Category: strategy
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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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How to innovate like Amazon
I spent a few days with Diageo’s European leadership team in Dublin recently and whilst there I saw a talk from Amazon’s supply chain lead Marcus Mallon who talked about how the company innovate. Amazon are of course known for their customer obsession and ‘working backwards’, their relentless experimentation and openness to fail, and for combining a long-term…
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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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Technology, functional drift, and collective blind spots
I recently came across a news article which reported that Health New Zealand, the primary publicly funded body set up by the New Zealand government to oversee their healthcare system was using a single Excel spreadsheet to track $28 Billion of public money. An independent report by Deloitte found that the reliance on a single spreadsheet to…
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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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Why critical thinking is even more important in the age of AI
I was really struck by this post from Dr Philippa Hardman who has done a fantastic job of reviewing five recent studies on the impact of Gen AI on learning. Many have hailed the potential of generic LLM tools in supporting learning but as Dr Phil points out, an increasing body of research suggests that generic AI…
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Brands, and Latent Space
Reading Jack Smyth’s reflections on the recent BRXND Marketing x AI conference in LA I came across the idea of ‘latent space’ as it relates to brands and LLMs. I confess I’d not heard the term before so I did some digging to find out more about what it means, and I think it’s a…