Category: Uncategorized
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Technical and Adaptive AI Transformation
In 2013 the American surgeon and writer Atul Gawande wrote a New Yorker piece in which he looked at the reasons why some innovations spread almost instantly whilst others can take decades to be adopted. He used a fascinating medical example, telling the story of how the use of anaesthesia (introduced in 1846) had spread…
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The Erosion of Judgement
Regular readers will know how passionate I am about protecting critical thinking in the age of AI, and avoiding cognitive surrender to the machine. The lens through which I look at this subject is typically strategy and leadership, and I thought it would be super-interesting to get another, different perspective on it from a real…
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Our Shrinking Sense of Agency
Two months ago Johnnie Moore wrote an unusually thought-provoking post over on LinkedIn referencing Stephen Covey’s circles of control, influence and concern: ‘More and more, I think our culture and technology is dragging our fragmented attention further and further away from what we can influence. I know I can easily be lured into excitable content…
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AI and the three types of problem in the world
I spent a couple of days this week working with a leadership team on the topic of decision-making in adversity and the session kept returning to the same territory – the importance of diagnosing the kind of challenge that is in front of you. We had a particularly interesting debate around the difference between complicated…
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The Steinway System
In New York in 1919 a young copywriter working at N.W. Ayer was handed an account that few others in the agency wanted to work on. The copywriter, Raymond Rubicam, was asked to write three full page magazine advertisements for Steinway & Sons. The piano maker had long thought that advertising was somewhat beneath them.…
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Cognitive Surrender
Helen Edwards from the Artificiality Institute tells the story of the researcher who, before LLMs came along, read every transcript of every interview he had ever done. He handed that job to an AI and then mid-presentation he had to stop because he realised that he couldn’t speak to any of it. The analysis might have been…
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Thinking (and working) in loops
In early June Peter Steinberger, the developer behind OpenClaw, posted (on X, but I’m not linking to X) something which seems to have changed a lot of influential people’s approaches to working with AI. ‘Here’s your monthly reminder’, he said, ‘that you shouldn’t be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt…
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The Hidden Costs of AI
A couple of months ago the Oxford academic Carl Benedikt Frey wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that, as the application of AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, more tasks that were once handled by professionals or businesses will shift onto consumers. This, noted Frey, is not a new phenomenon. The washing machine may have…
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Strategists, AI and the Edge Effect
In 1933 the American naturalist Aldo Leopold set out a principle which shaped decades of wildlife management. His ‘law of interspersion’ noted that wildlife species that required different types of food and cover thrived where distinct habitats intersected. Animals that required more than one thing to survive concentrated in the areas where those requirements were…
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How Data Won the Premier League
In 2015, Liverpool Football Club hired Jürgen Klopp as their new manager. It was a decision that was met with scepticism by many pundits. During Klopp’s last season at Borussia Dortmund the side had dropped to the bottom of the Bundesliga. But Liverpool had seen something that the pundits had missed. Dr Ian Graham, the…