Year: 2025
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The Agentic Organisation (redux)
I really believe that AI agents are going to upend everything from organisation design, to strategy formulation and execution, to workflows, to how we interact with data, to how people get stuff done. It’s going to bring such fundamental change that we need to start thinking now about how we can take a more deliberate…
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On the value of ignorance
I loved listening to Rory Stewart’s podcast series on the long history of ignorance. It’s a wonderfully thought-provoking and counter-intuitive premise for an intellectual exploration and Stewart delivers it well. In the series he makes the argument for how we should embrace ignorance as a fundamental aspect of human existence, and why exploring what we don’t…
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The progression of AI agents
I truly believe that with AI agents we are on the cusp of huge change – in organisation design, strategy, operations, staffing, customer experience – just about any and every area of the organisation will be impacted. And as I wrote a few weeks back, the agentic organisation will operate a lot differently to the businesses and…
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Productive and Generative learning
I came across Tony O’Driscoll’s ideas around productive and generative learning via Robert Guidi’s LinkedIn post which seems to have stirred up quite a bit of debate in the comments about the future of AI learning & development. Anyhow, I was interested in the delineation which Tony makes: Productive learning is about efficiency and applying…
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Why critical thinking is even more important in the age of AI
I was really struck by this post from Dr Philippa Hardman who has done a fantastic job of reviewing five recent studies on the impact of Gen AI on learning. Many have hailed the potential of generic LLM tools in supporting learning but as Dr Phil points out, an increasing body of research suggests that generic AI…
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Bimodal working, and why we’re having the wrong debate about WFH
Margaret Heffernan makes a great point in her post about WFH and why focusing on arguments about the number of work days that should be based in the office or at home is really the wrong debate to have. The issue, says Margaret, is not about the number of days in the office, it’s about…
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Brands, and Latent Space
Reading Jack Smyth’s reflections on the recent BRXND Marketing x AI conference in LA I came across the idea of ‘latent space’ as it relates to brands and LLMs. I confess I’d not heard the term before so I did some digging to find out more about what it means, and I think it’s a…
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On DeepSeek and hiring experience
There was an interesting detail in Ian Leslie’s latest newsletter about DeepSeek: ‘DeepSeek explicitly hires inexperienced programmers. They’ve said their ideal employee has 3-5 years of experience and that if you have 8 or more they won’t even consider you. In industries that exist at a frontier of rapid innovation, experience is a burden, knowledge…
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What Darwin, Faraday and Wollstonecraft teach us about navigating an overwhelming world
I’ve been listening to Human Intelligence, a wonderful podcast from the BBC which features short (15 minute) episodes focusing on ‘brilliant thinkers with 50 stories that celebrate the human mind’. Like one of it’s subject thinkers Socrates, Human Intelligence is concerned with how people think rather than what they think, and I loved the way that they organised an impressive…
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On the Agentic Organisation
The next wave of AI innovation is already upon us, and it’s the era of agentic AI. In fact, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has already said that ‘agentic’ will be the word of 2025. The pace of progression has been remarkably fast from simple chatbots that were primarily designed to engage in conversation, answer questions,…