From Not on My Watch to Agilis Sentinel

People occasionally ask whether Not on My Watch was written to promote Agilis Sentinel. The truth is that though Not on My Watch seeded the idea to build Sentinel, it was not written with technology in mind at all.

When I began writing Not on My Watch, I wasn't thinking about artificial intelligence, dashboards, or enterprise software. I was trying to understand something I'd witnessed repeatedly over three decades of building businesses, leading organisations, and serving on boards: companies rarely fail because they lack information. They fail because people stop seeing what has gradually become normal.

“Companies rarely fail because they lack information. They fail because people stop seeing what has gradually become normal. They fail because what they tolerate, they cultivate. The book presences that. So does Sentinel”

The signs are almost always there — a customer who quietly leaves, a warehouse where shrinkage becomes "acceptable," a leadership team that celebrates green dashboards while avoiding the uncomfortable conversation, a board that receives accurate reports but never quite gets an accurate picture of reality. None of these failures happen overnight. They accumulate quietly, one compromised decision at a time, until someone finally asks how things got so bad.

That question fascinated me — not because I believed leaders were careless, but because I'd come to understand how easily familiarity blinds us. We stop questioning things. We explain away anomalies. We get comfortable with performance that would once have been unacceptable. That's what Not on My Watch explores. Although it's written as a business fable, it's really an exploration of judgement — what it means to lead when the obvious answers aren't enough anymore, and why organisations often decline long before anyone recognises the decline is happening.

As I was writing the book, another thought started to take shape: if organisations struggle because people can't always see what matters, could technology help — not by making decisions for leaders or replacing their judgement, but by helping them notice what they might otherwise overlook? That question eventually became Agilis Sentinel.

Sentinel was never conceived as another reporting platform or conversational AI assistant — there are already plenty of systems that can retrieve data, answer questions or produce charts. What interested me was something different: could software develop the discipline of continually looking for what should concern a leadership team? Could it recognise patterns before they became crises, connect signals that seem unrelated across finance, operations, supply chain, customer experience and governance, and challenge assumptions instead of reinforcing them? Most of all, could it act as the colleague every executive wishes they had — the one who quietly says, "something doesn't look right"?

That idea sits at the heart of Sentinel. It doesn't replace leadership; it strengthens it. It doesn't claim certainty; it surfaces blind spots. And it doesn't ask leaders to trust artificial intelligence — it asks artificial intelligence to earn that trust, through evidence, transparency and thoughtful reasoning.

Looking back, I realise Not on My Watch and Sentinel are two expressions of the same belief, one working through story and the other through technology. The book asks leaders to refuse complacency. The software helps them recognise it. Neither promises perfect decisions — both rest on a simpler conviction: the greatest risks facing organisations are rarely the ones they cannot see. They are the ones they have stopped noticing.