My three interesting things this month…
1. Why conversations become your edge, when AI makes CVs ordinary
We’re moving into a world where CVs, cover letters and job applications are becoming commoditised.
AI can help people produce cleaner CVs, sharper LinkedIn profiles and more polished applications in minutes. The baseline quality of candidate materials is rising fast, and the documents themselves are becoming less useful as a differentiator.
But a lot of people still approach interviews as if the old rules apply. They get asked an opening question and spend the next five minutes walking through the basics of their CV.
In an attention-starved economy, almost no one cares. That sounds harsh, but it’s true.
In reality, interviewers are trying to answer a much simpler question: Can this person help me solve a problem I care about?
That’s the standard now. So in an AI-powered market, your edge isn’t a prettier CV, a longer case study or a more rehearsed story.
Your edge is how quickly you can make the conversation relevant. The best candidates do this through a simple three-step sequence:
Step 1: Diagnose
Most people jump into performance mode too quickly. They want to prove themselves, so they reach for stories, achievements and examples.
But if you don’t understand the real problem in front of you, your answer will always feel slightly off and generic, no matter how impressive it is.
Strong candidates diagnose first. They ask good questions, listen properly and try to understand what’s going on underneath the role, the brief or the hiring need.
That might sound like:
- “What does success in this role look like after six months?”
- “What are the biggest challenges the team is dealing with right now?”
- “Where do people usually struggle when they step into this role?”
Those questions do two things: help you give a better answer and signal maturity.
The best interviewers aren’t just looking for someone who wants the job. They’re looking for someone who understands business problems.
2. Prescribe
Once you understand the problem, then talk about what you’d do.
Many people get this step wrong by doing a light diagnosis, then jumping into a generic story they prepared in advance.
The problem with stories is that there’s often a massive gap between what you’re describing and what the interviewer is actually worried about. A case study only lands when the connection is obvious.
So after diagnosing, prescribe. Show how you’d think about solving their problem.
Not a random problem. Not a vaguely similar one from three jobs ago. Their problem.
At this stage, you won’t have all the details, but that doesn’t matter. The important thing is to show your thinking, rather than pretending to know everything already. For example:
“From what you’ve said, it sounds like there are three issues here: reporting is too slow, confidence in the numbers is weak and the team is spending too much time reworking things manually. I’d start by stabilising the reporting process, then tighten controls, then rebuild stakeholder confidence through clearer commentary and more decision-focused insight.”
This kind of answer works best because it shows judgement, structure and commercial understanding.
3. Credential
Only now should you bring in your example.
Examples are what most people start with. But in reality, they work much better once you’ve diagnosed the issue and prescribed an approach.
In this order, your example becomes proof rather than performance.
Now you can say:
“I saw something similar in my last role, where different departments were working from different assumptions and confidence in the forecast was low. I reset the process, simplified the inputs and introduced a clearer review cadence. Within two cycles, forecast accuracy improved and the stakeholder conversations became much more constructive.”
When a story is attached to a real business problem, it becomes a lot more credible and relevant to the interviewer.
A good credential isn’t there to show how impressive you are in general. It’s there to reduce the other person’s risk. It tells them: I understand this kind of issue, I’ve thought clearly about it and I’ve handled something similar before.
So the sequence is simple: Diagnose. Prescribe. Credential.
In a world where more and more candidates can produce polished applications at the click of a button, this is what separates the strong from the forgettable. The people who win are the ones who can step into someone else’s world quickly, make sense of the problem and show how they’d help.
Get in touch if you’d like help preparing for this.
2. Why frameworks matter more than almost anything else in senior finance careers
One of the biggest differences I see between good finance professionals and the ones who go on to become really strong Finance Directors and CFOs isn’t intelligence, technical skill or even experience.
It’s frameworks.
In my view, the single most important capability for progression into Director and CFO roles is the speed at which you can figure out, create and apply frameworks.
A framework is just a clear way of structuring something complicated. It helps you make sense of messy information, communicate it simply and move people towards action.
And the more senior you become, the more your job is exactly that.
At junior levels, your value lies in accuracy, effort and delivery. At senior levels, your value comes from clarity.
Can you make sense of complexity? Can you simplify without dumbing things down? Can you help people see what matters, what doesn’t and what should happen next?
Frameworks are what make that possible.
Once the framework is right, everything underneath gets easier
When people to struggle to solve problems effectively or sell an idea internally, it often isn’t because they’re bad communicators.
Usually, it’s because they don’t have the right framework yet. Once you do, a lot gets easier.
- Communication improves because you know how to explain the issue.
- Problem solving improves because you can see where the real issue sits.
- Planning improves because you can break the work into sensible parts.
- Influencing improves because people can follow your thinking.
- Even confidence improves, because you’re no longer speaking around half-formed ideas.
That’s one reason senior finance leaders can look calm in messy situations. They might not have all the answers, but they’re very good at finding a structure that helps them work the answer out quickly.
Put simply: they don’t just think harder, they think better.
The best CFOs do this constantly
One CFO client of mine references or creates four to six frameworks in a 30-minute conversation.
Not because he’s trying to sound clever or because he’s memorised a set of consulting buzzwords. It’s just how he thinks.
He’ll use one framework for a people issue, another for a commercial decision, another for a change challenge, then simplify a strategy discussion into a handful of moving parts that everyone can understand.
The best CFOs do this to create clarity in real time, and that’s a huge part of what makes them valuable.
A lot of people think progression comes from having better answers. I don’t think that’s quite right.
Progression comes from being able to frame the problem better than other people can, because once the problem is framed properly, the answer is usually much easier to find.
A good framework can change how people see the whole business
I saw this very clearly while working with a CFO whose business had six pillars to its offering.
That was fine on paper, but much too complicated in reality. Even though the business could explain what it did, the explanation never quite landed.
So I reframed it.
Instead of six separate pillars, I created a framework that showed how different parts of the business actually interacted: three consecutive circles and three layers of a pyramid.
Within 15 minutes, the founder said it was the clearest anyone had ever explained his business. That’s the power of frameworks.
Nothing fundamental had changed. We hadn’t changed the strategy, the offering or the facts. We’d changed the shape into something people could actually understand.
In finance, so much of our job is helping other people understand complex things. Performance. Risk. Trade-offs. Investment choices. Operating models. Team design. Transformation priorities.
If you can’t frame those things simply, your impact will always be lower than it should be.
Why this matters for Director and CFO progression
As you move upwards, your role becomes less about doing the work yourself and more about helping other people think clearly. Your ability to create frameworks becomes a multiplier.
A strong framework helps a board understand a decision, a team understand what matters, stakeholders buy into a plan and a founder explain the business.
And it helps you avoid one of the most common senior leadership mistakes: drowning people in detail before you’ve given them a way to organise it.
Senior people don’t just bring knowledge. They bring usable structure and that’s what gives them leverage.
How to get better at it
This is hard to learn passively. You only really get good at building frameworks by practising relentlessly.
A lot of your first attempts will be bad. That’s normal. In fact, one of the biggest barriers here is that people give up too early because their first few frameworks feel forced or over-engineered.
Of course they do. That’s part of the process.
One useful place to study this is Ray Dalio’s Principles. In many ways, it’s essentially a book of frameworks. Whether or not you agree with every conclusion, it’s a strong example of someone trying to turn messy real-world leadership and decision-making into repeatable structures.
That’s the muscle to build. Because if you want to progress into more senior roles, this is one of the most valuable habits you can develop. When faced with complexity, don’t just dive into the detail, start by finding the framework.
Get in touch if you’d like help building this capability.
3. Why every finance team needs an AI champion
Most finance teams don’t have an AI problem. They have an adoption problem.
Despite all the tools and opportunities available, most teams are stuck in the same place: they don’t know where to start, they don’t want to look foolish and they’re not sure whether using AI is genuinely encouraged or risky.
Choosing an AI champion in your team can be a first step towards changing that.
The best model is one dedicated person whose role isn’t to do the work for teams or be the only expert, but to coach them through it and help everybody else use AI in ways that actually matter.
Their starting question is simple: What’s your most annoying, repeatable task?
That’s the right entry point because it gets out of theory and into something useful. Ideally, something a team would happily never do manually again.
From there, the AI champion helps them work out whether AI can help, how to test it safely and how to build the habit into normal work.
That matters because the teams pulling ahead with AI aren’t just talking about it. They’re making experimentation easier, building internal capability and committing to finance-wide adoption.
What makes a good AI champion
1) They deflect credit.
If the AI champion becomes the hero of every story, the model won’t scale. Teams need to feel that they solved the problem, built the habit and created the value. The champion’s job is to make other people successful.
2) They never step in and do the work.
The moment they become the person who fixes everything, they become a bottleneck. Worse, they teach dependency. A good AI champion coaches, nudges and simplifies.
3) They aren’t a threat to anyone’s job.
This is critical. If people think the AI champion has arrived to assess efficiency and cut heads, they’ll hide problems instead of raising them. The role only works when it’s clearly positioned as enablement.
4) They think commercially, not technically.
AI champions aren’t the people who know the most jargon. They’re the people who can spot friction, prioritise value and help teams apply AI to problems that matter.
How to start in practice
Start small. Pick one person with credibility, curiosity and enough time to do this properly. Ideally, they should sit in finance, understand how teams really work and enjoy coaching others.
Give them a simple mandate: go team by team and find one annoying, repeatable task worth fixing.
Look for repeated questions, inconsistent answers, control risk and key-person dependency. Those are great places to start because they’re painful, visible and usually full of hidden value.
From there, keep the model simple:
- Set up a shared Teams channel for use cases and lessons learned.
- Create a central repository for prompts, tools and examples that worked.
- If you can, create a safe space where people can experiment without feeling like they’re going to break something.
Then measure the right things. Don’t just ask, “How many hours did we save?”. That matters, but it’s too narrow. The better lens is decision speed, decision quality and impact.
And finally, make sure senior finance leaders use AI themselves.
If the CFO and directors never touch it, the rest of the team will treat it as optional. Finance-wide adoption only happens when leaders make it visible, normal and worth talking about.
An AI champion isn’t there to centralise intelligence, but to distribute it. They help teams solve their own problems, build their own confidence and create their own wins.
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