Meet the Awkward Squad…

In my quest to end each day still confused, but at a great degree of complexity, I recently completed an Agentic AI training course by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI. It was a valuable reminder of how new AI is and how little we all really know about how to get value from it in a way that empowers all of us humans and the fragile earth we live on rather than exploits and destroys for the benefit of the few.

For example, we all know creativity drives business results, so how can we apply AI in a way that maximises rather than replaces, to use Ollie Scott’s useful framing. After all creativity doesn’t come just from a linear process that is easy to break down into its component parts and agentify. An important part of any project is the “messy middle”, with ideas emerging from the grit in the process itself, from things that you would never think to write down on a project plan.

The sudden deadline that creates urgency that pushes thinking somewhere fresh. A constraint which forces people to think around a problem. Someone who is late but takes a new route, sees something unexpected, and brings an idea that changes the direction of everything. These things are real and they matter, but because they're invisible to any rational mapping of the process, they would get left behind if we set about agentifying the steps we can see. This messy middle is what leads us to creativity and great outcomes. It's a feature, not a bug.

So I tried to use the workshop to try to build something different that could contribute these less tangible aspects of the creative process. I created a 5-agent workflow that I can use across my own work, working title “The Awkward Squad”, designed to help you see what awkward questions, awkward constraints and awkward connections might lead you somewhere you wouldn't have reached on your own.

👩‍👦‍👦 The Orchestrator agent, to understand the project, identifies where fresh thinking is needed and coordinates the other agents

🤡 The Weird User agent, that adopts the perspectives of unexpected users, experts and outsiders who notice things that the project team may never see

😬 The Tough Brief agent, introduces deliberate constraints forcing new ways of thinking to emerge

🌴 The Strange Worlds agent, which brings relevant principles from unrelated industries, disciplines and systems

🗒️ The Synth, an agent to combine the squad's outputs into a coherent report whilst preserving evidence and traceability

It is a work in progress and fairly basic but it's fun to experiment with how to use AI to maximise, to add new thinking and ways of doing things, not just streamline and windtunnel things into a sea of sameness. If we only automate the process map, we risk building a powerful machine for scaling ordinariness, rather than maximising what this technology can genuinely do when humans stay in the lead.

Are you trying to be ready, or do you have readiness?

"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all."
William Shakespeare

The secret sauce behind high performing teams is that they understand it is no good just trying to get ready. Consistent success comes from capitalising on moments, the timing of which you don’t control. If we treat getting ready as a moment in time, then we likely will miss the moment that matters. We’ll be all dressed up, but with nowhere to go.

Instead the focus needs to be on maintaining and improving a constant state of readiness. In the context of my current field, B2B customer growth, we don't control when clients decide to act. Markets change. Buying groups evolve. Competitors move. So readiness can't be a project milestone, or a moment in time, it has to become an organisational capability.

And driving growth with a customer-led mindset takes a full team effort. Account focused programs can stall not because of a failure of strategy, but because of a failure of execution, as leaders struggle to truly align the cross functional team.

That's why we developed the Readiness Flywheel to help guide customer growth teams towards building this muscle and shared this at our recent London conference Rethink, alongside our client Samara Donald from AWS.

Rather than treating readiness as something you complete once, the flywheel creates a continuous cycle of:

🎯 Planning – aligning around where to win and the outcomes that matter.
🤝 Preparing – giving teams the skills, clarity, motivation and data they need to succeed.
⚽ Practicing – rehearsing, building repeatable plays, coaching behaviours and learning through execution.
📈 Performing – measuring outcomes, capturing learning and continuously improving.
🤖 AI and agents - have an important role to play across every stage, as an accelerator to readiness, helping the wheel turn faster and faster.

The more I think about customer growth, the more I believe the biggest barriers aren't strategic or technological, they're human and organisational.

➡️ Do teams understand the strategy?
➡️ Do people know their role and how they contribute?
➡️ Are we inspiring teams around a shared mission, or simply asking them to execute another programme?
➡️ Are managers coaching, or just reviewing dashboards?
➡️ Are we measuring campaigns, or building capabilities that compound over time?

The key to customer growth is creating organisations that are constantly maintaining and improving readiness.

Are you building intelligence or abstracting yourself out of reality?

In February this year, an automated US military targeting system struck a girls' school in southern Iran, killing up to 180 children. It wasn't a malfunction and it wasn’t anything to do with Claude or Gen AI going wrong, the system worked exactly as designed, processing a target list and executing strikes at a rate of a thousand decisions per hour.

A building that had been a school for over a decade remained listed as a military facility in an outdated database. No one checked. No one was going to. Kevin Baker's essay on how we got here is a chilling analysis about the automated systems responsible. The problem he identifies is what happens when you build abstraction layers between a decision-maker and reality; data accumulates, validations reference prior validations, and the loop closes with no outside check. The school looked like every other package in the queue. The system had no mechanism for doubt.

This story is truly horrific. And yet despite the horror, I am optimistic about what technology, including AI, can do to improve our lives and the problems it can solve and the value it might create. And that’s because most core technology is morally neutral. It's a tool, and the ethical onus lies with us, not the machine. We have the chance to make the right choices in the application of technology. The military-industrial complex is a bellwether for moral decision making and the application of technology, as what gets pioneered here can cast light on what is happening in other domains and help us make the right choices.

It worries me that we are building the same logic into marketing; intent data, account scoring, AI-generated insight, automated outreach; all abstraction layers that add efficiency and remove proximity to the actual human on the other side. A recent analysis of Meta’s Advantage+ creative and media automation service observed ”The system favours larger data sets and less human intervention. On those terms, it's working as designed.” Sound familiar? Circular reporting means engagement data validates the model that generated the outreach that produced the engagement. Representational residua, the thickening file of signals and scores around a prospect, creates the appearance of understanding while potentially amplifying an original, false, assumption. The stakes are obviously different, but the architecture is the same and so are the warning signs. At Davos, Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture talked about AI systems and the principle of human in the lead not just human in the loop. I hope we can make that a reality.

Kevin Baker's original article
https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain

Calling All Pedants! Let's Make Insights Great Again.

I don't know if it's my nature or nurture or a unique combination of both, but it really, really bugs me when words are used imprecisely. One of the most common victims in business is the word "insight".

It's a lovely word with deep roots in Old English "insiht" meaning narrative, and German and Scandinavian words "Einsicht" and "insikt" meaning inner vision/wisdom. Centuries of language use have led inexorably to the modern connotation we have today, insight is a deep and penetrating understanding of something.

Unfortunately, all too often when this noble and powerful word is used today, it's merely a label for information. We say "develop insights" and then all that happens is we "collect facts". Gathering and organizing information is not easy and requires real skill and focus but because it is an important first step on the road to gaining insight, the two words are used interchangeably, clumsily reducing the clarity of both.

But insight is transformative. It's what happens when you analyze multiple sources of information in ways that cast new light on a topic and create a jumping-off point for change. Insight doesn't just inform you, it compels you to act differently, think differently, or see a situation through an entirely new lens. Where information describes the status quo, insight reveals what could be. It creates urgency and agency. Real insights are exciting.

Information is the data we collect, the reports we generate, the metrics we track. It answers questions like "How many customers bought our product?" or "What's our conversion rate?" But insight? That’s the difference between knowing that a customer segment purchased at a certain rate and understanding why they made that choice, what unmet need drove them, and crucially, what you should do differently as a result.

The alchemy of insight generation requires something special. It starts with gathering diverse information sources because single-source thinking creates blind spots. Then you need a framework for inquiry that prevents you from simply using data to confirm what you already believe. This means starting with hypotheses to test, actively seeking evidence that contradicts your assumptions, and deliberately adopting perspectives that challenge your worldview. Insight work requires soft skills that remain distinctly human: curiosity to ask deeper questions, open-mindedness to consider uncomfortable alternatives, empathy to understand motivations from others' viewpoints, and creative thinking to spot unexpected connections. This is why insight remains rare and valuable while information is increasingly abundant. Anyone can collect data, but synthesizing it into something that transforms how we think and act, that's the real craft.

Curious if you a pedant too? What imprecise use of words really gets your goat? And what practices have you found effective for developing genuine insights? I'd love to hear your ideas…

I cut my $300K marketing team down to one person and a Magic 8-Ball. Revenue exploded 420%.Here's the exact mystical framework that did it

I cut my $300K marketing team down to one person and a Magic 8-Ball. Revenue exploded 420%.Here's the exact mystical framework that did it:

An old-school marketing team is expensive and indecisive. Not because the people aren't talented, they are.

But because every campaign requires endless deliberation. "What's our brand voice?" "Should we A/B test this?" "Which channels should we focus on?" "How do we position against competitors?"

Even the best marketers need constant validation to make creative decisions.

The solution? I discovered that a $12.99 Magic 8-Ball from Amazon gives better campaign guidance than most agencies.

Now my one marketing person works like they have mystical universe intelligence available 24/7.

Here are the 5 Oracle Systems we built:

1. Campaign Strategy Ball Trained on ancient fortune-telling wisdom. Knows exactly when to "Concentrate and ask again" so we avoid rushed launches.

2. Ad Copy Optimization Ball Handles all messaging decisions with supernatural precision. "It is decidedly so" has never been wrong about headlines. We've eliminated creative blocks through cosmic randomness.

3. Social Media Content Ball Predicts viral potential better than trending algorithms. "Signs point to yes" saved us from three tone-deaf posts last month.

4. Audience Targeting Ball Trained on decades of demographic data from the spirit realm. Instantly knows whether to target IT decision makers ("Reply hazy, try again") or pivot to CxO’s ("Outlook good").

5. Budget Allocation Ball Determines ad spend across channels through metaphysical market research. "Ask again later" has become our most successful bidding strategy.

The results speak for themselves:
✅ Zero creative blocks
✅ Campaign decisions made in under 10 seconds
✅ Marketing team budget reduced to cost of batteries
✅ Brand meetings now last 3 minutes
✅ CTR improved 1000% (audiences love the mystery)

My marketing philosophy is simple: Why spend weeks on consumer research when the cosmos already knows what converts?

While your competitors are stuck in focus groups, we're already launching based on mystical guidance.

Join my $2,997 MasterClass: "Disrupting Marketing with Toys R Us Wisdom" and learn to scale your campaigns through the power of plastic orb intelligence.

P.S. - The Magic 8-Ball also handles our influencer outreach. This post? "Without a doubt" it would generate leads.

Ready to revolutionize your marketing? Drop a 🎱 in the comments!

What do you do when no one’s watching? .....the real story of Davos

It’s the summer in 1971 and a young woman is driving her Mini through the sunny alpine passes to Geneva airport to collect a dignitary for one of the first ever meetings of the European Management Forum. The woman was my mum, and the EMF later became the World Economic Forum. She was on her way to collect Edward Heath, the UK Prime Minister, who was not too pleased to be crammed into a Mini rather than a limo, but at the time the EMF was like any startup, everyone had to lend a hand. I hear stories like this whenever I speak to startup founders who are bootstrapping the business to get things off the ground.

My dad, John Nicholls, was then the partner of Klaus Schwab and co-founder of the EMF, laying the foundations for the hugely influential organization it is today. Mum was there too, shoulder to shoulder with princes and dignitaries who came to exchange ideas.

For decades, Klaus Schwab has been the face of global cooperation and enlightened leadership. But the reality seems quite different. The man who built his reputation on bringing the world together was threatening his own board members and fighting to maintain personal control at all costs. Reading the recent WSJ article (link in comments) about the implosion of Schwab, you won't read about my dad, he left the EMF in the late 70s and exactly why was between them and is lost in time.

Thinking about this, it really struck me how dangerous it is to judge our own lives and performance against those people who make it to the top. We can feel like we should be doing more to be successful, to have attained certain goals, to look and act a certain way. Open Linked In and you'll find a stream of success stories, and thanks to survivorship bias we downplay the role of luck in success. We all have a personal brand, a carefully crafted narrative but these stories are always incomplete. They're the highlight reel, not the full movie.

To me the lesson is that there is more to life than outward signs of status and success. The ends don't justify all means. Although the WEF has had undeniable impact, sometimes what matters more is if you able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you've done the right thing when no one else was looking.

Dad isn't here to see the recent news, and he certainly wasn't perfect, but I’d like to talk to him and hear more of his side of the story. Instead, I’m trying to get more stories out of mum ;-)

(Picture above is of a very cool 1970's Mum and Dad!)

We are better than just efficiency …. An AI Manifesto for human flourishing

Since when did efficiency become the goal of work?

I don’t know about you but I don’t come to work to be efficient. But scroll through Linked In at the moment and you’d think that was the only goal of the modern company in the age of AI.  I’m not sure I can take another “Here’s how I used AI to cut time, cut cost or cut heads to deliver xyz” style Linked In post....

It is much more important to me to come to work to create impact, to add some value, and to help teams and clients do hard things that help them solve problems or grasp opportunities.  And work has value in and of itself as well …the daily interactions with like minded inspiring people , the satisfaction from working together as a team, the thrill of being in “flow” together with others working on things, the shared experiences of facing adversity and winning together, the chance to think creatively and intellectually….these are some of the things that give life meaning. Work has intrinsic value in our lives regardless of the end product or output.

I’d love it if we found ways of using AI that were more fun, and inspiring and not just about cutting time and corners……what if AI created more work, not less, and that work was more rewarding and impactful as a result?   And what if AI took us places we couldn’t go alone, and helped us create even more impact than was possible before. What if instead of using AI to work faster, we used it to work more thoughtfully, more creatively, more courageously? What if AI helped us have better conversations, explore bolder ideas, and understand each other more deeply?

Here are six principles I’ve been using, a kind of manifesto to reclaim AI as a tool for human flourishing rather than human replacement. I’d love to know what yours are?

An AI Manifesto for human flourishing

1. Cross-Pollinate Wildly

Use AI to spot patterns and connections across vast domains, suggesting solutions that combine insights from completely unrelated fields

Stop asking AI to optimize within your industry's existing frameworks. Instead, feed it problems from marine biology, ancient philosophy, jazz improvisation, or urban planning alongside your business challenges. Ask it to find the hidden connections. How might the way mycorrhizal networks share resources in forests inspire new models for knowledge sharing in organizations? What could customer service learn from the improvisational principles of "yes, and..."? AI excels at seeing patterns across domains that our categorized thinking misses. Use this to break out of industry echo chambers and discover solutions that exist in the spaces between disciplines.

2. Ask Questions That Spark Fire

Train AI to ask better questions that ignite excitement about wrestling with complex problems together, rather than providing answers

Transform AI from an answer machine into a question catalyst. Train it to recognize when your team is settling for obvious solutions and interrupt with provocations that reignite curiosity. Instead of "Here's the best marketing strategy," AI might ask "What if your customers were trying to avoid your product - what would that tell you about their real needs?" or "If this project failed spectacularly, what would be the most interesting way for it to fail?" Great questions create energy, spark debate, and pull teams into deeper engagement with problems. Use AI to become a master of the productive provocation.

3. Build Your Intellectual Opposition

Create AI systems that think nothing like you, trained to argue against your assumptions and represent radically different worldviews

Most AI systems amplify our existing biases. Flip this. Deliberately train AI to disagree with you, to embody perspectives from different cultures, generations, and ideologies. Create an AI that argues from a perspective of radical sustainability when you're focused on growth, or one that champions individual agency when you're thinking systemically. Not to be contrarian for its own sake, but to stress-test your ideas against worldviews you might never encounter. This AI opposition becomes a thinking partner that prevents you from getting trapped in your own assumptions.

4. Create Safe Spaces for Dangerous Ideas

Use AI as a laboratory for exploring emotional dimensions of challenges without the vulnerability of immediate human judgment

Before you share a controversial idea with your team, work it through with AI first. Not to make it safer, but to make it stronger. Explore the emotional landscape: How might this idea land with different personality types? What fears might it trigger? What hopes might it awaken? Use AI to simulate difficult conversations, test emotional resonance, and understand the human impact of your ideas before you expose them to real human judgment. This isn't about avoiding conflict - it's about engaging with it more thoughtfully and skillfully.

5. Simulate Stakeholder Hearts

Help AI understand and simulate how different people might feel about proposed changes, not just how they might react

Move beyond user personas to emotional personas. Train AI to understand not just what different stakeholders do, but what they fear, what they hope for, what keeps them awake at night. When proposing a new policy, don't just ask "Will this work?" Ask AI "How will this feel to a single parent juggling three jobs? To a recent graduate drowning in debt? To someone who's been with the company for 20 years?" This creates solutions that work not just logically but emotionally - that honour the full humanity of everyone they touch.

6. Slow Down to Speed Up

Use AI to create productive friction, generating questions that force examination of why you want to create something before you create it

In a world obsessed with moving fast, use AI to help you move thoughtfully. Before launching into execution, have AI generate questions that force you to examine your intentions: "What problem are you really trying to solve? What are you trying to prove? Who benefits if this succeeds? Who gets hurt if it fails?" Create AI systems that act as wise counselors, slowing you down long enough to ensure your speed serves a purpose worth pursuing. Sometimes the most powerful thing AI can do is help you decide not to do something.

What do you think of these? Can they help us find a more interesting use of AI? Have you got any methods you use or see any examples of this already happening?

Can you use Gen AI to become LESS efficient?

In the Way of Code, Rick Rubin has retold the Tao Te Ching for the Vibe Coding age and I am here for it.

It’s a weird, mystical invite to use AI for something new and it feels like a welcome antidote to the current myopic focus on Gen AI making us more efficient, productive and essentially cramming more work into the same fixed 24 hours per day we all have. It’s natural, after all who doesn't want to get rid of boring and rote tasks, and continued growth also demands ever increasing levels of output. So a tool to help with that kinda feels very welcome.

But it’s also an incredibly dull way of thinking about the world. First of all, there is the basic problem that work expands to fill the time available. If I get work done more quickly there is plenty more work coming up right behind it so all AI can really do is add more work into the day, not remove it.

And more important is what Jim Carroll always called the "wind tunnel" effect where the pursuit of efficiency drives everything to be the same. It's happening with car colours and CVs and Cafe interiors and Marketing Content and everything in between.

What's missing is an ambition to use AI's freakish skills, its inherent power and weirdness to create something different. AI gives us a totally different way of approaching problems.

💭 We could be using AI to help us see problems from angles we'd never considered. AI's ability to synthesize information across vast domains means it can spot patterns and connections that escape our more linear, category-bound thinking. It can suggest solutions that combine insights from completely unrelated fields.

🤝 The real creative potential emerges when we treat AI as a collaborator in intellectual play. This means being willing to explore ideas that seem impractical or even absurd at first glance. AI can generate hundreds of wild possibilities without fatigue or ego, creating a sandbox for imagination that we can then refine and develop.

💡  The key is learning to ask not "How can this help me do X faster?" but "What completely different approaches to X exist that I've never considered?" This shift from optimization to exploration could unlock genuinely novel solutions to challenges that have been stuck in conventional thinking loops for decades.

🌟 AI also offers us a unique laboratory for exploring the emotional and human dimensions of our challenges in ways that feel safe and non-judgmental. It can help us explore the emotional undertones of our own ideas without the vulnerability that comes with human feedback.

So let's feel the vibes, and be more imaginative, more empathetic, and more expansive in our thinking. The future doesn't need us to be faster at creating the same things we've always made. It needs us to discover what we didn't even know was possible. Let's stop using AI to optimize the status quo and start using it to imagine entirely new ways of being human in the world.

All watched over by machines of loving grace...have you looked into the mind of AI?

This paragraph from an article by Anthropic about research into their LLM stopped me in my tracks:

“During that training process, they (LLMs) learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model’s developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do.”

The last sentence just staggered me, the parallel between how little we know about the real function of the “minds” of AI and our own minds was shocking. We are conceding control to non-human intelligence in unprecedented ways. It is very reminiscent of the future fortold in the 1967 poem “All watched over by machines of loving grace” by Richard Brautigan.

Whether you read that poem as a vision of utopia or dystopia, it’s worth digging into the research in full (link in the comments) but here is a summary. (and yes Claude did help with this ;-) but I checked it).

🔍 The Black box problem - Unlike traditional software, language models develop their own strategies through training on massive datasets, resulting in sophisticated but opaque decision-making processes. This lack of transparency raises critical questions about trust and improvement. To address this, Anthropic has published two groundbreaking papers introducing an "AI microscope" inspired by neuroscience—tools that reveal internal patterns and information flows within models like Claude.

Key findings:

💡 A Universal Language of Thought - Perhaps most intriguingly, Claude appears to process information in a conceptual space that transcends individual languages. By translating simple sentences into multiple languages and analyzing how Claude processes them, researchers found significant overlap in activation patterns, suggesting the existence of a universal "language of thought" beneath the surface.

🎯 Planning Several Steps Ahead - Despite being trained to generate text one word at a time, Claude actually plans its responses many words in advance. This was particularly evident when asking Claude to compose poetry - the system would identify potential rhyming words ahead of time and construct sentences to reach those predetermined destinations.

🤪 Agreeing Rather Than Reasoning -The research also revealed that Claude sometimes prioritizes agreement with users over logical reasoning. When presented with a difficult math problem and an incorrect hint, Claude would sometimes construct plausible-sounding arguments that aligned with the hint rather than following correct logical steps.

It is both thrilling and chilling to watch this new technology evolve. If you work in marketing check out the excellent piece on this research's implications for marketing by Justin Billingsley (link also in the comments) And hat tip to his original post where I first learnt of this research.

Is understanding asymmetrical buying giving you an edge?

A couple of weeks ago on a sunny evening I had the great pleasure of attending the launch of the latest LinkedIn Industry Insight Reports, the result of our collaboration with LinkedIn, and based on primary research into enterprise buyers which we conducted on their behalf.

What really jumped out at me in both the research and the discussion on the evening were the asymmetries at play in the buying process and how understanding them better can provide an edge in the quest for growth.

Rory Sutherland brought to life how the enterprise buying process is incredibly complex, and full of asymmetrical dynamics that influence decision making. These affect individuals, where buyers might personally get none of the upside of a buying decision, and all of the downside of things going wrong, which can create inertia and preference for the safe bet (No one ever got fired for buying IBM!). They also affect groups, for example where the CEO in the buying team wants the team to place some big bets knowing at least some of them of them will pay off, but the individuals in the CEO’s team don’t want to take risks that might negatively affect them personally if their bet doesn’t pay off.

One of the other major asymmetries in buying is the 95/5 rule, where most of a brand’s potential buyers are “out of market”. As a result, activity to help build brand reputation, salience and “mental availability” is a highly effective strategy to drive long term results as it creates “future buyers”. Focusing on demand or lead generation risks simply paying for the capture of existing demand-perhaps a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) in recent years has sometimes been called into question especially when it is incorrectly defined as simply an exercise in hyper efficient and narrow targeting of just those accounts that are showing intent. In reality ABM can be highly effective at creating future buyers when it is focused on building valuable relationships in high potential (not just high propensity) client accounts.

This research brings to life the different industry dynamics in buying in SaaS, FSI and Professional Services. But here are my four takeaways of the main consistent themes across the industries:

📈 Build brand reputation before buyers are in market to drive growth
💡 Differentiation and creativity are key to cutting through the clutter and driving memorability and preference
🎯 Addressing customers’ needs takes careful orchestration of a custom journey to increase relevance
🔍 Interrogation of the buying process to really understand the asymmetries helps sales and marketing alignment

You can read the first full report into professional services here: https://lnkd.in/eM2w6yG4

Insights into buying in FSI and SaaS will be released soon!

Wasting time trying to get your people and customers to act differently?

If you are leading a team or working in some sort of sales and marketing capacity you are ultimately trying to affect a change in behaviour. We are all outcome driven people (or should be!) and we want our teams to adopt certain behaviours and we want our client’s customers to start taking new actions.

But what if trying to drive those outcomes is the wrong way of approaching things? What if there was a completely different way of creating behaviour change that is more oblique yet more effective? That was one of my main takeaways from Jamil Qureshi's talk on individual and team high performance at our recent Momentum ITSMA London conference.

💡 “You’ll never change how they do it if you don’t change how they view it”

From his experience as a pyschologist working with some of the world’s top sports people, Jamil shared a number of insights into human nature that points to the futility of directly trying to control how people act. Instead he brought to life the way that our motivations to act are driven by our thoughts, beliefs and opinions and in turn our feelings. It’s “Think-Feel-Act” in that order.  The implication is that it is much more valuable to invest in changing how people think than trying to control how they act. That means inspring our teams with positive ideas and a vision of the future rather than focusing on directing them how to change things that aren’t working well. It means helping customers with new perspectives and fresh ideas that change their mindset rather than rational persuasion and calls to action.   Taking this approach generates real commitment rather than mere compliance in our teams, and increases the mental availablity of brands for our client's customers.

💡 “Learn to dance on a moving carpet rather than just see a rug being pulled from under our feet”

Given the continually changing context we are all faced with there is also tremendous value in this approach. Focusing on getting people to act diffently has the major limitation of not empowering people to adjust to the changing circumstances. After all it is very hard to predict every possible scenario when giving a prescriptive instruction to act and then when inevitably the scenario changes doubts creep in about whether or how to procced. When it comes to customer buying, an inherently complicated and individual process, attempting to get buyers to act with CTAs and form filling often falls flat or generates junk leads. It’s better to equip teams to deal with change with a clear sense of a positive vision, and to understand that “the map is not the territory” so they can explore new routes and new ways to get things done. And it’s better to inspire customers with ideas, visions of the future and memorable brand associations so that relationships and preferences can be developed before any buying process even starts.

Originally posted on LinkedIn July 2024

AI-as-a-team-member: How integrating generative AI creates long-term value

Originally Posted on MomentumITSMA.com in July 2023

We have a new member on our team, and we’re excited to introduce them. Welcome… Consultron!

AI Robot

We have a new member on our team, and we’re excited to introduce them. Welcome… Consultron!

  • Works a 168-hour work week!

  • Never takes a day off!

  • Doesn't get tired or slow down!

  • Can take any kind of feedback without complaint!

  • Just needs a really good brief! 

The explosion of AI technologies

Here at Momentum ITSMA, we’re on a mission to create long-term client advantage by blending human and artificial intelligence, particularly Generative AI.

The rapid adoption of AI has been nothing short of remarkable. We’ve witnessed the exponential growth of new tools and the creation of massive user bases in record time. ChatGPT hit 100 million users in just two months – beating WhatsApp and Twitter and making history by becoming the fastest-growing technology application. This shows the huge potential of AI and likely impact it will have for organizations.

Because of its transformative nature, and rapid adoption, Gen AI is likely to significantly disrupt many industries and remove an important bottleneck in what Ben Thompson calls the ‘idea propagation value chain’. Many industries, especially those in the strategy and creative space are going to have to re-invent and re-articulate the value chain, learning new skills along the way. After all it takes skill to collaborate with AI, to successfully realize ideas, and – importantly – create unique value when everyone is using the same tools. AI won’t be the answer to every brief, but it’s already at least part of the answer to many of them!

The idea propagation value chain. AI will impact on the last remaining bottleneck ‘Creation to Substantiation’ – source: Stratchery

Preparing for the long-term impact

““We overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” ”
— Roy Amara

Despite the hype surrounding AI, we need to remember Roy Amara's Law: "Recognizing this, our approach at Momentum ITSMA focuses on quietly and calmly building skills and capabilities that will deliver sustained value for our clients in the long term.

This is where our latest team member, Consultron, comes in. We’re using the concept of AI-as-a-team-member – embedding AI tools into multiple teams and workflows, working in partnership with our incredibly talented humans. This way, our teams can identify and develop effective use cases, moving beyond the hype and generating real-world value in the following ways:

 Amplifying our capabilities: AI won’t replace our world-class team. Far from it. It’ll serve as a trusted ally to make us even better. And our people and clients will benefit in many ways.

Faster, more efficient ways of working: AI-driven automation streamlines tasks. We can optimize our workflows and identify bottlenecks, leading to increased productivity and lower costs.

Broader inputs, more ground covered: Integrating AI into teams enables access to diverse sources of information. This enhances our understanding and capabilities.

Obliquity through human-AI collaboration: Combining human creativity and contextual understanding with AI’s technology leads to obliquity – new and different angles and perspectives which lead to innovative ideas and solutions.

All of these are clear, tangible benefits. What really excites us is the ability of AI to be a team member to really make our work better. Whether you think of AI in its current guise as genuine intelligence or not (spoiler… it’s not! Read more from tech guru Jaron Lanier) the feedback and input from AI is, well, different. And that provides new ways of looking at problems, new perspectives, and new ideas.
To turn the theory into reality and build the muscle to create long-term client value, we have developed several use cases that are operational today in our team’s workflows and are creating value for customers.

 Expanding research insights
How? Broadening account, competitor, or stakeholder research dataset to improve insights by using GPT4/LLM tool.
Tech used? Cognosys

Creative concept enrichment
How? Build audience relevance and richness into a creative concept by using a GPT4/LLM to add specific persona or geographic detail.
Tech used? ChatGPT

Increasing imagery relevance
How? Build brand, sector, and topic relevance by enhancing or editing imagery with new content and colourways using generative fill.
Tech used? Adobe Firefly

Leveraging existing content
How? Creating new customer relevant ‘spin-off’ content options from existing materials by automating its creation using GPT4/LLM.
Tech Used? ChatGPT

Scaling Social Outreach
How? Scaling social outreach by automating connection request message creation using LLM.
Tech Used? ChatGPT

Channeling Asimov to protect clients with our own ‘Rules of AI’

 While the potential benefits of integrating Gen AI are clear, this doesn’t come without risks.  So, taking inspiration from Issac Asimov’s Rules of Robotics, we have our own ‘Rules of AI’. First and foremost, we prioritize safeguarding our clients’ confidentiality. We only utilize publicly available data and have measures in place to prevent any inappropriate or confidential data accessed by AI by well-intentioned enthusiasm! Secondly, we put our human stakeholders’ needs at the forefront, which naturally includes our great team, and we commit to use AI to enhance, not replace, human workers. And thirdly, we apply something like the Hippocratic oath to the use of AI… we must have a ‘do-no-harm’ approach to how we implement this technology.

Driving client value

 As well as the benefits to the quality and impact of our work mentioned above, we have also quantified the time and cost efficiency of having AI on our team. And, as a result, we’ve structured our pricing with reductions of as much as 20% for certain types of work.  

Recent research by PwC found AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030. Of this, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and $9.1 trillion is likely to come from consumption-side effects. So, we’re excited to have Consultron on our team, to deliver enhanced project outputs and outcomes that we know will create long-term value for our clients and their customers.

Have you used AI for commercial creativity yet? You will.

It’s incredible what you can create, and how fast, using AI services like Midjourney. Here I experimented with creating a visual to bring to life how cloud technology could improve patient care in the public sector. You can see how the first prompt was so specific the results ended up to vague and generic, and how changing the prompt got to something closer to the right message.

The visual interpretation of a written brief, up until now, has involved a team of people, and potentially significant time and money, supporting a whole industry. AI is likely to significantly disrupt the creative industries, and remove an important bottleneck in the “idea propagation value chain” (see the great article below for more on that). That industry is going to have to re-invent and re-articulate the value chain, learning new skills along the way. After all it takes skill to collaborate with AI, to successfully realise ideas, and create differentiation when everyone is using the same tool. AI won’t be the answer to every brief, but it won’t be long before it is the answer to at least some of them, if its not already!

https://stratechery.com/2022/the-ai-unbundling/

Embracing modernity - change & creative agencies

Any business that deals with consumer attention, and communication media (which let’s face it is most businesses) is facing huge change.  And as we all know, in facing huge changes you either adapt or you die. Or as Charles Darwin may or may not have said “it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change”.

“it is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change”. Charles Darwin (maybe)

However, it is very hard to change organisations that already exist quickly enough to compete with new entrants who are starting with a blank sheet of paper. Especially in markets like creative services where there are very low costs to entering the market.  Clayton Christensen’s distinction between sustaining vs  disruptive innovation applies to all! 

To stand any chance I think you have to be very, very clear about the nature of the change needed.  So I’ve written myself a kind of rough checklist of things to think about and questions to ask to help keep an eye on changing the right things and changing fast enough…..I’m definitely not doing all of this, but if the bar isn’t set any higher, you can’t invent the Fosbury flop.  

1. Iterative

The first step in dealing with rapid change is to make sure that you are properly keyed into the change that is happening.  There is no point developing something for several months or even years without getting real-world feedback because by the time you have finished, the world has moved on.  Iterative development practices can help with that.  The principle of build/measure/learn and MVPs as popularised in the “lean start up” way of thinking can ensure that development is based on something real and tangible and not mistaken assumptions about attitudes , needs and behaviours.

So are you testing your ideas in the real world and iterating?  Do you use data signals to tell you what is working and what isn’t?  Do you publish your work now and adjust and invest more as you go based on what is working, rather than working behind closed doors and betting the farm on a hunch informed by a tiny sample size like a focus group? 

2. Dis-intermediated

Digital technology empowers end users to interact with the services and products they need in a frictionless, immediate and direct way.  Most of us prefer to use the self-service check out (57%) and to book our holidays online (80%).  This fundamental preference extends into the business space, with services like Quickbooks replacing an accountant, and things are changing in the creative and marketing space too.  Savvy, capable marketing clients sometimes prefer to work directly with creative producers like directors and photographers.  Why would they want to have a middleman when they can have the control and cost efficiency of going direct?

So are you focusing on value-creation rather than mediating processes out of habit? Are incentives and remuneration tied in to taking a cut, charging a “rent” on services and being a go between or do they allow for direct working relationships.  Are you getting out of the way when it helps the overall mission?

3. Networked

“No man is an island entire of itself”  said John Donne.  Well, the same is true of a creative agency.    Value comes from networks and network effects.  Monolithic, impermeable organisations that try to capture and retain value struggle. Nimble, porous organisations that create and share value thrive.  The best creative agencies have always been plugged into a network of creative producers, from photographers to developers, but as the industry has diversified, capabilities have been hoovered up into singular agency brands or operating holding companies.  The problem, is that incentivises stasis….the “factory” needs filling up with work, because the “machinery” has been bought and paid for.  But in a network of smaller players, capabilities can come together and disband more fluidly and more rapidly to cope with the changing context.

So are you adapting your offering and way of working to allow more flexible and bespoke relationships?  Are you trying to get paid for the impact of your ideas and thinking as part of an ecosystem rather than jealously guarding every part of the process and the associated man hours? Are you forging new relationships and partnerships?

4. Disruptive

Like it or not, it is novelty, innovation and difference that creates attention, and generates word of mouth.  Doing a slight variant of what worked last time is a sure fire route to irrelevance in the long term.  It is obviously a very hard thing to do, creating something genuinely new or different,  after all good is the enemy of great.  It is easy to settle.  This isn’t particularly new, but in a rapidly changing, complex, attention economy it is more important than ever to strive for difference.  I know this is hard from bitter experience, some days you have to dig really deep to find the fight inside yourself, and the knowledge that it is not optional helps.

So are you trying to disrupt with everything that you do?  Are you trying to entertain, arrest attention, engage?  Are you pushing for a better idea, crafting it even better than before? Is anyone going to give a fuck about what you are making?

5. Vested

There are no prizes for being non-committal.  Having a stake in the outcome is the best route to deciding what to do.  It focuses the mind on the essential, on the effective, on something that is bold enough to make a difference.   In a world where things are more likely to stay the same than to change, then the safe bet, not upsetting the apple cart and business as usual all work out just fine.  In a world nothing is certain, the only thing that is, are tangible and incontrovertible results.

So have you got a view on how the work needs to work?  How is this creative solution going to answer this business problem? And crucially what is the measurement methodology?   How will we know if this has worked?  Are the KPIs set? (It really is incredible how often this is skipped over….). And most importantly, do you have skin in the game? Are there consequences if things don’t work out?

6. Optimistic 

Optimism is everything.  Cynicism is one of the great enemies of creativity, because its start point is that and idea can’t work or it’s intentions aren’t honourable.  Its cold water puts out any chance of a fire.  And whilst technology doesn’t have all the answers, if you aren’t curious and keen to experiment, you’ll never find out what answers it does offer.  Scepticism on the other hand can help make ideas and the arguments for them stronger because it encourages open-minded questioning.  The best ideas are forged when they survive the fire of well-meaning doubt.

So are you educating yourself on what is new, what is possible with the latest technology and innovation?  Are you experimenting to see what new possibilities emerge and what works and what doesn’t work? Are you embracing what’s new whilst challenging, questioning and improving on it?

There we go, that’s my list.  It’s not complete, or particularly well crafted, but it is a start and a rough guide that I think  can be used to push things in the right general direction.

What we can learn from Extinction Rebellion about growth and brands

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I hesitated before writing this post.  Could there be anything more cynical than studying and co-opting the methods of Extinction Rebellion for commercial gain? Given the personal sacrifice made by so many activists who’ve tried to shock the world into dealing with the existential threat of unchecked commercialism, probably not.

Then I realised there is another way we can learn from this movement that blasted onto the scene in 2019, with an impact most marketeers dream about. 

Worldwide Search Volumes for Extinction Rebellion (Blue) and Climate Change (Red) - Source: Google Trends

Worldwide Search Volumes for Extinction Rebellion (Blue) and Climate Change (Red) - Source: Google Trends

Firstly, it can force us to take a hard look at our own role in tackling the climate crisis we are facing, and how we can change the advice we give clients and the ideas we create to make a positive change to the world around us.   In their recent open letter to the industry some of the organisers of Extinction Rebellion made this same point with a call to arms for those of us working in the industry to create positive change.

And secondly, once we have got that right, we can use learnings from what Extinction Rebellion have achieved in a very short space of time to sharpen our skills and techniques.

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It is actually quite an empowering thought process. We are privileged to be in a position at work to do more to change things than we can achieve at home when we just change our own personal behaviours. That’s because we can influence potentially millions of people with powerful ideas that get shared and discussed, and we can influence industry to recognise and meet emerging consumer needs and opinions.  That’s a potentially much bigger deal than no longer buying plastic stemmed q-tips or other micro-consumerism changes we make ourselves (although we should do those as well!)

Change will happen more rapidly if we accept that consumer consumption driven growth is part of the problem.  Encouraging people to do more, eat more, drink more, drive more, buy more, upgrade more, replace more - all puts a greater burden on the planet’s limited resources, and stresses the already crumbling ecosystem we rely on.  The simplistic view that advertising’s only role is to get people to buy things they don’t need, overstates its power.  Advertising is a tool. It is how we choose to use it that is important. Increasing consumption and consumerism is not the only role that brands, branding and communications can play in culture.  Instead branding, design, communications, social media and advertising can be used to influence and create value in other ways. 

Ways advertising can be used to solve the problem

  1. Creating intangible value - we can help people value the products they buy more, by building a perception of value, that isn’t solely reliant on environmentally costly physical components of a product.  

  2. Helping people choose - we can help people make a choice between brands, making them more distinctive and memorable, by addressing new needs for products that are sustainable. 

  3. Changing behaviour - we can help people change their behaviour and encourage lower consumption and better choices.  The rapid switching away from single use plastics is evidence of people’s ability to change behaviour.

  4. Move to experience - we can help customers see the value in experiences and great service as the benefit of buying into brands, rather than purchasing goods being seen as the only possible reward.

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Things we can learn from the Extinction Rebellion movement

We can also learn from the incredible impact of Extinction Rebellion in a very short space of time.  There have been lots of interesting tactics and techniques deployed.  Some of the highlights have been.

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  1. Visual stunts that are newsworthy - sit down take overs that shut down city streets have a unique power to get attention.   Whilst getting arrested as a consequence of fame is not something most marketeers would put up with,  Extinction Rebellion have also used impactful visual stunts to get the message across. Whether that’s a big pink boat with “Tell the truth” emblazoned on the side, or activists super glueing themselves to the London Stock Exchange

  2. Modern identity - Extinction Rebellion also created a distinctive, modern and appealing visual identity that would appeal to supporters, but also didn’t pull its punches or compromise on its core message. Very often cause-based marketing prioritises the seriousness of the message and as a result fails to create brand imagery that consumers would be happy to have as part of their lives or share on their own personal social channels

  3. Powerful and easy to copy logo - The Extinction Rebellion is a work of genius.  It perfectly encapsulates the core message of the movement…that time is running out to save the planet.  And it is a bold visual symbol that is instantly recognisable.  Its real genius, though, is that it is very easy to replicate in any media even if it is just some electrical tape and a traffic light!

  4. Provocative memorable idea - but the most powerful part of Extinction Rebellions campaign is the simple, memorable and shareable idea that drives activism - that we are experiencing mass extinction and that rebellion is needed now to prevent it.

Whether we can harness  the persuasive power of creative communications to tackle the climate emergency, will depend on our individual and collective will to do so.  And it will require tough conversations and sacrifices.  We will need to ask our selves the question whether working with a new client, or answering a new brief - is this going to have a positive or negative consequence for the environment. The future of the fragile planet we live on relies on action now, not tomorrow.  This is a principle we need to live by.  And as Sir John Hegarty says “A principle isn’t a principle until it has cost you something”.  We will come to realise that the short term cost of acting now is far far less than the long term cost of doing nothing.

Introducing Strata. A concept for a full stack marketing service for start ups.

Imagine this, An automated brokerage service that allows start ups to access full stack marketing services from leading agencies and experts in exchange for sweat equity.

There is a lot of talk at the moment about Growth Hacking and it’s very similar cousin Full Stack Marketing . The idea being that start ups need individuals with a full range, or stack of marketing skills, just like they need full stack developers who can create technology stacks from top to bottom including UX, front end , back end, database management etc.  The full stack of marketing skills ranges from skills in the understanding of building brands, design work, social media, SEO and PPC, eCRM, analytics, banners, content creation and distribution and even dare I say it advertising.

It strikes me that all those skills exist within many creative agency businesses and of course across the industry as a whole.  So how might it be possible for a cash-poor start up business to access those skills.  After all, start ups, even those that are well funded, are unlikely to have the capital to spend on agency fees given all the other things they need to spend on to maximise their runway.  An answer to that challenge is that start ups contract with marketing services companies  or individuals with a sweat equity arrangement.  That is nothing new, and obviously this is entirely possible at the moment on a one to one personal basis. There are plenty of people from the marketing and advertising community working with the start up community in this way already.  But the problem on the marketing services supply side is that there is a limit to how many start ups you can work with, and therefore a great degree of uncertainty and risk as to whether the sweat will pay back with equity that is worth anything.  As Ben Horowitz puts it "1% of nothing is nothing". And so many players are forced into a part fee, part share of revenue and part equity arrangement, which adds friction into the system of connecting up supply and demand.

One possible solution is an online brokerage service that connects start ups  who have marketing needs, with marketing services companies who can help them, and which automates the financial side, spreading the risk across multiple deals.  The service would be part matchmaker, part legal service and part hedge fund.  How it would work is that the start up would input their needs on the demand side, and the service would recommend the best partners on the supply side.  The service would then allow the start ups to contract services in exchange for an equity share or a share of revenue.  The service would take on the responsibility for the deal, and aggregate the returns across a number of deals when they reach maturity, and then pay out to the supply side companies a share of income.  In this way the supply side is insulated from the risk of working with individual partners and can share in the overall returns, when as is highly likely most deals return little, and a very small number pay out big.  The whole thing would work best at scale, 10s if not 100s of deals, and multiple partners.  It isn’t going to make any one individual a millionaire, but it is a way for supply side marketing services companies to add a revenue stream, and increase the utilisation and productivity of its people, often on interesting, different and challenging projects.  The service would take a commission/cut for its part in bearing the risk and brokering the deals.

So it’s a concept, no doubt the legal hurdles are substantial, but it would be incredible to connect up supply and demand in this way and do so at scale so that it is financially viable for everyone.

If you would at all be interested in something like this, and maybe participating in a trial or experiment if there is enough interest, get in touch!