In my last two posts I mentioned, almost in passing, that I had changed the name of the system I’ve been building. For months I called it a Personal Operating Model. Now I call it the Faithfulness Coach. A few people asked why — and the honest answer turns out to be long enough, and revealing enough, to deserve its own post.
Names are not decoration. In the work I do with organisations, the wrong name for a function or a process quietly distorts how people use it for years. The same is true here. The name you give a personal system tells you — every time you open it — what it’s for. Get the name wrong, and you’ll optimise for the wrong thing without ever noticing.
What “Personal Operating Model” got right
I didn’t choose the original name carelessly. I’ve spent forty years helping organisations design operating models — the systems, processes, and governance that make things actually work — and when I turned that same lens on my own life, a Personal Operating Model was the accurate description. It captured the structure: where information lives, what happens daily and weekly, what gets automated, what needs my judgment, and what needs a real conversation.
That structure was — and still is — genuinely useful. So the problem was never that the name was inaccurate. The problem was that it was incomplete in a way that mattered.
What the name quietly hid
“Operating model” answers the question how does this run? It’s a structural question — an engineering question. And if that’s the only question your system asks, you will build something efficient that points at nothing in particular.
I wrote in the last post about exactly this risk: a flawless system built on efficiency logic, with no prior question about what the efficiency is for. Tasks done, areas managed, progress visible — and the soul running dry. A name that foregrounds the operating model keeps your attention on the machinery. It rewards you for tuning the engine. It says nothing about the direction of travel.
But the direction of travel was always the point. The core question I built into the system from the start was never how productive am I? It was does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be? That isn’t an operating-model question. It’s a faithfulness question.
The question the system actually answers
So I renamed it after the question it’s really designed to ask: am I being faithful to what I said matters most?
That’s a different standard from productivity, and a harder one. Productivity asks how much you got through. Faithfulness asks whether the things you got through were the things you actually meant to be doing — the relationships, the commitments, the purpose you named when you were thinking clearly, rather than the urgent noise that crowded them out this week.
“Personal Operating Model” describes the structure. “Faithfulness Coach” names the question. Once I saw that distinction, keeping the old name felt like calling a compass a “navigation device” — technically true, and missing the entire point.
Why “Coach” — and an honest word about what it is
I’ll be straight about the other half of the name, because it raises a fair question. “Coach” sounds like a product — something you could buy, or sign up for. So let me say plainly where this stands.
Right now, the Faithfulness Coach is a personal system. I built it for myself, I use it every day, and it is not something you can buy. There’s no waitlist and no launch.
But I chose the word “Coach” deliberately, and not only because it describes what the system does for me — surfacing the right question at the right moment, challenging me toward my own judgment rather than deciding on my behalf. I chose it because I’m genuinely curious whether what I’ve built for myself is something other people would want. I don’t know yet. That’s an honest I don’t know, not a coy one.
So treat this less as a launch announcement than as an open question. More on that at the end.
A word about “Faithfulness”
One more honest note, because I work in a secular Finnish business context and I would rather name this than pretend it isn’t there. “Faithfulness” has a religious ring, and for me the word does carry that — my own purpose is rooted in faith, in being present to my wife and family, and in serving my community.
But the standard the word points to doesn’t require you to share my faith. To be faithful to what matters most to you — your people, your health, your work, whatever you would name in your clearest moment — is a test anyone can apply. The name broadcasts a little before the explanation catches up, and I’ve decided I’m comfortable with that. It is a more honest name than a neutral one would be.
Is your voice still yours?
In the last post I ended on a question I keep returning to: is your voice still yours? — the worry that as we let tools think, write, and decide for us, we quietly hand over the very judgment they were meant to support.
I came across a sharp illustration of the stakes recently. The Oxford mathematician John Lennox, writing about living well in an age of intelligent machines, described discovering a deepfake channel built in his name — fabricated lectures, thousands of followers, his own face and voice saying things he never said. What unsettled him most was not the technology but how easily people believed it: even careful, well-educated people couldn’t tell the counterfeit from the man. When a machine can manufacture your voice convincingly enough to fool the people who know your work, the question is your voice still yours? stops being philosophical. The only real defence is not technical. It is knowing what you actually stand for — clearly enough that no imitation can dislodge it.
The rename is my small answer to that question, turned inward. A “Personal Operating Model” is the kind of thing you could imagine handing to a sufficiently clever machine to run on your behalf. A Faithfulness Coach is not. The whole design rests on the system strengthening my discernment, never replacing it — and the name now says so out loud. What the tools must never take over is authorship of my own life: the source of the idea, the judgment, the accountability for where it all points.
Where this is going — and a question for you
I’ll keep writing about how the system actually works — the review cadence next, most likely, because that’s where a good system most often quietly fails.
But I also want to ask you something, because the “Coach” question is real and I would rather find out honestly than guess. If you’ve been building something like this for yourself — or quietly wishing you had a way to live and work more faithfully to what you’ve said matters most — I would like to hear from you. Not to sell you anything; there is nothing to sell yet. Only to learn whether the thing I built for myself is a thing other people would actually use, and what it would need to do for you.
If that’s you, get in touch at martin@bilboconsult.com or on LinkedIn. Tell me what you would want it to be.
This is the third 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; the second, What the Pope’s AI Encyclical Says to Anyone Trying to Live Faithfully, connects it to questions of AI and human judgment.
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.