Writing topicWork and Organizations
Organizational capability, collaboration, product work, and the changing economics of professional practice.
Everybody's Smart
3 postsThe folder is the canvas
Canvas tools built collective thinking into physical space. AI changes what the source of truth is — and therefore what the canvas is for.
Silence is Golden: Field Notes on a classroom
I had two hours with a group at the very beginning of their learning careers — students who had chosen to study human-computer interaction, which means they had already decided, at some leve
We’re losing our professional identity, and denial won’t help
For most of recorded history, thinking was a protected occupation. Not formally protected — no guild, no license — but protected by scarcity. Most people were too busy surviving to do it at
Essays
7 postsThe liberated oppressor
Paulo Freire warned that the oppressed, in their urgency to be free, often want nothing more than to switch seats. Organizations are full of this pattern. One team wins the territory it foug
Enterprise assisted-coding is the new Mega Drive. How to survive the creative chaos?
There is a meme circulating that compares Claude Code to the Sega Mega Drive: how professionals now rush home from work to keep coding, the way children once rushed home to keep playing Stre
Human, not AI: make sure you’re at either end of a decision
There is a genre of AI commentary that reassures professionals by telling them the thing that matters most is something AI cannot do.
A Three-Actor Systems: A Structural Shift in CX Design
Customer-centricity was a structural correction. Before it, businesses designed from the inside out (from what
Adding AI Isn’t Becoming AI-Native
In the early years of digitalization, many organizations proudly announced that they had created “digital products.” In practice, what they had done was scan books into PDFs.
If you’re applying AI to your work, you need a Product Owner’s mind
The scene repeats itself in every company right now. A designer fine-tunes a Claude prompt for brand tone. A recruiter trains a CustomGPT for job descriptions. A data analyst builds a workfl
The Red Zone Design Canvas: How AI Slop Helps to Think Five Minutes Into the Future
Let’s start with an example that is alarming everyone: the enormous wave of irrelevant or harmful content created by AI.
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.