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 care about what they do and can see how it 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 help people build with AI.
We work alongside people as they try ideas from their own work, from a first connected tool to an internal innovation incubator.
02We build useful software.
We work across product design, architecture, engineering, 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 leaders on decisions about technology, their teams, and the company they want to build.
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.
- 01.06 Manifesto Useful work with people who care, and the independence to say what we think.
- 01.07 What we do and how we work Learning and enablement, useful software, and executive leadership. What the work involves and how we arrange it.
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.
- 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.
- 02.07 See the Work Making work visible should make it easier to understand and act on. If the same status rituals continue untouched, we have added a task.
- 02.13 Gift, Not Asset A cultural argument for making generous, symbolically charged things without immediately turning them into assets to extract from.
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 Write down the judgment that matters, try it against real work, and keep it open to correction.
- 03.07 Useful, Not Done Make something useful soon enough to learn from it, and finish enough of the work that people can rely on what you offer.
- 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.
- 03.16 Ability Is Not Obligation Removing grind should give people room to think, try things, connect with customers, and discover what they could contribute. Greater ability need not become a larger quota.
Projects
Systems, services, and working practices built with customers, alongside projects of our own.
- 04.01 Balsam AI Centre of Excellence We built and operated Balsam’s AI Centre of Excellence, bringing together customer-owned workbenches, reusable tools, shared context, and explicit judgment with hands-on support. Colleagues learn through real work: building useful tools and software, reviewing results, and using source control to make changes others can inspect and build on. The work stays visible as people share what they learn and bring their teams into the practice. A colleague who began without source-control experience now contributes changes and onboards her team, one example among many of the broader enablement work.
- 04.02 Balsam product pipeline We’re building Balsam’s internal product pipeline with its Product and Technology teams: shared rails for moving product work between people, tools, and systems. The pipeline brings together explicit business rules, product judgment, and AI assistance, with human-review interfaces where people can inspect the context, resolve exceptions, and decide what happens next. Observability makes the work, decisions, and changes traceable across the pipeline. Balsam owns the source and infrastructure, with a working foundation its teams can continue to develop.
- 04.03 Just In Case Oregon We designed and built the service behind Just In Case Oregon, which makes no-cost naloxone available by mail to Oregon residents. The work spans service design, a privacy posture that limits the personal information collected and retained, and a simple request journey without accounts or identity checks. An operational pipeline carries requests through review, shipping, and exception handling. We built a working surface for fulfilment and customer-support operations, giving the team the context and tools to manage requests, correct problems, and help people receive their orders.
- 04.04 AEA Italia claims modernisation We’re helping AEA Italia assess how to modernise its claims operations. The analysis connects everyday claims work with larger technology choices: where to adopt specialist platforms, extend existing systems or build new capabilities. We’re examining the tradeoffs in integration, control and delivery capacity, with a focus on where AEA’s own investment could create a better service for insurers and their customers.
- 04.05 BRABUS social media operations We helped BRABUS explore where AI could improve its social media operations. We translated the team’s questions into dashboards and analyses of content, campaigns and product launches, tested available data sources, and made the evidence and its limitations visible. We handed over the dashboards, findings and recommendations to inform the team’s next steps.
- 04.06 Workbenches A customer-owned place to bring real work, judgment, and AI tools together, and improve them through use.
- 04.07 Smaak Judgment that people and their AI tools can apply, question, and improve: principles, constraints, examples, and standards.
- 04.08 MOOI NIET. A gallery experiment in making, circulating, and living with art. Giving unfamiliar work time to become part of a life.
- 04.09 AI Agent Workshop A workshop game where teams teach AI agents to handle simulated maintenance requests. Write instructions, try them in a toy factory, and compete to improve the results.
- 04.10 KaapEngine A recreation of Gerald van der Kaap’s 1996 internet artwork. Search through fragments of poetry to make tiled compositions of photographs, following words into unexpected images.
- 04.11 BlindRom An archive and emulation project for Gerald van der Kaap’s 1993 CD-ROM artwork: images, music, video, and unruly interactive experiments worth preserving.
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 Useful work with people who care. Human-first AI enablement, creative freedom, independent advice, simple arrangements, and room for delight.
- 05.02 Rory Sutherland Behavioural science and creative reframing: 75 principles for finding what the usual business brief leaves out.
- 05.03 Mark Fisher Read the words and rituals that keep an organization performing what its people no longer believe.
- 05.04 David Graeber Understand what a ritual is for, who carries the work of understanding, and how the arrangement could change.
If there’s something you want to work through with us, we’d like to hear about it.