Category: leadership
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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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On Changing the System
I wouldn’t call myself an ardent football fan but I am a fan of exceptional innovations and innovators from the world of sport and how they help us to challenge our own thinking. The other day I was talking to a client about systems thinking and change, and they mentioned the example of Johan Cruyff,…
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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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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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Winning the race before it starts
I featured a case study in my most recent newsletter which focused on the theme of changing how the game is played – learning from sports, culture and business examples where the protagonist had flipped the script to rethink norms and gain unprecedented advantage. The example was the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team, and it’s…
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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…
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The Agentic Organisation (redux)
I really believe that AI agents are going to upend everything from organisation design, to strategy formulation and execution, to workflows, to how we interact with data, to how people get stuff done. It’s going to bring such fundamental change that we need to start thinking now about how we can take a more deliberate…
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Productive and Generative learning
I came across Tony O’Driscoll’s ideas around productive and generative learning via Robert Guidi’s LinkedIn post which seems to have stirred up quite a bit of debate in the comments about the future of AI learning & development. Anyhow, I was interested in the delineation which Tony makes: Productive learning is about efficiency and applying…
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Bimodal working, and why we’re having the wrong debate about WFH
Margaret Heffernan makes a great point in her post about WFH and why focusing on arguments about the number of work days that should be based in the office or at home is really the wrong debate to have. The issue, says Margaret, is not about the number of days in the office, it’s about…
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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…