Category: change
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Organisational knowledge in the age of AI
I’m not a fan of trendy neologisms like ‘prompt engineering’. Marvin Minsky once described how ‘suitcase words’ (high-level and abstract terms) often contain a variety of different, sometimes jumbled meanings. And there’s a lot of suitcase words around AI right now. But
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Re-imagining the corporation in the age of AI
Alex McCann has been doing some interesting writing around the current and future state of corporate work over the past year. He wrote that well-shared (I refuse to say ‘viral’) post on the death of the corporate job which seemed to resonate with a huge number
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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
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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
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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
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Should we learn like an athlete?
‘Knowledge workers should train like LeBron, and implement strict “learning plans.” To be sure, intellectual life is different from basketball. Success is harder to measure and the metrics for improvement aren’t quite as clear. Even then, there’s a lot to learn from
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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
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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
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Breaking out of paradigms
‘What happens with a lot of creative works is that people exist within a paradigm and they don’t realise that they’re constrained by their paradigm. So they’re a little bit like a goldfish swimming around in a bowl, and they say ‘we
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The Lindy Effect, and the optimisation trap
A while back I read Shaw Talebi’s reflections from doing Nassim Taleb’s Real World Risk Institute course. One of the concepts featured in the course is The Lindy Effect – a principle derived from the observation that the future life expectancy of non-perishable entities,