Year: 2025
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The Future of Strategy in the Age of AI
A couple of weeks ago I ran a session with a large agency strategy team focusing on integrating AI throughout the planning workflow. It reminded me of how much I love working with strategists – naturally curious and open people. Towards the end of the session we had an interesting discussion around where this is…
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Think-prompt-think
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight and robbed them with his face uncovered. When police arrested him hours later using surveillance footage, Wheeler was genuinely shocked. He’d rubbed lemon juice on his face (the same substance used in invisible ink) believing that it would make him invisible to cameras.…
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Why good ideas die and how to save them
This week I was running a three day workshop with a group of leaders from an education foundation on the topic of connecting strategy through to execution. We got on to the topic of innovation and began discussing Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The talented group of engineers, computer programmers and scientists that came…
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AI, creativity, and lived cultural philosophies
When I gave a talk to a group of creatives and production agency leaders earlier this year I tried to articulate the reasons why AI would, for a while at least, struggle to capture the indefinable essence of a human-generated work of high creativity. Dr Rebecca Marks (in her wonderful article on art in the age…
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How AI supercharges strategy and planning
I ran a session with a leadership team last week in which we were working through how AI could be a true partner throughout the strategy development and deployment process. One of the issues in discussing this subject is the sheer breadth of application. Similarly to the innovation process, there’s just so many ways in…
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Using AI for simulation and scenario planning in strategy
One of the most eye-opening ways in which AI engines have opened up new possibilities in my work has been through the ability to use them in simulation and scenario planning. It’s enabled me to do things that were previously not an option for me without using expensive systems or tools. As I’ve said before,…
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Transforming systems and thinking differently
I once did a fascinating project with the operations team of a big pharma business helping them to understand how they could combine agile ways of working with Lean manufacturing techniques. As part of the research for it I did a dive into the origins and principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS) from which…
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On the limitations of AI
As much as everyone is getting excited about what AI can do, it’s also important to understand the limitations of AI and where there remains a gap between machine and human capabilities. I wrote a LinkedIn post a while back on this but I wanted to dive a little deeper on this topic as I think this…
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Separating fads from trends, and the second and third order effects of AI
‘Don’t be the dog that barks at every passing car’ Richard Wheldon How should we separate major underlying shifts in technology from the fads that come and go? How do we identify which trends will be long-lasting and high-impact, and which are over-hyped and will change little? The characteristics of a general purpose technology are that…
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Using synthetic personas and research to explore ideas
One of the areas of my work which has been truly eye opening recently is the application of synthetic research (using AI generated data and personas to simulate real-world research scenarios) to explore ideas and open up new thinking. Various pieces of research have shown how accurately AI engines can replicate the responses of human…