For the better part of two decades, I have worked at the intersection of governance, risk and technology. In the early years, that work was deeply creative. We were building governance maturity frameworks before platforms existed to automate them. We were translating principles into practical tools that organisations could actually use. The thinking was the work, and the work was the thinking.
Then I co-founded and built a business.
Blue Zoo ran from 2006 to 2021. It grew, we hired good people, and many of them wrote and delivered content on behalf of the firm. They were talented professionals and the work they produced was strong. But the practicalities of running a small consultancy meant that I became the bottleneck, not the creator. When you are juggling a dozen operational priorities, the time and headspace required to iterate on ideas, to sit with a concept until it sharpens, to find the precise angle that makes an insight useful rather than generic, that time disappears first. It is the easiest thing to defer and the hardest thing to get back.
Over fifteen years, I gradually lost the part of the work I loved most. Not because the ideas stopped, they never did. But because the conditions to develop them properly were gone. I was running a business, not doing the work that made me want to build one in the first place.
Rediscovery
When I established Wilk Advisory, I wanted to do things differently. Smaller. More deliberate. Closer to the thinking.
The catalyst I did not expect was AI. Not as a subject I advise on, although I do, but as a working tool that fundamentally changed how I develop and articulate ideas. Working with Claude, I can stay in the concepts. I can iterate at the pace of my thinking rather than the pace of scheduling time with another person, briefing them, reviewing their draft, explaining what I meant, and finishing it. The AI does not replace the expertise or the judgement. It removes the friction that was stopping me from using them.
This is not an advertisement for AI tools. It is an honest reflection on what happened when the barrier between having an insight and publishing it dropped from weeks to hours.
Looking back
Over the past few weeks, I went back through four years of LinkedIn posts. Some were short commentary on articles. Some were event promotions. But a thread runs through the ones that mattered: a consistent perspective on how directors and boards should think about cyber governance, regulatory enforcement, AI adoption and risk.
Some of those posts were prescient. In September 2023, I posed three questions directors should be asking about the Privacy Act reforms. Two and a half years later, every one of those questions has proven more relevant than I expected. In late 2022, I flagged the cyber insurance war exclusion shift after Zurich cited acts of war to deny NotPetya claims. That exclusion framework is now being stress-tested in real time by the Iran conflict.
Some posts missed the mark or were too thin to stand alone. That is the nature of social media commentary: not everything ages well.
But the exercise of reviewing, updating and expanding these posts into proper Insights for the Wilk Advisory website has been unexpectedly valuable. It forced me to confront what I got right, what I got wrong, and where the landscape has shifted in ways none of us predicted.
What comes next
Over the coming weeks, I will be publishing a series of Insights on the Wilk Advisory website, adapted from those LinkedIn posts and updated to reflect where we are now. They cover cyber governance, ASIC enforcement, privacy reform, AI adoption, cyber insurance, automated decision-making and more.
Each piece carries two dates: when it was originally published and when it was updated. I want readers to see the trajectory of the thinking, not just the current position. Where my earlier analysis has been validated, I will say so. Where the landscape has shifted, I will explain how.
But this series is also a starting point, not a retrospective. The commitment I am making, to myself as much as to anyone reading this, is to maintain the practice of developing and publishing Insights consistently. Not as a content marketing exercise, but as a discipline. The best governance thinking comes from practitioners who are actively engaged with the landscape, testing ideas against real situations, and willing to put their perspective on the record.
I lost that discipline once. I do not intend to lose it again.
The first Insight in the series, on the evolving cyber insurance war exclusion and what the Iran conflict means for directors, publishes next week.