The Adaptive Edge Blog

• From Certainty to Wisdom — The mark of a wise leader may be the capacity to hold opposing truths in tension, rather than the confidence to resolve them. On telling a false binary from a real choice, and why holding the tension so often reads as weakness.
• The Ladder and The Climb — I keep circling an afternoon that hasn't happened yet. Imagine a commercial paralegal. Call her Maya, three years in. One Tuesday she is asked to check a folder of forty supplier contracts for a particular kind of indemnity risk: the clauses that decide who pays when something goes wrong. This is the sort of job that, when she started, would have eaten a week. You read every clause. You learn the shape of the standard wording so the deviations announce themselves. You develop, without noticing, a feel for where the danger usually hides.
• How Might They — "How might we" is the most useful question in design thinking, and the one teams misuse most without noticing. Four problems hide inside a single familiar question, and the deepest isn't a mistake at all.
• Having more or being more? — Pope Leo XIV has written sixty thousand words on AI. A surprising amount of it is about what we lose when we let the machine set the pace, and about the difference between having more and being more.
• The Strange Power of Imagining Failure — Ask a room of leaders to imagine their strategy has already failed, and instead of deflating, they come alive. The reason is buried in the neuroscience: the brain imagines the future using the same machinery it uses to remember the past. So a premortem doesn't ask people to predict. It asks them to remember a failure that hasn't happened yet.
• When Reflection Becomes a Trap — A month ago, I ran the first of two strategy workshops with a client. The day after, the core team gathered to debrief, and I opened with the question I always open with. It went badly. The second time, I didn't ask it, and everything changed.
• Why Good ideas Die Quietly — The other morning I noticed myself pushing away an idea before I'd even finished thinking it. Turns out this might be more common than we realise. Some ideas make us uncomfortable the moment they arrive. So we let them go before we've even thought them through. What if we're not bad at having good ideas, but quietly allergic to the ones that matter most?
• The Trap of Limitless Capability — AI tools promised to give us time back. Instead, they've made us busier than ever. The pattern isn't new — and the solutions won't come on their own.
• What Managing Taught Me About AI — I'd been using AI for everything, but I wasn't saving time. I'd just moved the work into the prompt box. Then a reframe about tasks versus goals changed how I think about agents entirely.
• The Gap Beneath the Door: How Culture Shapes What We Build — My sons and I were in Cancún when one of them asked: 'Dad, why can you see people's feet in the toilets here?' This simple question about bathroom stalls sparked a deeper inquiry into how cultural values become embedded in everyday design—and what this reveals about the invisible assumptions we build into our organizations.
• The Question Divide: Why Knowledge Is No Longer Power — When I was a teenager, my doctor told me I would always have asthma and it would limit my exercise capacity. I accepted this as medical fact.
• The Genre Trap: Why Organisations Can Only Think Thoughts They Have Stories For — A strategy workshop reveals how changing the narrative genre unlocks creative breakthroughs and shifts teams from scarcity to abundance thinking.
• Beyond the Learning Curve: How Creative Thinking Powers Organisational Agility — Exploring the importance of creative thinking and associative connections for organisational agility, inspired by the Air France Flight 447 case.
• Why We're Brilliant at 'How' But Struggle with 'Why': The Strategy Workshop Paradox — This article explores why teams often jump straight into tactical solutions without clarifying the underlying strategic purpose. It examines the neuroscience behind this bias towards 'how' over 'why' and offers practical tools for focusing on outcomes, managing cognitive energy, and embracing productive discomfort during strategy workshops.
• The Paradox of Progress: Why we're underwhelmed when the future finally shows up — This piece explores the paradox of progress: why exciting technological breakthroughs often leave us feeling underwhelmed when they finally arrive. It reflects on personal experiences with AI tools and examines how inflated expectations, shifting baselines and our brains’ reward systems can dull our sense of wonder. The article suggests ways to manage expectations and appreciate incremental advances.
• The Oracle Effect: Finding Answers vs. Finding Understanding in the Age of AI — I've started having a worrying thought. It came from watching my mum use ChatGPT to solve a tech problem.
• Build to Think: How Machines Shape the Way We Know — You learned to ride a bike as a child. You can probably still do it. But here's the thing: physicists still argue about exactly how bicycles work.
• The Race Against Automation: Why Foundational Skills Still Matter — It is increasingly common to hear that we live in an age where anything can be learned—or replaced—at the speed of a YouTube tutorial or a NotebookLM podcast.
• Who Really Holds the Mic? Power and Voice in Flat Hierarchies — Over the last two decades or so, I've worked in and with many organisations that describe themselves as "flat." They typically reject command-and-control management, favouring agility, peer collaboration, and decentralised decision-making.
• Leading on the Edge of Uncertainty — "Everyone has a plan—until they're punched in the mouth." — Mike Tyson
• The Missing Link Between Marketing and Design: Psychology, Trust & Value — For most of my career I carried around a quiet suspicion that marketing was where the bluff began.
• The Adaptive Edge: How Hidden Motivations and Emergent Strategy Shape the Future — In the early 1960s, Honda set its sights on breaking into the US motorcycle market. The plan was straightforward: challenge Harley-Davidson with heavyweight models.
• The Transformative Power of Play in Organisational Change — Every three years, a company you've likely never heard of—but whose products quietly shape our daily lives—hosts a unique management meeting in Frankfurt.
• The New Digital Divide & Mindful Adoption of AI — We're one month into 2025 and I don't know about you, but the rapid pace of AI advancement has started to make me feel quite dizzy - and I consider myself an enthusiastic follower.
• We're Measuring AI Wrong: The Case for Human Enhancement Over Replacement — Today's headline: "AI outperforms humans on Physics exam!" Meanwhile: A hospital team repeats last year's fatal error, a corporate board drowns in contradictory data, and a peace negotiation fails over missed cultural nuances.
• The Architecture of Power: From Steam to Silicon — Throughout history, the physical and organisational structure of work has been intimately tied to the prevailing source of power—both literal and metaphorical.
• Why Culture is Your Strategic Moat in an AI-First World — When AI automates nearly everything, what truly sets you apart? As we race to deploy increasingly sophisticated algorithms, we might be overlooking the most powerful differentiator of all.
• How Tribal Thinking Hinders Organisational Agility—And What Leaders Can Do About It — Imagine opening a news alert on your phone to find: ‘Alien spacecraft detected entering our solar system’. How would you respond? How would society respond? This is a favourite polemic in science fiction, including a recent novel by Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse, which poses an intriguing idea: “As much as science has transformed humanity, Alice understands that science is an outlier in history—a unicorn. Science is not normal for anyone. What’s normal is arguing and being defensive.” Alien invasion might sound far-fetched, but the underlying question remains: how do people—and organisations—react when faced with unfamiliar or challenging information? This raises a central question: are we, as humans, truly wired for evidence-based reasoning – or do our tribal instincts tend to dominate when confronted with the unknown? In the workplace, the same underlying tensions can surface when we need agile, collaborative thinking but encounter resistance and siloed viewpoints.
• How to Avoid Bias when Prompting AI — Generative AI (or GenAI) tools are fast becoming must-have tools for senior leaders to navigate complexity and change. However, even as these tools are powerful, they come with risks. Whilst much has been said about hallucinations (these are improving with more advanced models), algorithmic bias is still a factor. Despite being frequently discussed, practical solutions for users to address this issue are rarely provided. Inappropriately biased outputs can undermine the credibility of your decisions, deter innovation, and even perpetuate systemic inequities.
• Team collaboration - does AI help or hinder? — I recently faced a daunting challenge: collaborating with an expert partner from one of the big four consultancies on a high-stakes project. Their reputation preceded them, and I felt the pressure to prove myself. To make matters worse, their deep domain knowledge left me feeling completely out of my depth. Although it was clear their role was to be that expert voice, it felt like I was in the kiddy chair whilst the grown-ups spoke. If I couldn’t speak the same language, how could I direct the project and ensure its success?
• The Myth of Originality and the Role of AI in Creativity — In the world of creativity, we often cling to this idea of pure originality—of the lone genius who crafts something new from nothing. We love the story of the artist who conjures brilliance overnight, as if by magic. But let’s be honest: that’s not how most great work happens. Whether it’s design, art, or writing, the real process involves drawing on what’s come before—taking inspiration, experimenting, and refining until something fresh emerges.
• The AI-Driven DIY Renaissance: Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future — Laying a concrete floor with ChatGPT's help revealed a new kind of DIY revolution. Like the mid-century DIY boom, AI is reshaping who can do what, and raising fresh questions about divides, trust, and expertise.
• AI and Innovation: Unlocking the Power of Human Expertise — Much of the AI hype focuses on efficiency. Its most promising application may be elsewhere: a materials science study shows AI amplifies human expertise rather than replacing it, with the biggest gains going to those who can judge its output.
• From Creator to Curator: How A.I. Transformed My Approach to Work — Since discovering GPT-3, my work has shifted from creator to curator. The brain science behind that shift, and what we gain and risk when AI takes on the first draft.
• Why it's (almost) impossible to be judgemental and curious at the same time — Empathy is a dance between judgement and curiosity, and it's almost impossible to do both at once. Why curiosity, not relating, is the route to genuine empathy.
• The Myth of Idea Creation — Ideas aren't born in the minds of individuals; they emerge from culture. Why the myth isn't that we create ideas, but that we create them alone.