Category: AI
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Gigantomania and why big projects go wrong
This weeks news about the further delays and overspend costs associated with the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail project had a distinct air of inevitability about it. Government infrastructure initiatives and large corporate projects that don’t overrun and exceed budget are a unique kind of rarity. Oxford academic Bent Flyvbjerg, who co-wrote the excellent ‘How Big Things…
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Superagency: Amplifying Human Capability with AI
There’s something very attractive about the idea of ‘superagency’, the emerging concept that sits at the intersection of AI, organisational design, and talent. It refers to the amplification of individual or team capability through AI, allowing people to operate with outsized influence, speed, and creativity. The idea is that we’re creating a compounding effect where…
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Integrating AI into the strategy workflow
I’m a big fan of the idea of AI amplifying human capability and have long been working to fully embed AI into my strategy work. For me it’s been a real game-changer. It’s not just about efficiency, although it is like having a mini-team of researchers always on hand which is amazing. It’s also that…
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AI, and inflection points in the creative industry
AI has generated a real inflection point for every sector that involves/uses/hires creative thinking and talent. For many creative businesses it can easily feel as though they are facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty or even an existential threat. I’m doing a talk at an upcoming event on AI for creatives and production folk and I’m theming…
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Decoding the real value of AI
When it comes to developing a strategy for AI implementation there seems to be a lot of rabbits in a lot of headlights right now. How do you make sense of all the potential that AI brings to so many areas of the business? How do you understand where the real value is? The myriad…
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On AI model collapse and the era of experience
Will AI end up eating itself? What happens when AI models run out of human generated inputs and are trained on content created by AI? Is there a risk that AI models trained on AI slop become ‘inbred’ and get into a self-reinforcing death spiral of reducing quality? So many questions. AI model collapse refers…
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Is it worth learning how to prompt?
Learning how to prompt better was a real moment for me in the early days of using LLMs. Understanding how to use even quite basic prompting techniques dramatically improved the quality of outputs from AI tools and gave me the motivation to truly integrate their use into my daily workflow. Effective prompting directly improves the…
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Being more intentional in the age of AI
Several years back the brilliant Faris Yakob wrote a triumvirate of posts making the case for a more intentional media diet (post one, two and three). He captured this in the pyramid visual above. The premise was that any content where ideology leads to falsehood (at the top of the pyramid) is simply not good for us and we…
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Technology, functional drift, and collective blind spots
I recently came across a news article which reported that Health New Zealand, the primary publicly funded body set up by the New Zealand government to oversee their healthcare system was using a single Excel spreadsheet to track $28 Billion of public money. An independent report by Deloitte found that the reliance on a single spreadsheet to…
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The Shamrock Organisation
Something like fourteen years ago (crikey) I wrote about the concept of the shamrock organisation, and it’s something I’ve found myself coming back to, notably in my thinking around agentic AI. In the late 80s Charles Handy, in his book The Age of Unreason, used the shamrock metaphor (he was Irish of course) to describe…