A solitary figure on a rock by a mountain lake at dawn, looking toward distant peaks.
Richard Sutcliffe

Against
the
obvious.

Technology and governance, viewed sideways.

CTO at ThinkTribal · 25 years in regulated sectors

Read the writing

36 essays · ~175 min of thinking in public

Selected writing

  1. Field note

    Wrong in Public Since 1997

    The footer of this site claims I have been wrong in public since 1997. A claim like that needs receipts. Here are five, dated, each traceable to an essay where the mistake is on the record.

    4 min
  2. Field note

    Nothing Is Invented to Fill a Gap

    I spent 2026 rebuilding how ThinkTribal designs, assures and sells around agentic AI. One rule made it safe to automate: every claim a machine writes traces to a dated, sourced record, or it does not get written.

    4 min
  3. Argument

    The One Skill Every Coding Library Never Wrote

    Twenty-five years leading projects without a psychologist on the team, and I've spent the last few months writing three skills putting user psychology into the code itself.

    4 min
Older essaysBy topic

About

Twenty-five years across architecture, data governance, user research, delivery, and regulated sectors. Chief Technology Officer at ThinkTribal, building production AI tools for social housing and healthcare in weeks rather than months, working with AI as a development partner.

This site is where I think in public about what these tools reveal when you put them on real problems for real people. And about what a broad, cross-domain career turns out to be worth in the age of AI, and what it doesn’t.

The name of this site is a twenty-nine-year-old story about power. Worth two minutes.

25 yearsarchitecture to delivery, regulated sectors
2 production AI productssocial housing and healthcare
Credentials →the record, for committees who check