October 2026
Kayfabe at Work
How organizations learn to mistake the performance of competence for competence itself
A team needs a decision. Twelve people join a call. Everyone makes a recognizable contribution. The question remains.
Read the essay
A small company /
An evolving account
Goose Group.
We’re Mike and Alex. We work with people who know their jobs and can see how those jobs could be better. Together, we turn that knowledge into useful tools, software, and ways of working.
Book time with us 30 minutes with Mike and Alex.
Why
People often know more than their tools and organizations let them put to use. AI gives small groups more ability to close that gap. We want the people who understand the work to have more say in changing it.
What we believe
Human judgment matters. An improvement needs to help somebody. Collaboration includes helping others become able to contribute. The process should earn the time it takes.
In practice
We work through real examples, build something people can try, and follow the result into use. Customers keep the tools, the source, and the knowledge to carry the work forward.
The company
We want useful paid work, direct relationships, and room for curiosity, writing, art, and generous things. Smallness gives us choices about how we spend our time and what we bring into the world.
This is where we explain that position, work through its implications, and leave room to change our minds. More about us ↓
What we do
Mike and Alex work across these three areas. An engagement can bring them together around the same problem.
01
We build and operate innovation incubators.
We help people inside a company turn ideas from their own work into useful tools. We run the working sessions, build alongside participants, and help the company take over the practice.
02We build useful software.
We work from the first real example through product design, engineering, release, and use. A small team stays close to the people who need the result.
03We provide executive leadership and coaching.
We work directly with founders, CEOs, and other senior leaders on where to invest, how to organize the work, and what their teams need to carry it forward.
The work, the practicalities, and the engagement arrangements →
About us
Why we exist, what matters to us, and the kind of work and company those beliefs ask for.
- 01.01 Why Goose Group exists People know more about their work than their tools and organizations let them put to use. We want to help close that gap.
- 01.02 What we believe Human judgment, useful consequences, shared responsibility, and enough freedom to try something worth doing.
- 01.03 How the work happens Start with a real task, make a useful first version, follow it into use, and help the people around it take responsibility.
- 01.04 The company we want to build A small company that supports useful work, direct relationships, independence, and room to make things because they should exist.
- 01.05 The people Mike and Alex; the experience we bring to the work. Published
- 01.06 Manifesto The earlier statement of our position, kept here alongside the new synthesis. Published
- 01.07 What we do and how we work Innovation incubators, useful software, and executive leadership. What the work involves and how we arrange it. Published
Essays and questions
Arguments about judgment, organizations, software, and culture. Each essay develops a question in its own right.
- 02.01 Kayfabe at Work A team needs a decision. Twelve people join a call. Everyone makes a recognizable contribution. The question remains. Published
- 02.02 Management in the Age of Mechanical Observation An essay on what a request to be kept in the loop reveals: a century-old separation of planning work from doing it, a status ritual outliving its purpose, and the part of management that visible work cannot replace. Published
- 02.05 Observability Is the New Governance Making work visible is a beginning. Leaders still have to use the evidence, make decisions, and remove the reporting it can replace. Published
- 02.09 Gift, Not Asset A cultural argument for making generous, symbolically charged things without immediately turning them into assets to extract from. Published
Beliefs in detail
The more specific ideas behind the practice, with room to examine where each one helps and where it reaches its limits.
- 03.01 Taste as Infrastructure AI only differentiates when it carries a point of view. Encode judgment so teams can reuse it in tools, workflows, and decisions. Published
- 03.07 Useful, Not Done Useful is a better milestone than done. Ship small improvements, learn from real use, and compound. Published
- 03.15 Collaboration Is Contribution What becomes easier, clearer, or more possible because we work together? That includes helping someone else become able to contribute. Published
- 03.16 The Happy Mascot Problem Office theater protects itself by turning the subject of a system into the system's cheerful spokesperson, but the positive aim is shared dignity. Published
Projects and other pursuits
Tools we want to use, ideas we want to test, and things we want to exist. Some grow through customer work. Others make room for a different kind of curiosity.
- 04.01 Workbenches A place to bring expertise, tools, and real work together. The starting point for much of what we build with people. Practice
- 04.02 Smaak Making judgment explicit and reusable: the principles, constraints, examples, and standards that help an AI do work with taste. Tool
- 04.03 MOOI NIET. A gallery experiment in making, circulating, and living with art. Giving unfamiliar work time to become part of a life. Experiment
Taste and influences
Reading editions of our Smaak packages: philosophy, methods, standards, and principle catalogues. The judgment behind the work, and the thinkers who help us question it.
- 05.01 Goose Group Value for the person receiving the work. Judgment made explicit, useful experiments, and a company with room for gifts. Reading
- 05.02 Rory Sutherland Behavioural science and creative reframing: 75 principles for finding what the usual business brief leaves out. Reading
- 05.03 Mark Fisher Read the words and rituals that keep an organization performing what its people no longer believe. Reading
- 05.04 David Graeber Understand what a ritual is for, who carries the work of understanding, and how the arrangement could change. Reading
If there’s something you want to work through with us, we’d like to hear about it.