ABOUT
Why do capable people struggle to get things done in organisations that have everything they need?
I learned what a good organisation felt like before I understood what it took to run one.
My family had a small Michelin-starred restaurant in Norfolk.
My mum is an artist, and she ran the front of house that way. The room, the lighting, the timing, the welcome. Nothing was accidental.
Money was tight, the team was small, and I was regularly drafted in as a teenager with precisely zero hospitality experience. And yet I knew what good looked like. Everybody did.
I didn’t need to be exceptional. The place around me made it surprisingly easy to rise to the standard. We couldn’t do everything, so we did what mattered.
Good organisations don’t require people to be heroic. They make it easier for people to be good.
Then I entered corporate life.
There were huge budgets, thousands of smart, capable people and good intentions everywhere. And yet getting things done often felt like wading through treacle.
I spent the next 25 years trying to understand why.
I led transformations, worked with executives and watched brilliant teams produce exceptional work that somehow struggled to survive beyond their own boundaries.
Again and again, I saw brilliant work created in one team, one function or one corner of an organisation. The difficult bit came when we tried to scale it.
We were very good at building islands of excellence. We were much less good at changing the sea around them.
And when things weren’t working, our instinct was almost always to add something.
Another initiative. Another process. Another transformation.
I started wondering whether we’d got it backwards.
What if the answer wasn’t doing more, but removing the things making everything unnecessarily hard?
The more organisations I worked with, the more I recognised the same problems wearing different clothes.
Perfectly sensible decisions accumulating into something that no longer made sense.
So I started writing things down.
Recurring problems became Patterns. Consistent observations became Laws. Convincing explanations that sent us in the wrong direction became Rational-Lies. Things that helped became Tools.
That’s how Blood Sweat & Business came about.
It’s my attempt to make the things holding organisations back easier to see, talk about and change.
I’m Lizzy Arnold.
I’ve spent 25 years working across 60+ organisations and 15+ industries, from Accenture and major corporates to founder-led businesses.
My work has won International Business Transformation of the Year. I’m the author of We Need to Talk About Agile, have been featured in Forbes, and have spoken at London Tech Week and the Serial Acquirer Symposium.
I don’t have every answer, and I don’t particularly trust people who think they do.
But I’ve learned to recognise quite a few things that get in the way.
For years, I helped organisations build better islands.
Now I’m interested in the sea.