Writing topicWork and Organizations
Organizational capability, collaboration, product work, and the changing economics of professional practice.
Everybody's Smart
17 postsWisdom is not a job description
The comforting line is that AI can't do wisdom. But wisdom is not a job description. What survives automation is a position: carrying responsibility for choices that matter.
Stand at the two ends of a decision
Every decision has two ends — starting something and signing off on the result. AI is good at the middle. The valuable place is at the ends, a seat creative work didn't always hold.
Why the middle is exactly what AI took
The tasks that stay with people are not safe because they are mysteriously human. They are safe because no one agreed to let a model carry the blame.
Building with AI makes you an owner
Building with AI is no longer just using tools. It is creating them. That moves every expert from contributor to product owner — responsible for how the work scales and integrates.
Don't let your tools die in a closet
Most clever AI tools die in a closet, never shared. Giving your tool a path others can trust is creative work stepping into ownership it did not have before.
The Mega Drive feeling
A meme compares AI coding tools to the old Mega Drive: people rush home to build for the pleasure of it. The fun is real, but underneath it, how companies get software is shifting.
How to survive the chaos
Distributed building risks sprawl: unapproved apps wired into live data. The winners build the right tools, maintain them, and know when to stop building and buy.
So be the one who gets copied
Perfecting a copy of the current trend will not pay; the machine wears trends out fast. Make something new. Be the one who gets copied. Own the idea, borrow the execution.
Why an essay is the one thing AI can't write
An essay entangles lived experience and reflection that moves the writer. AI can write almost anything, except lived experience out in the world.
Sweden already sold you this model
An H&M executive once asked me: is H&M your go-to store? That question explains a whole Swedish model of business, and why AI tools feel so familiar.
Lagom means just enough
Lagom means just enough, measured against what the group needs. AI runs on the same idea: for about twenty euros a month, a skill that used to take years and money is open to anyone.
When everyone is good, good stops counting
When the basic level of good work rises, the middle gets crowded. Competent work stops setting you apart, and the range of what gets made shrinks even as each piece improves.
The canvas was a clever bet
For twenty years the canvas bet that knowledge lives in people's heads, and the workshop's job was to get it onto the wall. That bet rested on one limit — and the limit just changed.
The folder knows more than the room
Your organisation already holds far more than any meeting could, scattered across drives, CRM, and old research. AI can read all of it. So the source of truth moves from the room to the fold
The folder gets smarter each time
Each session's output now returns to the folder and feeds the next one. The work compounds. Your value moves from filling the blank space to finding what the data could not know.
When AI pre-writes the self
danah boyd calls it parasocial media: television performed on social media. AI is the next step, and it leaves one question — what part of you is left that the machine does not have?
The grief is real, and that's fine
Many of us resist AI, and the reasons are fair. But a lot of design work was routine checking, and AI does that part well now. That frees your attention for the work AI cannot do.
Methodologies
4 postsSixty Years of Design: costs and trade-offs
From paste-up to prompt: what sixty years of compression tell us about where creative work still lives — and where it has already left.
The Three-Actor Canvas
The Value Proposition Canvas was built for two parties. AI-native concepts require three. Customer, Business, and Agent — each with their own profile, each with their own design problem.
The Shape of Work Has Changed
Six dimensions map what shifted in consulting, strategy, and design work — and where the value actually sits now.
Work anyway: a methodology for when the tech changes before you're done
Agile assumed the technology was stable at sprint start. That assumption is now false. Here is what replaces it.