Writing this from a departure lounge, waiting for a flight to Doha and then on to Beirut. Tensions in the Middle East are escalating, and I'm hoping things don't kick off mid-flight.

On My Mind

I've spent much of this month working on crisis management frameworks, and I keep returning to a problem I've watched teams struggle with for over two decades. I call it 'linear overload'.

Here's how it plays out. A crisis hits. The team assembles and starts working through their process — assessing the situation, assigning roles, establishing priorities. But the situation isn't static. New information arrives while they're still processing the last update. So they reset. More information arrives. They reset again. Before long, the team is trapped in a loop — perpetually restarting their process and never getting past the first few steps.

The result is paralysis. Not from a lack of capability, but from a process that assumes the world will hold still while the team catches up. It won't.

I've seen this happen to experienced teams in well-resourced organisations. The conventional fix is "train harder" or "communicate better," but those miss the structural issue. The problem isn't the people — it's the architecture of the response.

What I'm working on now are subprocesses that let teams absorb new information without derailing their primary workflow. Think of it as giving the team a way to acknowledge, triage, and park incoming data so the core process can keep moving forward. Early results are promising, and I'll share more as the approach matures.

This Month

Incident Manager

This month I launched a custom deployment of Incident Manager for a customer. I've moved from a Ruby runtime to a Docker runtime, which will allow us to run the app in AWS Fargate. Steep learning curve, but getting it done.

On the AI side, I've been tweaking temperatures, tightening tokens, and experimenting with different prompts to improve the AI features. I also added a new stakeholder analysis feature, which is proving genuinely useful. A lot of this development has been accelerated by Claude Code — tasks that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes, including running a full suite of tests and stepping through screens in an emulator. It's changed how I work.

That said, it's tempting to use AI everywhere. But 25 years of crisis management experience tells me that's a recipe for disaster. I'm being deliberate about making these features a natural extension of team process, not a replacement for functional expertise. It's a challenging balance.

Folio Books

I published my first electronic books in 2020. Since then, I've tried several platforms to manage and sell them, and none quite fit what I needed. So I spent the last year taking notes — what would I actually want if I built this myself?

This month, I built it.

Folio Books is a direct-to-reader sales platform for independent authors. The core idea is simple: authors should own their customer relationships. Most platforms sit between you and your readers. Folio gives you your own storefront — you sell directly, keep more of each sale, and build a customer list you actually control.

It handles the things that matter: payments, instant digital delivery, and customer management. Authors can publish standalone titles, bundles, and series. And it includes the kind of analytics — sales velocity, reader retention, revenue breakdowns — that help you run a business, not just list books.

It's early, and I'm building it for my own use first. But it solves a real problem I've had for five years, and I think other independent authors will find it useful too.

Reading List

Articles worth your time this month.

Picks

AI Command and Staff—Operational Evidence and Insights from Wargaming — Military Strategy Magazine. Read here.

Words Without Consequence — The Atlantic. Read here.

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations — New Scientist. Read here.

More Links

• Donald Trump Has Built a Clicktatorship — The Atlantic
• $50 on war in Iran: How geopolitical bets have surged on Polymarket — Rest of World
• The political effects of X’s feed algorithm — Nature. Also: Turning on the ‘for you’ feed shifted political opinions, but turning it off did not
• Russia’s Grinding War in Ukraine — CSIS
• U.S. Military in the Middle East: Numbers Behind Trump’s Threats Against Iran — CSIS
• Trouble Is Brewing in Syria — Foreign Affairs
• Tracking China’s Increased Military Activities in the Indo-Pacific in 2025 — CSIS
• To understand China, we need to understand the Chinese internet — Rest of World
• Russia’s sabotage campaign is becoming bolder — The Economist
• The Emerging US Influence Threat to British Democracy — RUSI

From the Workshop

Quick updates and links across Spartan9 projects.

Products — Completed a detailed review of our Crisis Exercise Kits with a host of improvements, plus two new scenarios bringing the total to seven. View Crisis Exercise Kits here.

Publications — Dedicating an hour each day to the sequel to Memoirs of an Assassin. Having a great time writing this book — already thinking about the sequel to the sequel. View the Memoirs website here.

Applications — Improving security and performance across all apps, and actively containerising. See Incident Manager, Whistler, Tenacio, and Our Shared Stories.

Training — View all workshops here.

Station XV — Browse the range here.

I'll be away for the rest of this month and most of March. Details once I'm back.

Thanks for reading.

Grant Rayner Spartan9