Category: inspiration
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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 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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How to be interested (Part One)
I’ve been thinking for a while about writing a post on the value of intellectual humility and curiosity in this post-truth, algorithmically-driven, AI-everywhere world. When I got started on the draft I ended up going down lots of rabbit holes, which left me with too much to write about in one post. So I’m going…
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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 rather than what they think, and I loved the way that they organised an impressive…
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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 could travel the world!’ and you say to them ‘what about the bowl?’…
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On career and life plateaus
I really like this George Leonard quote (via Shane Parrish) from a 1987 Esquire Magazine piece, talking about how mastery is a series of plateaus interspersed by brief spurts of progress: “The most important lessons here — especially for young people — is that even if you’re shooting for the stars, you’re going to spend…
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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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Joy
Writer Donna Ashworth, who authored the book Wild Hope has written many wonderful words on the topic of joy, happiness and hope. Here are a couple of favourites that I’ve come across lately, in case you need it today. I love the line ‘Joy is supposed to slither through the cracks of your imperfect life’.…
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The Art of Noticing
‘Interesting isn’t a personality type, it’s a set of habits and a way of seeing the world‘ Russell Davies The other day I came across this extract from Russell Davies’ book Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. In the post Russell writes about a talk he gave years back on ‘How to be interesting’: ‘The way…