framework of four domains — Contemplation, Constitution, Community, and Craft — with a deliberate priority order. Faith and health before business.

Life architecture means mapping out your areas of responsibility. I have 18, from faith and marriage to business development and household maintenance. Each gets regular attention through a weekly rotation. The upstream priorities get reviewed first. That’s not just organisation — it’s a statement of values encoded in a schedule.

Information architecture is about having one place to look. My Obsidian vault is the index of my life. Not everything lives there, but everything is reachable from there. When I open my daily journal in the morning, I can see and reach every decision that needs my attention. At least, that’s the goal — making the links reliable is still a work in progress.

Process architecture has three layers: a pipeline for mechanical data processing that runs invisibly, a cockpit (the daily journal) that presents information clearly, and a conversation layer — a morning standup with AI that doesn’t just list tasks but asks questions about what matters.

Automation and AI strategy follows a simple principle: use the simplest technology that works. Deterministic scripts for routine processing. A local language model for classification tasks that need more intelligence than regex but less than a full conversation. And a frontier AI for the genuine dialogues — morning reflection, strategic thinking, the conversations where being challenged is the whole point.

Technology choices matter less than you’d think. What matters is that each component has a clear role, and when one piece is unavailable, the whole system degrades gracefully rather than breaking.

Lifecycle tracking means that tasks, opportunities, and commitments each have defined states. The system doesn’t just tell me what’s new — it surfaces what’s stuck, what’s overdue, and what deserves to be celebrated.

Review cadences give the system its rhythm. Daily for orientation. Weekly for feel and direction — how did it go? Monthly for data — what do the numbers say about health, finances, goal progress? Quarterly for strategy — am I doing the right things? Each cadence has a different character, and mixing them up makes them all less useful.

Governance means the system itself gets maintained. Documentation is a first-class output. And there’s a question built into my monthly review that keeps me honest: is the system helping me achieve my goals, or am I just enjoying building it? Because building systems is fun, and that’s a legitimate risk.

Human factors are the most important dimension. If I open the system with curiosity in the morning, it’s working. If I open it with dread, it’s not. Joy matters. The satisfaction of checking things off matters. A system you avoid is worse than no system at all.

What I’ve Learned So Far

Three things stand out.

First, purpose before productivity. Every design decision gets tested against the question: does this help me live faithfully? Not “does this make me more efficient?” Efficiency in service of the wrong things is just faster drifting.

Second, enterprise thinking works at personal scale — if you strip it down. I’m drawing on TOGAF, ITIL, Wardley Mapping, and GTD. Configuration management, capability mapping, service value streams — these are design patterns for complex systems, and your life is a complex system. But you have to be ruthless about what to keep and what to drop. Most enterprise architecture is overhead at a scale of one.

Third, the biggest enemy is the good-idea cycle. New idea, burst of energy, initial progress, life gets busy, new idea replaces old one. The operating model’s job is to break that cycle — not by being rigid, but by making it visible. Here’s where you said you wanted to be. Here’s where you are. Here’s what changed and why. You decide — but with clear sight, not in the fog of busyness.

Why I’m Sharing This

I’m building this for myself, and I’m genuinely enjoying it. But I also notice that the methods and frameworks are not specific to me. The purpose is personal — yours will be different from mine. But the architecture of intentional living is universal.

Over the coming months, I’ll share more about specific components: the daily journal as a life cockpit, the three-tier AI strategy, the review cadence framework, and the design principles that make the difference between a system you love and a system you abandon.

If you’re someone who has plenty of good ideas but struggles to make them stick — or if you’ve tried productivity tools and found them useful but somehow not enough — I think you’ll find something here.

Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant based in Helsinki. He helps organisations with transformation, service integration, and governance — and is currently applying the same thinking to the question of how to live well and intentionally.

Get in touch at martin@bilboconsult.com or connect on LinkedIn.

May 7, 2026
April, May, and a lot of forward motion

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.

April 24, 2026
From Reflection to Jerisjärvi — Presenting at VikingPLoP 2026

Six months ago, I had never written an academic paper. I had never presented at a conference. And I had never started a company.

That last one — founding BilboConsult — set the other two in motion. When my long-time friend Stefan Holtel invited me to submit to VikingPLoP, a conference on pattern languages, I hesitated. Pattern languages come from architecture and software engineering — rigorous, structured, peer-reviewed. I come from decades of doing the work, not writing about it.

But I kept a reflection habit throughout the founding process, and the patterns kept surfacing. Problems I recognized. Solutions that worked — or didn’t. Forces pulling in opposite directions. So I started writing.

The paper

“Finding Your First Client: A Pattern Language for Early-Stage Consulting Startups” documents nine patterns across three phases — from establishing your market signal to landing that first paying engagement. At its heart is what I call the Consulting Credibility Bootstrap: the paradox of needing a track record to win clients while having no way to build one without them.

What makes it unusual is that it’s a live field report. I wrote it while living through the patterns, not looking back on them. The paper includes real missteps, real pivots, and honest gaps where the outcome was still unknown at the time of writing.

You can read the conference version here:

Download the paper (PDF)

Gratitude

This paper would not exist without the people who shaped it.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock shepherded the paper through multiple revisions with patience, precision, and a gift for asking the questions I was avoiding. Stefan didn’t just convince me to write it — he walked alongside the entire process, from first outline to final edits.

The sparring partners who stress-tested my thinking throughout the founding journey — Reetta, Teemu, Ville, Marko, Rob, Michael, Olli, Mathias, Mike, Nikke, Toomas, Pauliina, Edwin, and the wider Business Espoo community — will find their fingerprints throughout the patterns. Every honest conversation shaped the framework.

And to everyone who read the peer review version in March and sent feedback: thank you. You made the paper better than I could have alone.

What’s next

This week I’m in Jerisjärvi to present the paper and participate in the writers’ workshops that are central to VikingPLoP. The process doesn’t end with the conference — it’s where the next round of refinement begins.

If the patterns resonate with your own experience of starting something new, I’d love to hear from you.

April 7, 2026
Finding Your First Client — An Academic Paper Born from a Real Consulting Launch
I have never been a very academic person. I haven’t studied at university, and I haven’t published an academic paper before. Then again, until five months ago I also had never started my own company either.

But what I have always done is reflect on what I’m doing — thinking about the methodology, the patterns, and the lessons hidden inside the experience. So when a good friend invited me to join VikingPLoP, a conference on architectural patterns, an idea clicked: what if I turned the lessons from launching BilboConsult into a proper pattern language paper? My learning becoming something other people can use too, and I also dig into the world of academic writing and pattern languages.

From reflection to framework

Pattern languages — a method originating from architecture — describe recurring problems and their solutions as interconnected patterns. Instead of writing a business plan or a how-to guide, I chose to document what I was learning as nine interdependent patterns, each with the forces that pull in different directions, the solution I found, and honest reflection on what worked and what didn’t.

The core problem the paper tackles is the Consulting Credibility Bootstrap: you need a track record to win clients, but you can’t build a track record without clients. That paradox defined my first months as an independent consultant — and it became the thread running through the entire paper.

The nine patterns

Fig. 1: Finding Your First Client — Pattern Language Overview

The paper presents nine patterns organized in three phases:

Establishing Foundations — Signal the Market, Listen to Market Gravity, Narrow Your Beachhead. These form a feedback loop: your signal generates market responses, those responses reveal where your real pull is, and that sharpens your positioning.

Building Evidence — Be Your Own Customer, Harvest Your History, Join Forces, Connect with Brokers. Different strategies for building credibility when you don’t yet have consulting references.

Converting to Revenue — Conduct a Warm Rehearsal, Land the Anchor Deal. Moving from conversations to contracts.

The patterns aren’t a checklist. They work as a toolkit — you weave between them based on your situation.

Signal types and what I learned

Fig. 2: Signal Types and Market Response

One of the most concrete findings: three distinct signal types produced measurably different responses. Authenticity beats self-marketing for building relationships, but mentioning a specific, urgent market problem is what converts attention into potential revenue. Both signal types matter — authenticity opens doors, but the problem-specific hook is what pulls prospects through them.

The journey

BilboConsult journey: October 2025 – March 2026

What makes this paper unusual for the academic world is that it’s a live field report. I’m not looking back on a successful journey — I’m writing from the middle of it. The paper documents real mistakes (like marketing to the wrong beachhead for two months because of confirmation bias), real pivots (narrowing from broad SIAM transformation to AI governance advisory), and patterns where the outcome is still unknown (I haven’t closed my first client yet, and the paper says so).

Why I’m sharing this now

The paper will be presented at VikingPLoP 2026 in April. The conference version deadline is March 26. Before submitting, I want to do something the academic process doesn’t always allow: open the paper to broader peer review.

I’ve been fortunate to work with Rebecca Wirfs-Brock as my shepherd throughout the process. Her feedback has been invaluable. But a paper about consulting practice deserves feedback from other practitioners — people who’ve started practices, navigated the credibility gap, and built client relationships from scratch.

The paper

You can read the full paper here:

Download: Finding Your First Client — A Pattern Language for Early-Stage Consulting Startups (PDF)

Share your perspective — or join the peer review group

The paper includes ten reviewer questions embedded throughout the text, designed to guide feedback on the patterns, the honesty of the narrative, and whether the framework resonates with real experience. But you don’t need to follow those — any perspective is welcome.

If something rings true, tell me. If something feels off, I want to hear that too. A quick comment is just as valuable as a detailed review.

For those who’d like to go deeper, I’m forming a small peer review group of practitioners willing to read the paper and share structured feedback. This isn’t a formal academic review — it’s a conversation between people who’ve navigated similar terrain.

What’s involved:
- Read the paper (~8,000 words, 30-minute read)
- Share your thoughts — on the embedded questions, or in your own way
- Feedback by March 24 (so I can integrate it before the March 26 conference deadline)
- You’ll be acknowledged in the paper’s acknowledgments section
Interested? Send me a message at martin@bilboconsult.com or comment below. I’ll share the paper with commenting access so you can mark up directly.

I’ll also be reaching out to a few trusted sparring partners directly, but the more diverse the perspectives, the stronger the paper becomes. If you’ve started a consulting practice, navigated a career transition into independent work, or simply have a practitioner’s eye for what rings true — I’d value your input.

Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant at BilboConsult OY, Helsinki. He brings four decades of transformation leadership across Cognizant, Tieto, HCL, Nokia, and AXA Tech to help organizations navigate complex IT governance challenges.
March 18, 2026
Starting a New Season

Five months ago I registered BilboConsult as a company. At the time, I thought I was starting a business. I was wrong — or at least, I was thinking too small. What I’m actually doing is starting a new season of my life, and the business is just one part of it.

Let me back up.

I spent over forty years in IT management — at Nokia, Cognizant, Tieto, HCL, AXA Tech, and a handful of others. Big organizations, complex transformations, the kind of work where you spend years learning how to hold things together when everything wants to fall apart. Crisis management, service integration, governance. I got good at it. I loved it.

Then last year, at sixty, I decided to do something I’d always thought about but never quite dared: build something of my own.

The honest version

I could write the polished version of this story — the one where I had a clear vision from day one, executed a brilliant strategy, and here we are. But that’s not what happened.

The first few months of BilboConsult were messy. I built a website. I wrote a go-to-market plan. I networked. I studied frameworks and positioning and all the things you’re supposed to do. Some of it was useful. Much of it was premature. I was moving fast without being clear about where I was actually going.

So in early March, I did what I’d advise any client to do: I stopped, took an honest look at what was working and what wasn’t, and made a deliberate pivot.

What changed

The pivot wasn’t dramatic from the outside, but it was clarifying from the inside. Instead of trying to be everything — fractional CIO, SIAM consultant, transformation advisor — I asked a simpler question: where does my forty years of governance experience meet the most urgent market need right now?

The answer turned out to be AI governance.

Not the technology side of AI — there are plenty of brilliant people working on models and algorithms. But the governance side: risk management, human oversight, documentation, incident response, compliance frameworks. The EU AI Act lands in August, and most organizations are treating it as a technology problem. It’s not. It’s a governance problem. And governance is what I’ve been practicing my entire career.

That realization sharpened everything. The positioning, the partnerships I’m developing, the content I want to create — it all started to align.

What else is growing

But here’s the thing about starting a new season: it’s not only about work.

I’m learning Finnish. Not conversational Finnish picked up over coffee — I’m in an actual classroom, at A1 level, stumbling through verb conjugations alongside people half my age. It’s humbling in the best way. There’s something about being a genuine beginner again that recalibrates your relationship with competence. You can’t hide behind expertise when you can barely order lunch.

I’m also writing an academic paper. It’s for VikingPLoP, a pattern language conference, and it documents patterns for experienced professionals starting a consulting practice. The strange thing about writing an academic paper on your own live experiment is that you can’t hide behind theory — the results are unfolding in real time, and the paper has to be honest about that.

And I’m working with AI in ways I didn’t expect. Not just studying AI governance — actually using AI tools as a daily operating partner. Building systems, writing, thinking, planning. It’s changed how I work, and it’s given me a practitioner’s perspective that most governance consultants don’t have.

Slow is fine

None of this is happening fast. BilboConsult is pre-revenue. The partnerships I’m building are in early conversations. The Finnish course runs through June. The paper isn’t submitted yet.

A few months ago, that slowness would have bothered me. I would have seen it as falling behind. Now I see it differently: things are taking root. The direction is right. The foundations are solid. And I’d rather build something real than rush something hollow.

I named the company after Bilbo Baggins for a reason. Not because of the adventure — because of the unexpected journey. The one where you leave your comfortable life, discover capabilities you didn’t know you had, and come back transformed. The journey matters more than the speed.

What to expect from this space

This is my first post here, but it won’t be the last. I’ll be writing about AI governance — what the EU AI Act actually requires, how existing governance frameworks map to it, and what organizations should be doing now. I’ll share what I’m learning, both professionally and personally. And I’ll be honest about the journey: what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m figuring out along the way.

If you’re navigating a similar transition — whether it’s starting something new, finding your footing after decades in corporate life, or trying to make sense of the AI governance landscape — I’d love to hear from you.

The season is just beginning.

Martin Kallenbach is the founder of BilboConsult, an independent IT management consultancy based in Helsinki, Finland. He brings over forty years of experience in IT governance, service integration, and organizational transformation.

March 11, 2026

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