Category: insight
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In praise of working at the edge
Over a decade ago Oliver Burkeman wrote what I think is one of my favourite short op ed pieces of all time on the topic of how ‘everyone is totally just winging it, all the time’. The piece was well-shared at the time, in large part I think down to the fact that it touched…
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The Future of Strategy in the Age of AI
A couple of weeks ago I ran a session with a large agency strategy team focusing on integrating AI throughout the planning workflow. It reminded me of how much I love working with strategists – naturally curious and open people. Towards the end of the session we had an interesting discussion around where this is…
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Using AI for simulation and scenario planning in strategy
One of the most eye-opening ways in which AI engines have opened up new possibilities in my work has been through the ability to use them in simulation and scenario planning. It’s enabled me to do things that were previously not an option for me without using expensive systems or tools. As I’ve said before,…
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Using AI as a thought partner
A lot of the focus on the benefits of AI are (perhaps naturally) focusing on efficiencies right now. But one of my favourite ways of using these tools is to challenge my own thinking, to open up new lines of exploration, and to originate new perspectives and ideas that I hadn’t even thought of. If…
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Innovating employee experience in the age of AI
I was lucky enough to give the keynote at the CIPD Change Management conference the other week and one of the speakers there referenced how they’d used change personas to help deal with the variety of different responses to a change initiative. It reminded me of a fundamental principle which I’ve always stuck to when…
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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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Five observations about how we perceive time
As we come to the end of another year that seems to have whistled by it seems an apt moment to pause and reflect on how we, as humans, perceive time passing. I did a bunch of reading on this a few years back but it’s always struck me as a fascinating topic, not least…
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Learning from Formula One
There’s some interesting things happening with Formula 1 right now, and Scott Galloway wrote this week about how the sport is at an inflection point as it tries to build from the huge broadening of appeal that ‘Drive to Survive’ has given it (not least with women). As well as the obvious (fast cars, glamour, drama, exotic…
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On knowledge layering
I was speaking to someone the other day who described me as ‘the consultant’s consultant’ which is a description that I was hugely flattered by (and if I’m honest not sure I deserve). But I suppose I’ve been on this path for almost 15 years now so that must count for something. There are of…
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Navigating uncertainty
I loved the approach that Sam Conniff (author of the brilliant Be More Pirate, and the founder of Uncertainty Experts) takes in the latest episode of Google Firestarters to how we should respond to uncertainty in the modern world. His fundamental point is that we have a choice about how we react to unpredictability and…