Martin Kearns has spent more than twenty years telling organisations how to get unstuck. He was one of the first three Certified Enterprise Coaches in the world, the third person ever awarded Advanced Agile Practitioner by Alistair Cockburn, and — in the interest of full disclosure — Andrea's co-author on Agile Transition back in 2012 and one of the closest friends of this company's founders. People had been telling him to write his own book for the better part of a decade.
It took until now. Not because he was short of material — he has enough consulting war stories to fill three books — but because the people most worth reading are usually the ones with the least room in their calendar to write, and getting twenty years of hard-won instinct onto the page is slow, demanding work.
Leading Productivity That Lasts — The PEARL Method is the result, and it opens the way Martin tells most of his best stories: at his own expense. We talked to him about the $200,000 disaster that opens the book, the six words that exposed an "accountability vacuum", the leader in the mirror, and what it actually took to finally get it written down.
(Interview lightly edited for length and clarity.)
The person behind the book
MarionYou're one of the first three Certified Enterprise Coaches in the world, you've advised organisations for over twenty years, and Andrea says in the foreword that people have been telling you to write a book for years. What actually stopped you?
Look, I always wanted to write a book — when you hear it enough times from people, there must be something in it. Time has never been your friend. When you work for consultancies, it's utilisation in the day, presales in the evening. When you're booked solid helping other people fix their organisations, there's no time to stop and think.
The second is more personal. Turning the way I think into clean, finished prose has always been a rough graft for me. I do my best thinking on whiteboards and in conversations, not in paragraphs. So the book stayed where most experts' books stay: in my head, and on a thousand sketches.
When I started my own business, I made the time. And I finally found a way of working that fit how my brain actually works.
MarionAndrea describes you as someone who "reads rooms instead of reports" and "draws instead of documents." How does the way you process the world shape the way you consult — and why did that make a conventional book so hard to get to?
I got tested for dyslexia at roughly the age of 34, and found exceptional skills in Perceptual Reasoning and Processing Speed — helpful in solving new problems — and in Non-verbal (Perceptual) Reasoning, where I can see the relationships in visually presented information. I decided then that this was where I was going to focus my career.
But that same wiring is exactly why writing was a barrier. A book is the most linear, most patient thing you can make. My head doesn't work in straight lines — it works in patterns and pictures and "this reminds me of a client three years ago." Getting that into a structure a reader can follow was what stopped me.
The $200,000 disaster
MarionThe book opens with what you call "my worst consulting disaster" — a $200,000 engagement, a beautiful 67-slide deck, and a team mutiny. Take us there.
An Australian financial services firm hired us to transform their delivery capability. We arrived with a beautiful 67-slide deck: squad models, scaled agile, maturity frameworks, governance structures, and enough change-management theory to fill a bookshelf. The leadership team loved it. To be honest, so did I.
That was the problem.
I had become completely captivated by the aesthetics of transformation. The diagrams looked elegant. The operating model looked logical. The framework looked comprehensive. I was so focused on designing the perfect solution that I stopped asking whether it reflected the reality of how people actually worked.
We implemented the framework exactly as planned. Workshops happened. Teams were restructured. Dashboards turned green. On paper, everything was succeeding.
In reality, very little had changed.
When our executive sponsor left, his replacement asked a simple question: "Why are we paying $200,000 to achieve something we could do ourselves?"
I didn't have a good answer.
That failure taught me the most important lesson of my career: organisations do not change because a framework looks good. They change when solutions are built around the realities of people, culture, constraints, and the work itself.
MarionMr. Grumpy — the fifteen-year veteran — asked you six words: "Who's accountable if this doesn't work?" You admit you fumbled it. What's the right answer? What would you say now?
At the time, I mumbled something about "shared responsibility and iterative improvement," which is consultant language for "nobody."
Today, my answer would be very different.
When Mr. Grumpy asked, "Who's accountable if this doesn't work?", the answer should have been the executive sponsor.
Someone has made the case for change. Someone has gone to the board, secured funding, allocated resources, and decided this initiative is important enough to take priority over a hundred competing demands. In a world where discretionary spending is becoming harder and harder to find, that is not a trivial decision. Somebody is putting their reputation on the line.
That person can delegate responsibility for implementation to consultants, project teams, or transformation leaders, but accountability stays with them.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in organisations is confusing participation with accountability. Everyone wants a voice in co-design workshops. Everyone has an opinion on the operating model. Everyone wants to debate the details. Yet I have seen months disappear in discussions that should have taken days because nobody was willing to say, "Thank you for the input, but this is the decision."
The moment accountability becomes diluted across a committee, progress slows and outcomes suffer.
What Mr. Grumpy was really asking was whether anyone owned the business outcome, not the process.
Looking back, he was right. We had plenty of people accountable for following the methodology. We had nobody clearly accountable for whether the organisation was actually better off as a result.
That is what I now call the Accountability Vacuum.
If you cannot clearly identify whose number is up when the business outcomes fail to materialise, you do not have accountability. You have governance theatre.
MarionYou write that the engagement was "transformation theatre." That's a brutal phrase for work you were paid $200,000 to do. How long did it take you to be able to say that out loud?
Years. Our whole industry is built on never saying it. You wrap the failure in "changing business priorities," you keep the case study vague, and you move on to the next deck. Andrea and I had actually written about this honestly back in 2012 in Agile Transition — we documented our failures across hundreds of organisations — but it's one thing to write about failure in the abstract and another to put your own $200,000 disaster on page one of your book. Saying it plainly was the price of admission. If I wasn't willing to be honest about the worst engagement of my career, I had no business writing a book telling other people how to do theirs.
PEARL and framework fatigue
You don't install a pearl. It forms layer by layer, often beginning with a source of irritation.
MarionPEARL stands for Principles, Enablers, Artifacts, Reinforcements, and Learning. But you're clear it's "not another methodology to implement." So what is it instead?
Most methodologies tell you what to do: follow these steps, adopt these roles, run these ceremonies. PEARL focuses on the conditions that make change stick. Over twenty years, I noticed that organisations that sustained improvement all had five things in common: clear Principles, Enablers that made good behaviours easier, Artifacts people actually used, Reinforcements that kept momentum alive, and a commitment to continuous Learning.
PEARL evolved from an earlier framework I used called BEAN. BEAN worked, but the teams that sustained change always seemed to do two extra things: they deliberately reinforced the behaviours they wanted, and they kept learning and adapting. That's where the R and L came from.
The pearl metaphor felt right because you don't install a pearl. It forms layer by layer, often beginning with a source of irritation. Sustainable organisational change works much the same way.
MarionChapter 2 says the biggest obstacle to productivity is often the leader. That's a hard message to deliver to the people who hired you. How do you make it land without losing the room?
I think it lands because I am not saying leaders are bad people or that they are intentionally creating problems. Quite the opposite. Most leaders are trying incredibly hard to achieve the right outcomes for their organisations.
The challenge is that organisational systems are shaped by leadership behaviour, and sometimes our unconscious actions contradict our conscious intentions. A leader might genuinely want empowerment, but continually step in to solve problems. They might want innovation, but unintentionally reward predictability. They might want accountability, but create approval processes that slow decision-making.
This is not a personal failing; it's a systems dynamic.
One of the key lessons from my consulting career is that culture is often the accumulated result of thousands of small leadership behaviours. The good news is that once leaders can see those patterns, they can change them. Chapter 2 isn't about blaming leaders. It's about helping them recognise how their habits, assumptions, and behaviours shape the environment around them, often in ways they never intended.
The mirror isn't there to create guilt. It's there to create awareness.
Writing it with my-book.ai
MarionAndrea built AIRIA, knew you had a book in you, and called you. How did the process actually work — what did you bring, and what did the system do with it?
Pretty much the way I already work, which was the point. I didn't sit down to "write." I talked. I sent whiteboard photos and voice notes and half-formed stories in the wrong order — exactly the "hundred cats" Andrea complains about in the foreword. What the system did was hold all of it: keep the through-line straight, remember what I'd said in chapter two when I contradicted myself in chapter nine, and give the thing a spine so a reader could actually follow it. Marion shaped the editorial side and kept me honest. What it never did was put words in my mouth or smooth out my voice — every story, every opinion, every bad joke is mine. I no longer lived in fear of prose, grammar, where to place a comma. This gave me the tools I really needed.
What it never did was put words in my mouth or smooth out my voice — every story, every opinion, every bad joke is mine.
MarionWhat surprised you most about finally getting this written — about yourself or about the process?
What surprised me most was realising that I actually had something to say.
For most of my career, one of my strengths was reading widely, researching deeply, and connecting ideas from different sources. I often felt like I was moving chess pieces around a board, drawing on other people's theories, frameworks, and research to help solve organisational problems.
When I sat down to write the book, I assumed that was what I would be doing again.
Instead, I found myself reflecting on twenty years of consulting, coaching, successes, failures, and observations. As I started connecting those experiences, I realised there was a consistent thread running through them. Many of the tools, approaches, and ideas I had developed over the years weren't random at all. They were connected by a set of beliefs about how people, organisations, and change actually work.
The biggest surprise was discovering that the book wasn't really about the frameworks I'd studied. It was about the lessons I'd learned. Once I found that thread, the writing became much more natural because I wasn't trying to win an argument anymore. I was trying to share something I genuinely believed in.
For the reader
MarionWho should read this book, and what do you hope they do differently afterwards?
Experienced leaders who've tried the methodologies and watched them quietly die. People who are a bit allergic to the next framework precisely because they've been burned by the last three. I'm not asking them to adopt PEARL like a religion. I'd settle for one question sticking — one that makes them look at a transformation they're about to greenlight and ask, "What are we trying to do here, and have we honoured the problems that need solving?" If that one question changes one decision, the book's done its job.
MarionYou write in the prologue: "Part of me lives in fear of sharing my thoughts openly." For someone who's been carrying their own book for years and can't seem to start — what would you say to them?
That the fear never fully goes, and that's fine — you just stop letting it have a vote. In today's world there are tools that genuinely help, and that let you still be you. I just needed a way of working that fit me. If you've been carrying a book for years, the thing you're missing probably isn't discipline or talent. It's the right process. Go find it.
If Martin's story sounds familiar — a methodology you've practised for years and simply never had the time to write down — that's exactly the gap we work in. We wrote more about why every expert should write a book.
If you're carrying a book like this one — the expertise is there but the time never is — we'd like to hear about it.