I was the loud one.

Shouting had become the default in that house. Mine most of all.

Kids learn fast. They started talking to each other the way we talked to them.

One evening, deep in it, I thought about my dad.

He used to shout too. Later in life he became the calm one. The one everyone gravitated toward without deciding to.

He passed in 2023.

Sitting in my own kitchen, years after, I wasn't wondering what he'd have made of us.

I already knew.

We didn't fix it that night. But we started asking a different question.

Not what's wrong today. Who do we actually want to be.

Chapter Three: The Same Noise, Wearing a Different Uniform

What does a service desk with more than 2,000 open tickets and 600 stalled projects have to do with burnout?

More than I understood at the time.

I walked into that organisation expecting to fix a struggling service desk. What I found was a capable team drowning in noise generated somewhere else.

This was years before I had the words Quiet Ops, but the pattern was already there: stop fighting the symptom, go upstream, find the source, reduce the noise.

Because sometimes the people who look like the problem were never the problem at all.

My son was twelve when he looked at me the way you look at someone you're worried about. We were on a mountain. I was frightened, and it had nothing to do with the mountain.

This is the story of how I got there. Not the dramatic version. The quiet one. Years of noise, building underneath a life that still, mostly, looked fine.

Chapter One of Quiet Ops. Eight chapters. Eight episodes. Real stories about noise, and what happens when you finally go looking for where it started.

Prefer to read it? The full piece is up on LinkedIn.