It’s a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.
– Vivienne Westwood
I have been writing on LinkedIn every day for the last 140 days, thinking that it might help as I take a new business to market.
I’m not sure it’s working.
Here’s the problem – what do you put your effort into every single day to develop your practice?
There’s a choice – write for your own blog – which is what I was doing. Or write in a platform, which someone else owns.
The way that works for me is a routine – a consistent approach that I commit to every day.
That means writing 7 days a week. No excuses, no interruptions. If you stop, everything stops. And when you stop, it takes time to come back and start again.
But it’s hard to do that on a blog and on LinkedIn – writing once a day is hard enough. Writing twice is perhaps asking too much. Especially if there is more writing to do – such as working on a thesis or papers.
So I decided to prioritize LinkedIn for a while because it felt like the place I could connect with prospects and partners.
But, I think consistency is now a problematic thing.
It’s hard to tell the difference between someone that puts in the effort every day and a bot.
If people are using AI tools to write and publish then what they do looks very similar to someone who does it through discipline.
Or, to reverse it, consistent discipline now looks like you’re using a robot to do your work.
And that’s problematic. I’ve seen views go down massively on LinkedIn. I don’t want to jump and blame the algorithm but it’s one of three things:
It’s depressing reach so you reach for the boost button and pay more.
There’s more AI content but the same number of eyeballs, so mathematically everything gets lower views.
It thinks you’re a bot and so depresses your content.
There may be more options but I can’t think of any right now.
So, the logical thing to do is to change – stop being predictable to a machine that’s adjusting itself as it goes.
My primary writing space has to be this blog – it’s where I work out ideas and think through situations.
And I think LinkedIn has to be a more random thing. In fact, I’m thinking of having a random number generator, like between 1 and 7, and only posting on the days when it’s over 4 and over.
Will the algorithm reward such randomness as evidence of being human? I don’t know – but I do know that life is too short to try and work for an algorithm.
So if you’re subscribed, you will probably see more posts from me again.
Sustainability can’t be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge. – Bjarke Ingels
I’ve been thinking of how to market environmental consulting products for a long time.
I remember sitting in a marketing training program so 20 years ago, and coming up with four words that mattered to clients when trying to make choices.
Cost, consumption, carbon and compliance.
These four words were, at the time, seen as quite technical – and I had to play with them to make the messaging easier for a lay audience to understand.
But the words themselves have stayed relevant.
Over the decades, companies have focused on one or the other at different times.
A good way to think about this is what I’m calling the sustainability diamond.
At the top of the diamond sits the company. Or any other organisation structure that has to think about its use of resources.
Resources have a cost – using gas and electricity results in bills, raw materials have to be purchased.
Companies actively track current and expected future costs – helped by traded commodity futures markets.
That’s where I started my career – building systems to look into the future and make decisions based on where prices were now, and where they were expected to go in future.
A bad trading decision could result in a swing in prices of 50% either way.
Then there was consumption – how much of the resources you used.
The easiest way to save money is not to burn fuel, to use fewer resources.
But it’s also a hard source of savings. It takes time and effort to identify where you can make improvements.
Energy and resource usage can easily become wasteful if you don’t monitor and control what’s going on.
In the middle of my career consumption management became more important.
As we added more renewables to the grid, the idea that we could manage demand – pay consumers to reduce their usage if supplies dropped – came to the fore.
This meant that if the wind stopped blowing and energy supply fell, we could balance the system by dropping demand rather than having firing up a gas turbine to fill the gap.
But to do this you needed a good handle on usage – and we built systems to monitor this on a minute by minute basis.
Cost considerations came screaming back after a series of events – the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the rise of shale gas.
But for the last ten years or so, the focus has been on compliance as new rules came in – most importantly net zero targets in many countries, starting with the UK.
Companies had to start complying with these new rules – measuring and reporting on the resources they used and starting to make plans to make their companies more sustainable.
These then are the three facets of the diamond – managing cost, consumption and compliance are the drivers for taking action.
And the action we take has a result in terms of carbon.
Recently, it’s become clearer and clearer that we should think of carbon like we think of dollars – a way to normalise different measurement systems.
For example, we convert all currencies into a standard one, like dollars, if we want to get a like for like understanding of how a firm is doing financially.
Measuring outcomes in terms of carbon allows us to do the same – taking therms of gas, kilowatt-hours of electricity, litres of diesel, purchasing spends – and putting them all into one, relatively consistent, unit. There are issues with conversions and emission factors, but on the whole we end up with something that is consistent and comparable over time.
The Sustainability Diamond may be a good way to keep the big picture in mind while focusing on any one part at a particular point in time.
Working hard in a world where you have computers seems like a failure of imagination to me.
I dropped out of my first PhD to join a startup.
While I was doing the PhD, however, I had plenty of time to get coffee with colleagues and talk about research.
And this was for one simple reason – my computer busy working for me.
I inherited a codebase in c of around 4,000 lines.
I cut it down to 100 lines in python.
And then I built a pipeline – the computer started with a model, did an initial pass to reduce compute time, and then worked through complex calculations on a computing cluster my colleague built. When the calculations were done, and the results were formatted and pulled together.
Yes, you could work hard at each of those steps and it would take days or weeks – or you could use a machine and get it done in three hours.
And this isn’t new stuff – we’ve had the tools for around 40 years now.
I’ve used the same approach again and again, and we do the same thing in our latest business.
Raw data is entered in spreadsheets. Computers do a series of tasks and clean and usable outputs pop out the other end.
Most systems on the market give you more work to do.
If you haven’t come across Rich Notes before, they look like the image above.
I make rich notes in my work nearly every day, to document and facilitate meetings with prospects, clients and colleagues – especially if we’re trying to work through something complex and multi-faceted.
They are notes taken by hand mostly using digital tools such as paint software and a graphics tablet.
The content includes text and images.
The structure is non-linear and non-hierarchical.
They are made using rich structural elements such as branches, processes, and lists.
They follow conversations, capturing what people say – or their narratives.
What makes rich notes different from tools like mind maps is their rhizomatic structure – a term from botany.
A tree is not rhizomatic. It has a structure that starts with a trunk, divides into branches, and keeps splitting until you get to the leaves.
Think of it like a top down approach that imposes structure where it grows.
A rhizome grows horizontally, with stems and roots growing off various nodes.
Rhizomes can interconnect at different points. If a piece breaks off, it can grow on its own.
It spreads out, growing around obstacles.
In the social sciences Deleuze and Guattari first used the rhizome as a metaphor to argue that the non-hierarchical, non-linear structure of a rhizome provided a richer way to understand social phenomena such as philosophy, linguistics, science and politics.
They talked about a rhizome establishing connections between signs, power organisations and circumstances.
In any situation you have multiplicities or dimensions and they talked about the need to flatten everything on the same sheet – lived events, histories, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations.
This again resonates with taking rich notes on a single infinite flat sheet.
Taking rich notes helps you get an understanding of a situation in all its detail, but what happens next?
That’s for another video.
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This post is a script that I worked on for a recent talk. If you want to listen to the presentation I recorded, see the video below.
Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences. – Howard Gardner
I’ve been thinking of the difference between the tip of the spear and the person behind it.
“Word Craft” by Alex Frankel got me thinking about sales.
He points to Jean-Marie Dru who, in his book “Disruption”, suggested that communication is not something separate from your product – instead it’s an integral component of it.
In other words, your product IS your message.
As a consultant or business owner you are also a product – which means your message is hugely important.
For example, I use this blog as a thinking space. It’s where I can collect ideas and work on understanding them.
And one of the things I’ve been struggling with is separating me from my work.
To start with, I’m building a business that provides data management services to clients that need to disclose information under various regulatory and voluntary frameworks.
At the same time, I’m interested in a range of topics such as strategy and marketing.
And I’m also carrying out research into improving approaches to understanding and improving problematic situations – a field known as problem structuring – through using Rich Notes – a technique I’ve created.
So, who am I? What am?
The business builder?
The strategy consultant?
The academic?
I think what’s going on is that we are more than one thing.
But – if we’re trying to connect with other people we have to pick one personality and stick with it.
For example, I had someone mention that they had talked to a prospect about my strategy work but when the prospect checked me out on LinkedIn I came across as too energy focused.
So, I either lost a potential prospect because of my message or I filtered out a prospect that wasn’t the right fit for what I was offering.
It feels like you should put across everything about who you are – the richness that you have.
But you have to decide what you want people to think.
The kind of research I do is Action Research.
This is where you have a situation – like figuring out what to do about marketing yourself – and you try something.
Maybe rewrite your profile. Tweak your outgoing messages. Try and make it easier for prospects to work out if they need you or not.
The research comes from doing something and then reflecting on what you’ve done, looking for lessons to learn, principles to extract, steps to reuse.
That’s a messy, unpolished process that requires engagement in a situation followed by reflection and writing.
But this is necessary to work through your experience of taking action so that you can come up with theory – a way to explain what happens.
For example, here’s a five part theory
1. Your message is your product
How you describe yourself is what you are. Think about this carefully because it will determine how people respond to you.
2. If you have multiple personalities, let one out at a time
I don’t like simple frameworks. Yet they are essential – because what you’re trying to do is remove ambiguity – make it easier for people to understand what you’re trying to say.
The reason I use LinkedIn is to reach and connect with potential clients. So everything on there needs to be related to that objective.
I’m not doing a very good job of making it clear whether I’m a founder, an academic or a consultant at the moment, so that’s an improvement action I need to take.
Think of it like having more than one personality – having two operating at the same time is very confusing.
3. Cut and refine each message
Cut, cut cut. This post is too long. But that’s ok, because it’s a thinking post.
But your LinkedIn posts have to be tight. Your books, articles, promotional materials, training programmes – they’ve got to be trimmed until they fit exactly what a prospect needs.
4. Design for filtering
You are not aiming to sell to everyone. There is a subset of the market that is perfect for you. You need to find them.
If that market doesn’t exist you need to do something else.
Make sure your system is designed to filter out people who are not right for you and what you offer.
5. Test and learn
There is no right answer.
But there is the work.
Have an idea.
Try it out.
Reflect.
Learn lessons.
Try again.
And now it’s time for me to work on what the next personality has to do.
Should you use AI less rather than more? Extracts from a philosophical and a legal opinion.
Our goal as thinking beings should be to cultivate the faculty of reason – according to Daly (2026) – working on habits to develop excellence in five intellectual virtues.
These are:
Knowledge of one’s field
Intuition based on knowledge
Wisdom in how one’s field relates to life and society
Decision-making skill in how to achieve a desirable end
Practical ability to make something using reasoning
The use of generative AI threatens the development of all these virtues.
The problem is that we experience sustained cognitive declines by outsourcing these habits to generative AI.
We literally get more stupid.
If that wasn’t enough the case for using Gen AI – that it makes us faster and more effective is undermined by Yuvraj (2025)’s verification-value paradox hypothesis.
In a nutshell, this hypothesis argues that the time saved by using Gen AI is offset by the increased time needed to manually verify the outputs from Gen AI.
This is because truth matters. Knowing that a collection of words belong together statistically is not sufficient justification to use them uncritically.
Verify. Then use.
Our cognitive skills matter. We should be very sceptical when it comes to replacing or diminishing them.
Writers – we’re always looking for that magic method
There’s nothing writers like more than reading about other writers and how they work. Maybe if we copy how they did it, we’ll be able to write like them too. I have a shelf of books on writing – and I’m always on the lookout for more. Maybe one day I’ll come across the perfect book, that tells me exactly how to get the perfect words on the page. In the perfect order.
While I’m waiting to find that book I make mistakes all the time. I open a new file and start writing, stacking sentences one after another. I weave in my worries about writing with the content that I’m writing about. Eventually I have a collection of sentences. If they’re for a blog post, I hit publish. And then I move on to the next piece.
If you’re a writer, then you’re going to write because that’s what you do. It’s the way you make sense of the world. If you write about what interests you, then it’s easy to define your audience – it’s you. Writing for yourself is the easiest way to begin. If you write for someone else, that requires you to know them. And that takes time. It’s a bit like making software – often the best software to make is one that “scratches your own itch”. If it works for you then it may work for others. If you’d read it, perhaps others will too.
Through writing, you make something that lasts. So make stuff. Write. Publish. Make videos. That’s the problem with just talking – once you’ve said the words they disappear. Make what you think exist outside you.
This is easier said than done.
Planning is better than failing
The problem is that making something gets complicated very quickly if you don’t have a plan. The more things you have on the page, the harder they are to organize. A document gets unwieldy very quickly. For example, you can order four sentences in 24 ways. Seven sentences? 5,040 ways. 16 sentences – nearly 21 trillion ways.
That’s one of the attractive things about large language models. They’ve got the computational power to take a collection of sentences and order them based on how likely one is to follow the other. That may be useful to speed the process up, but I also worry that offloading this part of what our brain does may not be a good thing. It’s one thing using an electric saw to cut down on the manual work of cutting a lot. It’s another using your brain less.
Now, before you read any further, I think the best piece of writing advice I have come across is Jordan Peterson’s “Essay”. It’s a very prescriptive approach to writing a good paper. I have referred to this document more than I have all the other reference books that I have. There are specific details that many books do well, but this short guide is the best prescription for just getting on and writing a good piece that I have seen.
But I think there are a few small additions that will help me with my own writing. So that’s what I’m doing in this post – jotting down a few reminders so that my future self can spend less time reading about writing and more time just getting on with the job of writing. I forget things quickly, so I hope this helps me the next time I put pen to paper. Or, as you will read shortly, put the pen and paper down and turn on the computer.
Here we go.
Have you done enough research?
If you’re have trouble getting started, the chances are that you’ve not done enough reading yet. There is more material than ever on every topic out there. But it’s not easy to find, even in a world of Google and AI. What comes up first is rarely what you need. You have to keep digging – there’s much more useful content in journals, newspapers and magazines – the places where you have editors and writers working to create useful content that people are willing to pay for. The stuff on the Internet is unfortunately just not good enough. With the exception of Wikipedia.
The trick when taking notes is to write what you think about what you’ve read in your own words. Add academic references, if you need them, as you go along, or link to relevant websites. Another useful trick, which I believe comes from McKinsey, is the dot-dash method, which is a bulleted list that looks like this.
This is your general point, and it starts with a bulleted list with a dot
Each point below the top point is supporting evidence, a number or a fact.
Each of these starts with a dash
Don’t bother with paper notebooks because it’s a pain having to type up your notes later. Put them into the computer as you go, or tap them into your phone. Whatever you do, make sure that you use the native application on your device. I wrote something the other day on Dropbox on the phone. Then I lost it because I think I closed the app. Write on the native app on every machine. Copy the version across when you need to work on it on a new machine. Organise your folders to make it easy to find your drafts later.
You can keep your notes in a single file, or use a file for each reference. As with anything else, the more you have in file, or the more files you have, the more complicated it becomes to manage the corpus of information. Yes, you can search as long as the information is digital, but it’s easier if you cut things down as you go. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
It starts with bullet points
Now that you’ve done your reading, the next step is to write down bullet points. Work from your notes and what you know about the topic. Some will come easier than others, so it’s worth knowing what you’re aiming for. Say you’re writing a 1,000 word blog post. That’s around 10 sentences of 100 words each, in traditional paragraph structure. That means you need at least 10 ideas, so aim to put down around 30-35 bullet points. Maybe more. But don’t stop at 5. Aim for one sentence per bullet.
Okay, you now have a list of bullet points. Copy them to a new document or at the end of the current one, leaving enough space so you don’t confuse the old list with the new. Then start to organize the sentences. Remember that’s it’s very hard to organize all of them in one go. So the way I start it to look at each sentence and figure out if it’s in the beginning, middle or end of the piece. Start moving sentences around. Treat each line like an index card that can be moved to a different location. Put in headings if that helps with the flow.
What we’re trying to do is reduce complexity. Ordering 35 things is difficult. Ordering 5 stacks of 7 points is easier. Ordering 7 points in a stack in order – relatively easy. Move things up and down until you have what looks like a story. When you’ve finished, you’ll have an outline structure.
Copy the outline to the bottom of the page. This will form the skeleton for your first draft. Put the bullets back on the sentences. This will help to visually separate the text you’re going to write from the bullet points. Now it’s time to write.
Writing the first draft
At this point, treat your document like it’s a typewriter – a machine for making words and nothing else. This is not the time to worry about formatting. I get easily distracted by details about page layouts – which is about text formatting, not text generation. It doesn’t matter what software you use to write as long as you’re spending time writing, not fiddling with settings. Make words. You can make them look pretty later.
It’s ok to have a break every once in a while. These breaks help your brain think about what you’ve done – it’s going to be mulling over the sentences and ideas while you’re taking a walk or having a nap. Give yourself time to work on your piece. I’m usually in a rush, I want to get what I’m working on written and posted. But I have to learn to take my time, because nothing is formed perfectly the first time.
Having a routine helps. If you work at the same place, at the same time, with the same tools, the chances are that you’ll get some work done. However, don’t constrain yourself. Sometimes trying a new approach, a different machine, a different place can help you think differently. Time on task is what matters. If you’re stuck, you can go back to the way things were before.
Editing
I think Peterson’s “Essay” tells you what you need to know about editing. I’ve written about that process elsewhere on this blog, so I’m going to focus in this piece on the first draft and the first edit. After that, everything is about making it tighter and better. And then better still.
I’m the kind of person that likes to hold on to what I’ve written. This is odd, because I have no such interest in holding onto material things. I can quite happily throw away most things I own if I had to. So, why am I reluctant to cut sentences – to delete them and forget about them? This has to change.
Think like a sculptor. If you’re working on a block of marble, the figure you’re trying to free is inside the marble somewhere. Each shard you chip off brings you closer to freeing that figure. The shard itself is no longer needed. Treat your sentences that way. Chip away at them and discard the shards – keeping the core that matters. Delete as you go along. If you want, save versions so you can see your progress, a little like taking pictures. You’ll probably never go back to a previous version. Keep cutting away. Be brave. If what you cut was important, it’ll come back to you and you can write it again. Cut away everything that doesn’t advance your story.
Now you have the start of something you can work with. Copy what you’ve done to the bottom of the page and remove all the scaffolding – the headlines and bullet points. It’s time to start editing.
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Now, I’m going to stop here and post this blog post. I’m also going to upload the pdf of the document behind this post so you can see the steps that led to this version. Now, it’s not like this is finished or perfect – it needs several rounds of editing to tighten before it’s ready to publish in a magazine, for instance. But remember – I’m writing this for future me to start with.
What explains the $100m to $1b salaries being paid to top AI researchers?
The way business value is created has changed forever – but our mental models haven’t caught up yet.
What is value anyway? In the 18th century, it was all about land. In the 19th, it became about labour. In the 20th, the narrative shifted to resources.
And now? It’s knowledge.
I was reading Grant (1996) and a quote stopped me in my tracks.
‘All learning takes place inside individual human heads; an organization learns in only two ways: (a) by the learning of its members, or (b) by ingesting new members who have knowledge the organization didn’t previously have’ (Simon, 1991: 125).
Some people think knowedge is safe in organisational rules and procedures. But we’ve all seen what happens when a key person leaves, and someone else picks up that rule book and finds it’s useless.
Will AI rescue us? That’s still up for debate – maybe if we can fix hallucinations and guarantee quality output. It’s still not clear if this is the answer.
But if these two are mirages – if knowledge can only be held and exercised by individuals, the foundations of shareholder value shift under our feet.
Value becomes about people, specifically ones that can create knowledge and apply knowledge. Finding ones that can do both is like hunting unicorns.
And that perhaps explains why some companies are willing to pay so much for them.
REFERENCES
Grant, R.M., 1996. Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm. Strategic Management Journal 17, 109–122.
Simon, H. A. (1991). ‘Bounded rationality and organizational learning’, Organization Science, 2, pp. 125-134.
Handcrafted insight 