It being the end of one year and the start of another I wanted to use this as an opportunity to pull together several strands that have dominated my thinking over the last 12 months notably the heightened value of critical thinking and intellectual curiosity, and how AI can be a true thought partner and human amplifier in a world shaped by complexity, nuance and change.
In the past I’ve sometimes wondered what makes the posts that I write here a cohesive whole. I write about what is interesting to me at the time and whilst there are common themes (AI, transformation and change, human learning) I’m aware that topically, I do jump around a bit. But after twenty years of writing publicly I’ve grown to understand something fundamental – writing is how I think. And writing this newsletter has become a fantastic discipline for me for evolving that thinking.
In this wonderful lecture, Larry McEnerney from the University of Chicago Writing Program talks about how writing is often taught as a process that is separate to thinking. We’re encouraged to do the thinking first, and then to write. But good writers, he says, do both at the same time. They think as they write and they write as they think. We are taught to follow the rules of writing rather than to follow what the true purpose of writing is – to change how readers think about the world. And in order to change how readers think about the world we need to work out first (perhaps through the process of writing) how we think about the world.
This idea of switching back and forth between modes of thinking and writing is key to how we do this. But philosophically, it’s also a great way to work through any complex challenge. These posts often start as a note in a text file about an interesting concept or idea, and the initial starting point is disorganised and messy. But through an alternating process switching between thinking and writing it emerges kicking and screaming into the world.
Maya Angelou wrote about dealing with writer’s block: “I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come’”. What she’s getting at is that the first draft of anything is often pretty bad but working through this helps us to find our voice, our story and our point of view.
The concept of ‘mode switching’ is naturally aligned to how the brain originates anything creative. Comedy writer (and founder of The Onion) Scott Dikkers has described this as the ‘clown’ and the ‘editor’. The clown represents uninhibited ideation, the part of the brain that just writes and writes and writes and doesn’t make any judgment about how terrible the writing is. The clown is like a child who says aloud whatever they’re thinking. The Editor embodies critical evaluation. It is calmer, more collected, and effective at judging what is interesting, what is useful, or what is tasteful. Where the clown produces a fountain of new ideas, the editor can pick the one that matters and has the sensibility to explore it and improve it.
Dr Rachel Barr has shown us that this idea for two distinct modes of cognition throughout the creative process is supported by neuroscience. Creative thinking, she says, relies on switching between two neural systems. The default mode network (DMN) is the neural ‘clown’, exploring without constraint, playful, active when we daydream, allowing spontaneous ideas and associations to emerge. The executive control network (ECN) serves as our inner ‘editor’, applying focus and logical evaluation. Our brains naturally go to the obvious solutions or well-worn neural pathways first. Early ideas may feel abundant but predictable. True originality only emerges after the seventh or eighth attempt, after most people have stopped trying.
As I read Rachel’s post I was reminded of that Chuck Close quote ‘Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work’. Studies, she notes, have shown that creative peaks arrive not from inspiration but from persistence beyond the point where comfortable associations run dry. You have to push past the mediocre to get to something remarkable. When we are given a wide scope for creativity (‘write about anything you want’) it can be paralysing for us because it creates competing retrieval strategies in our brains which cancel each other out. The clown and the editor cannot multitask and work alongside each other at the same time – it requires each to do their work and then switch to the other. An early intervention from the editor can kill an idea before it’s had time to properly form.
I’ve been working with a number of strategy teams recently on applying AI through the strategy and planning process and in many ways strategy development mirrors this creative rhythm. When faced with a complex challenge you need the clown’s expansive thinking to understand context and situation. AI can help by assimilating a far wider range of inputs than was ever possible before (category, customer, company and cultural context) and find patterns that you might never have found and connected.
But then we need the editor to converge, to evaluate what really matters, which signals to pay attention to, where the value is. AI can help here too but this relies primarily on human judgement to assess what hypothesis or angle deserves deeper exploration.
Then you switch back. The clown explores your chosen direction, and AI can play a role in helping us to understand how we can use that insight to develop a way forwards, challenge our assumptions, examine our idea from perspectives that we hadn’t considered before. The editor returns to evaluate what success would actually look like, the practicalities of following this path, and how we can gauge progress and impact.
Back and forth. Diverge, converge. Explore, evaluate. Strategy begins with divergence as the clown explores possibilities without prematurely narrowing the solution space and before genuinely interesting options have surfaced. Convergence without prior divergence produces incrementalism so when the editor arrives too early, strategy defaults to optimising what already exists rather than imagining what could be possible. The result may feel rigorous but it lacks a genuine strategic choice.
In many ways strategy is a creative process. It requires the same kind of interplay between these two neural systems. The clown generates possibilities and the editor shapes them into something usable. Great strategists toggle between these two modes deliberately. They know which mode they’re in and protect each from the other to get the most out of both.
Neither mode can work in isolation but the difference now is that AI can dramatically expand what’s possible in each mode. Used well it can supercharge the strategy development process in a way that draws from the strengths of both – human intuition, experience, evaluation, empathy and abductive thinking combined with AI’s structured thinking, assimilation and pattern recognition. But importantly, I believe that the human should be the driver of this process, not the AI.
To wrap this post I’d like to return to where I began it, with a thought about writing. Scott Dikkers broke his own writers block through systematically allowing his clown free reign. He decided he was going to do 30 minutes of free writing a day with no judgement, and no stopping to correct grammar or punctuation or style. In the first few days quality was low but by day four, he wrote an entire pilot script in one sitting. Quality emerges from embracing a bit of chaos at the start. Bringing in the editor to evaluate prematurely results in a mind that interrupts itself just as the creative thoughts are getting fun.
I’ve written 47 of these weekly short essays in 2025. The more that I write the more the value of writing them has compounded (I’ve used many of the concepts and examples in client work, workshops, and talks). Over the last 12 months the list has grown well beyond my expectations. It’s such a privilege to have an audience that is interested to read about the things that interest you.
I’d like to thank you for reading, and for all the wonderful feedback over the last year.
A version of this post appeared on my weekly Substack of AI and digital trends, and transformation insights. To join our community of over thirteen thousand subscribers you can sign up to that here.
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Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
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