In 2019, we noticed something we couldn't explain with project management. Our best-performing teams weren't the most skilled or the most experienced. They were the ones with the most energy. That observation started a three-year thread that became one of our most important ideas: the Three Literacies.
The Starting Point
It started with a simple question: why do good teams burn out on projects they care about? The answer wasn't workload. It was the gap between the energy a project demands and the energy a team has to give. We started treating energy as a finite, manageable resource, not an infinite assumption.
Perspective
Chapter 1 - Jul 2019. Energy as strategy.
Stretch Culture (Why We Protect Our Team's Energy)
The First Literacy: Health
In 2020, with Dr Tania Wolfgramm, we formalised the first literacy. Health literacy for tech teams isn't about gym memberships. It's about recognising the signals: sleep patterns that predict decision quality, stress responses that compound through sprints, movement habits that affect afternoon focus. Practical awareness, not wellness programmes.
Perspective
Chapter 2 - Jul 2020. Body signals.
Health Literacy for Tech Teams
The Second Literacy: Financial
The second literacy was less obvious. Developers who understand revenue, margins, and business models make fundamentally different trade-off decisions. They don't gold-plate features on loss-making products. They don't optimise for technical elegance when speed-to-market is the constraint. Financial literacy connects technical work to commercial reality.
Guide
Chapter 3 - Aug 2020. Business context.
Financial Literacy Basics Your Team Actually Needs
The Framework
By December 2020, the pattern was clear. Health, financial, and tech literacy weren't three separate ideas. They were three dimensions of the same thing: people who understand themselves, their business, and their tools make better decisions under pressure. The Three Literacies became our framework for building teams that don't just perform, but sustain.
Article
Chapter 4 - Dec 2020. The framework.
The Three Literacies (Health, Financial, Tech)
From Individual to Structural
The earlier posts focused on individual capability. This one shifted the lens. It doesn't matter how literate your team is if the structures around them create unsustainable conditions. Wellbeing isn't a programme you bolt on. It's embedded in workload management, role clarity, autonomy, and psychological safety. Or it isn't embedded at all.
Article
Chapter 5 - Sep 2021. The structural shift.
Wellbeing Isn't a Programme (It's How You Run the Company)
Under Sustained Pressure
Then came the test. By mid-2022, the pandemic wasn't a crisis anymore. It was a baseline. Teams weren't sprinting through an emergency. They were grinding through an era. The performance patterns we'd been tracking showed something concerning: slow erosion without clear recovery points. This post mapped what sustained pressure actually does to teams and what works against it.
Perspective
Chapter 6 - Jun 2022. The stress test.
Team Performance Under Sustained Pressure
The Third Literacy
The final piece. Tech literacy isn't knowing how to use tools. It's understanding how technology shapes options, constraints, and possibilities across the organisation. It's the literacy that connects the other two: health-aware, financially literate, and tech-fluent teams are the ones that outperform consistently.
Article
Chapter 7 - Jul 2022. The complete picture.
Tech Literacy Is the Third Literacy
Why This Series Exists
Most tech companies talk about culture as perks. Pizza Fridays. Unlimited leave nobody takes. We wanted to talk about it as capability. Teams that understand their own energy, their business context, and their technology make better decisions. That's not soft. It's the hardest competitive advantage to copy.
We didn't set out to build a wellbeing framework - we set out to understand why some teams sustain and others don't. The Three Literacies is what we found, and it's the thing we're most proud of that has nothing to do with code.
Isaac RolfeManaging Director