Category: insight
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The Great Unbundling of Work
On 4 May 1948, the US Supreme Court ruled in a landmark antitrust case that would change the way that Hollywood studios worked forever. Until that point the studios had owned everything, from the production lots, through to the cinemas that the films played in. Actors, Directors and writers were tied in to long-term, exclusive…
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On Getting Older, and Building Meaning
Every so often an essay or post comes along that when you read it, your only wish is that it had come from your brain and your keyboard. Packy McCormick’s Riding the Leopard was one such post for me. If you missed last week’s edition, this account of a talk which Packy gave at The Mountain event in…
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Creating an AI Braintrust
Years ago, when I first read (Pixar co-founder) Ed Catmull’s brilliant book Creativity Inc, I remember really loving their ‘Braintrust’ idea. This is where a group of Pixar’s finest creative brains come together regularly to review outputs and provide candid, constructive feedback on films in development. Ed Catmull described at the time how the job of the…
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The AI Inevitability Trap
If there’s one phrase that best expresses the two-way nature of the relationship between humanity and technology it’s probably Father John Culkin’s quote (often attributed to Marshall McLuhan): ‘We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us’. Humans create the technology, but that technology later shapes human behaviour, culture, perceptions, norms, and even the physical…
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The Brodie Helmet Problem
When the Brodie helmet, designed by John Leopold Brodie in 1915, was introduced to the British Army in the First World War it was intended to protect the soldiers from flying shrapnel. Until 1915 soldiers went into battle wearing soft cloth caps but it soon became apparent from the huge number of fatal head wounds from…
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Cognitive Sovereignty
Cognitive outsourcing (the idea of letting AI do your thinking for you) is being discussed a lot right now. but the term ‘cognitive sovereignty’ is probably a better way to describe the risks involved in this practice because it captures the nuance of how we actually work with AI to get the best from both…
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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 confused as they might be, these terms can also carry with them a…
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Using AI to Ask Better Questions
I wanted to go deeper on a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work – how do we genuinely break out of assumptions that can hold us back (including those we don’t even know we have). And ultimately, how can we ask better questions? I’m increasingly minded to believe that, with AI capability…
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The Clown and the Editor in Creative and Strategy Workflows
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…
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The differences between how LLMs and humans learn
I’m not a technical AI expert but I have tried hard to learn more about how LLMs work, mostly so that I can better understand the role that AI can play, its potential and its (current) limitations, and how humans can best work with AI in a 1 + 1 = 3 kind of way.…