Untangling

Most of what I do starts here. Things look simple on the surface, but don’t quite behave as expected. Progress stalls, conversations loop, and effort goes in without much movement. What appears to be one problem is usually part of something much bigger. These posts explore that underlying shape. The patterns, assumptions, and hidden connections that sit beneath the obvious. Not to neatly “solve” everything, but to see things more clearly and find a way forward.

Clarity Design Practice

All essays in Untangling

  1. A decade of Bold Wise 22nd of April 2026 Bold Wise passed the ten-year mark this month, which felt worth stopping for. Looking back, the work has taken different forms, but the thread through it has stayed pretty consistent: helping businesses make sense of complexity and come across more clearly.
  2. Make it professional, make it pop 20th of April 2026 “Make it look professional.” “Make it look good.” “Make it pop.” None of these are especially clear design instructions. But they are often useful all the same.
  3. Tangles 21st of January 2026 When teams feel stuck, the visible problem is often just one thread in a much bigger tangle of assumptions, incentives, uncertainty, and hidden blockers.
  4. Obvious in hindsight 11th of September 2025 Good design often disappears into the background, leaving outcomes that feel obvious only in hindsight, even when the path there was anything but simple.
  5. Refocusing 4th of February 2025 Fifteen years in, I’m reflecting on the work I do best: untangling complexity, shaping ideas, and helping teams find clearer direction.
  6. What is its job? 20th of May 2022 When a project gets stuck at the level of deliverables, asking ‘what is its job?’ shifts the conversation back to value, purpose, and outcomes.
  7. On asking why, copying, and outcome bias 12th of May 2022 I seem to go through a cycle of thinking I ask ‘why’ way too much, and then, shortly after, that I don’t ask ‘why’ nearly enough.
  8. Bug fix 17th of February 2021 Today, in a handful of lines of pretty much copied and pasted code, I solved a bug that’s been plaguing a client site for months - if not years.
  9. The shape of knowledge 27th of August 2020 I think of knowledge as something like an octopus, a splotchy, wriggling ink-blot shape that stretches out in many directions and across dimensions.
  10. The unknown knowns 9th of July 2020 Last month I suddenly realised I knew far more about a topic than I'd previously thought. This got me thinking about those unknown knowns — the things we don't realise we already know or understand.
  11. The gap between now and next 5th of February 2016 Any project requiring a designer has two states: Where it is now; Where you want it to be. There is a gaping void of uncertainty between the two.
  12. On design 12th of July 2012 Design is about problem solving - working within constraints to achieve a certain, set, and ideally measurable goal. However, the bulk of a designer's role is getting to that problem.

© Alex Magill