Month: November 2025
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Why systems beat goals
When I wrote my first book about agility and business transformation I wrote about the idea that in leading change, systems beat goals. It’s a principle that I keep coming back to, both in my transformation work with businesses and in a personal context with things that I’d like to achieve or change in my life. There’s…
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AI Transformation and ROI: Bottom-up trap, top-down fantasy
Last week I was asked to take part in a Cambridge Judge Business School panel on AI transformation. It was a pretty wide ranging discussion but there was a useful lens on this given by the latest McKinsey State of AI 2025 report which had just come out. There were some interesting findings about enterprise adoption of…
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How to be interested (Part Two)
In Part One of How to be Interested I wrote about the value of intellectual curiosity and humility in an increasingly algorithmically curated and AI-mediated world. It was a call to be more deliberate about optimising our signal to noise ratio in a world where a cacophony of AI-content is at risk of drowning out the pearls…
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In praise of working at the edge
Over a decade ago Oliver Burkeman wrote what I think is one of my favourite short op ed pieces of all time on the topic of how ‘everyone is totally just winging it, all the time’. The piece was well-shared at the time, in large part I think down to the fact that it touched…
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The Future of Agencies in the Age of AI
Last week I spoke at the Google Partner Summit in Dublin about managing agency change in the era of AI, and then moderated a panel of exceptional agency leaders including Pats McDonald, Christina Lemieux, and Liam Wade. In my talk I spoke about the need to combine optimisation and efficiency focused efforts with transformational thinking to reinvent processes, workflows and…