Category: strategy
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The New Agency Operating Model
I recently ran a morning session at the ICOM World Meeting in Porto on the new operating model for advertising agencies. ICOM is the global network for independent agencies and the room was full of agency founders and leaders from markets around the world. A big part of the session focused on a scenario modelling exercise where…
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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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Why Every Company Needs an AI Philosophy
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about that MIT Sloan piece that I shared in FF686 on how ‘Philosophy Eats AI’. The piece argues that three branches of philosophy are already embedded in every AI deployment whether leaders recognise it or not: teleology (what should AI models achieve?), epistemology (what counts as knowledge?), and…
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Techniques for critical thinking in AI augmented strategy
The ever-greater need for critical thinking in the age of AI has been a consistent theme of mine in this Substack. Humans are so-called cognitive misers. It comes very naturally to us to make use of techniques that make things easier for us, and humans have long used technology to outsource mental effort (digital calendars,…
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Designing your agentic AI system
There’s obviously a lot of talk about Agentic AI right now but the reality that I’ve experienced most in teams is that many of the agents that have been built so far are simple, task focused, sequential automations. There’s nothing wrong with this of course (and it’s a logical place to start) but to paraphrase…
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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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How AI rewires how we think
‘Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them.’ This is a fascinating look at how AI is reshaping how the best Go players in the world improve their skills using AI. After AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol ten…
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Leading Human/AI Hybrid Teams
For most of human history, leadership has meant one thing – getting the best out of people. But what happens to leadership in an age where hybrid teams of humans and AI agents will increasingly be the norm? It’s a pretty big question. And one that I’ve been working on to understand better (for a…
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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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The value of craft in the age of Agentic AI
Following the recent release of Claude’s latest model Scott White, Anthropic’s Head of Product for Enterprise, said that he thought we were moving into an era of ‘vibe working’. If vibe-coding was about describing the thing you’d like to build and letting AI write the code, vibe-working is the idea that humans can define outcomes and let…