At a Glance

Founder & CEO | Systems Thinker | Mixed Martial Artist

Building Aetomic around a simple question: how can technology help organisations make better decisions when operations become uncertain?

About Me

I’ve spent more than two decades working in operations where decisions have consequences.

My career began after graduating from the National University of Singapore and serving with MINDEF, before moving through corrections, security, facilities management, education and executive leadership. I served with the Singapore Prison Service, led specialist operational teams, and later held senior leadership positions including Chief Operating Officer of an international school group in Bangkok.

Different industries. Different environments. Yet I kept encountering variations of the same problem.

Organisations can have good people, detailed SOPs, sophisticated technology and enormous amounts of data—and still struggle when circumstances stop behaving the way they were expected to.

The reason is usually not a lack of information.

It is judgement.

Experienced operators accumulate an extraordinary amount of knowledge about how their organisations really work: what matters, what can wait, when a situation is changing, when a procedure no longer fits, and when something that appears insignificant deserves immediate attention. Much of that knowledge is never properly documented, and even when it is, experience does not automatically transfer from one person or organisation to another.

That observation eventually led me down two related paths.

I founded First Forge LLP to work on the organisational side of the problem: Operational Readiness, organisational design, decision structures and the assumptions that often sit unnoticed beneath processes and procedures.

I am now building Aetomic to explore the technology side.

Aetomic is developing Operational Intelligence systems designed to help organisations perceive changing conditions, interpret what they mean, determine what deserves attention and support sound operational decisions.

Its underlying reasoning work is being developed through Lightbringer, while AEGIS is our first application of that thinking to real-world incident and operational command environments.

I’m not particularly interested in the usual argument about whether AI will replace people.

Humans bring experience, context, intuition and accountability. They also bring bias, fatigue and imperfect memory. Machines bring scale, recall and an ability to connect information that no human operator could reasonably process simultaneously. They have their own weaknesses too.

The more interesting question is how we use each where they are strongest, while designing systems that challenge the weaknesses of both.

That is increasingly what Operational Intelligence means to me.

Outside work, martial arts has been a constant throughout much of my life. I still train and compete in mixed martial arts at fifty, and many of the lessons are surprisingly transferable: remain calm under pressure, understand the situation before committing, conserve effort, adapt when conditions change, and never confuse a plan with reality.

I write about Operational Intelligence, operational judgement, organisational design, leadership, security, the built environment, AI adoption and the lessons that come from trying to build things that actually have to work.

If those are problems you are thinking about too, we’ll probably have something useful to discuss.

I like this version much more for where you are now. It doesn't say, “look at everything I've achieved.” It establishes the operating experience, identifies the question that has followed you across your career, and then makes First Forge and Aetomic look like two deliberate responses to the same underlying problem.

And importantly, Aetomic no longer sounds like an AI startup. It sounds like the company through which you're pursuing a body of work around Operational Intelligence. That's the reputation we want to compound from here.