About
The Architect Strategy. Mechanisms over motivation. Joy as strategy.
I build leaders like I build systems.
I’m Dennis. I’ve spent years in enterprise operations, modern workplace, and endpoint security.
My flavour of leadership is simple: reduce chaos, protect energy, ship outcomes.
No theatre. No ceremony. Just mechanisms that work.
Where this came from
I learned leadership in the trenches of large, messy estates where “trying harder” was never enough. When a system is overloaded, people burn out first. Mechanisms prevent that.
What I’m doing now
I write playbooks that translate big ideas into repeatable moves. This site is the deployment layer: kits, prompts, and mechanisms you can actually run.
Mechanisms scale. Motivation doesn’t.
Most leadership advice is vibes with a haircut. It sounds nice, then Monday arrives and the team still drowns. I build systems that make the right thing the default, even when everyone is tired.
Working backwards, but for teams. Define the outcome, then engineer the loop that reliably produces it.
What changes for a real human?
What triggers the workflow?
Defaults, checks, rollback.
One KPI that proves it.
Rule: if it matters twice, build it once.
What you get here
Playbooks you can run. Scripts you can copy. Cadence you can repeat. Less meeting drag, more traction.
What this avoids
Hero culture, “alignment” theatre, and the classic mess where everything works only when one person is online.
Leadership Playbooks and HackTheSim are two halves of the same engine.
LeadershipPlaybooks is the structured layer: kits, lessons, prompts, and repeatable moves. HackTheSim is the builder lab: practical AI tools and experiments that turn the “thinking” into executable systems.
LeadershipPlaybooks
Frameworks you can teach. Moves you can reuse. Mechanisms you can run next week.
HackTheSim
Tools for turning AI hype into outcomes. Less fluff, more operational reality.
I didn’t learn leadership in a seminar.
In a previous life, I inherited a security and operations reality that was already on fire. We were drowning in busy work, and the “solution” was always more heroics. That does not scale.
Mechanism thinking
When teams repeat the same failure, it’s rarely a people problem. It’s usually an undefined workflow, missing guardrails, or a measurement gap.
Proof trail (quick links)
A few public references you can open and judge in context.
Five principles I actually use
- Energy beats optimisation.
- Celebrate micro-wins to keep momentum alive.
- Burnout is a silent blocker factory.
- Belief needs rails, not vibes.
- Speak in “we”, then prove it weekly.
- Make progress visible and repeatable.
- Subtraction is a leadership skill.
- If it cannot be explained fast, it is not clear.
- AI without clarity is just chaos moving faster.
- Honesty lowers shields, not standards.
- Humour warms the room, then you do the hard thing.
- Trade spin for spine. Protect trust.
How the playbooks are structured
The blog is the story. The kits are the deployment layer: extra tactics, PDFs, prompts, and practical moves.
- Clarity under pressure
- Do one thing properly
- Subtraction as strategy
- Energy and momentum
- Permission to simplify
- Perspective beats panic
- Cadence that sticks
- Belief through progress
- Leading with alignment
- Say the thing
- Lower shields, keep standards
- Trust through truth
- 📦 Bezos: mechanisms and working backwards
- ⚔️ Bruce Lee: be water
Clear authorship. No weird claims.
LeadershipPlaybooks and HackTheSim are independently created and operated by Dennis Knight. They are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or officially connected to any other person, brand, or organisation unless explicitly stated on the relevant page.