It's like I've never been on Zoom before. I was like, oh, numbers. Getting bigger.

Yeah, people will say hello in chat. Say hello in chat if you like. Hello

Hi, Raf!

A few from Springboard

I need you to tell me

Someone said will be recorded. Yes, it will. If you've got an account, you'll be able to just like watch it for a limited time. I don't know how long it's going to be up for, probably like six months or so, but it will be recorded.

And I can't keep up with all the messages. So if there's something that's important, just spam the chat filter.

Yes, yeah.

Hi, Berlin.

Someone from Brazil. Oh, Rafael from Brazil. Hey, Rafael.

Yeah, Rafa.

Tokyo, London

What else we got? Cape Town

Dallas, New York.

I'm doing, like, a little, like, round the road trip in Zoom.

I need you to tell me

The AG guys that I saw someone popped up from TRG

Yeah.

Alright, we'll give everyone a few more minutes.

Maybe another minute to join

Your husband is coming

And then we'll kick us off

I can enjoy the tunes for a more second.

Brisbane, London

Halley, California.

But there has to be more than just me

We're about in California

must super early in California. I think it's got to be like 6am

It'll be 5:30, 5:30, 6am. Oh, brutal

Commitment

Okay

I mean I call my girls and said SOS, pick a dress

Whereabouts? Are you in LA or SF?

LA

Oh, okay. Yeah, cool.

I mean, I used to live in San Francisco, which is why we're asking

Goodbye. We've got everything here. I've seen like Asia, Europe, Middle East

The US

I think we're all time zones, so I feel sorry for the people who have to be up late or early

No, we're gonna, it's going to be great. It's been worth it.

I need a pet talk

Should give them another minute and then get cracking Amy or

Yeah, yeah

Two-minute lag on chat. Oh, okay.

All right

We might jump in. Although people keep joining, so I'm tempted to

I love the light squirrel. Fuck him, let's go.

Alright, alright, let's do it, let's do it.

All right, welcome. Welcome to our first ever Spark sessions. Very, very excited to personally be attending today because Zoe is, you know, everyone's very excited to be here. I'll just say that

I should say who I am. I'm Amy, I'm one of the co-founders of Springboards. And I was really lucky enough to have worked with Zoe very, very early on in my career. My first agency role, we were working on the Coca-Cola account

And I remember even way back then being in total awe of her sharp intellect and deep curiosity for getting to the bottom of any problem. So I couldn't think of a better person to kick us off today for this first ever Springboard Spark session. But before we kind of go into the session itself

I just wanted to kind of reiterate for those that might be less familiar with who we are and why we even exist. Pip's on the call as well. He's the other co-founder, one of the other co-founders of Springboards, where agency marketing folk

And we kind of built this business purely around being better at ideas, and not getting too fast answers, which is obviously the world that we're in today with the evolution of AI and kind of it breaking into many industries and advertising and marketing being one of those

And it's springboards, it's all about, it's always kind of been about humans in the creative equation. It's one of our missions, one of our purposes, and allowing humans to do the thing that they really bloody good at, which is taking ideas and things and stimuli to unexpected places

And so today's sessions are about the people and kind of bringing it back to the craft, the industry craft that we kind of all love and adore and maybe have lost a little bit along the way as AI has kind of come in and interrupted our workflows and our

daily lives. So these sessions are essentially here to bring the craft back, bring it back to the people and the human intuition that we're all amazing at.

I'm paying good at that AI isn't good at. Our ability to kind of spot amazing ideas and take them to amazing places

And so I really hope that these sessions that we'll host every single month provide that kind of

sharpening of your craft, and maybe some other ideas on how you can learn and grow as human beings, but also within the work that you do.

So obviously Zoe is kicking us off today and she'll do exactly that. So she'll share how AI can become better at obviously the work and share ideas on building taste and ideas on how we can sharpen our point of view

Within the realm of creativity, but within the realm of many things.

And how you can use AI to obviously amplify yourself. So I'm super excited to hear from Zoe, and I'm not going to kind of belabor anymore. A few tiny little housekeeping things. This session is being recorded. We've had lots of people ask about that

There's a little kind of three dotter at the bottom for non-Zoom users that you can go in and submit a Q&A question. And then at the end you can kind of upvote anything that we want

like really dig into. So without further ado, Zoe, kick us off. Thanks. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me, I appreciate it, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone wherever you are in the world, and thank you for joining us today as well. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Give me 2 seconds. And I will get this up

Alright, let's get into it. I want to talk to you today about a practice that I'm calling the Whetstone. And this is something that I've already published online. So you may have already read it. But I'm going to go a little bit deeper into it today

And it is about how we start to think of leveraging AI for our own personal practice. So thinking about it as a cognitive prosthetic of sorts and something that can actually sharpen the way that we think, as opposed to soften it

So I'm going to jump straight into it, and you may know this saying, you may not. This is Nothioten, which is probably one of the most ancient philosophical phrases in human history. And this was carved above the oracle

In Delphi. And so imagine if you will, you know take yourself back to ancient times and you know you're a king, for example, and you have spent weeks, if not months, crossing harsh terrain to get to the oracle. And you want to ask the oracle to help you foresee a decision that could be the life or death of an empire.

And before you are allowed to go into the Oracle's cave, you see this carving above your head, which is know thyself, Nothioten. And you are unable to face the oracle. They won't even acknowledge you unless you come at it from a place of self-knowledge and self-wisdom. So who is actually asking the question?

And I think over the years, I say years, centuries even, we have almost kind of discarded this

As a kind of nice, philosophical saying, as I said, you know, something that kind of sounds neat, but not necessarily something that we hold dear, or not necessarily something that we interrogate. And we need to bring this back now, because we are at the beginning of an era where we have this

Super intelligence, which promises so much, but which will be hamstrung in its ability to deliver in the way that we all wish it to, unless we have that self-knowledge

And we are now on the verge of having to kind of navigate this super intelligence without losing our

And to me, that concept of self-knowledge, of sort of knowing thyself is going to be a base level skill. You know, it's going to be a kind of critical

fiercely practical competitive advantage, you know, as we move forward.

And a lot of the chat at the moment about how do we navigate AI, how do we kind of make it unique is kind of falling into very repetitive areas. You know, everyone's talking about taste at the moment, you know, everyone's talking about, you know, I'll be fine because I'm special

Because it can't possibly be creative, it can't possibly kind of know what I know. And to an extent, that is kind of true. But if you think about what really makes your work valuable, it's not taste, necessarily. Taste is almost a kind of curated way of looking at something that's already been delivered. It's out there in the world, you're kind of going, yeah, I like that color. I don't like that color, and I'm kind of creating my taste profile over the top of it

But what is really special and unique about what we bring to this industry, what we bring to kind of creativity is not the curation skill necessarily. It's the creation skill. So it's this idea of how do you dream up original thinking? How do you navigate problems

How do you figure out where to begin with a blank sheet of paper? And it's the kind of weird, idiosyncratic way that your mind works, and the way that your mind kind of comes at a problem

That's the real value, you know, that's something that really needs to be kind of explored. But the interesting thing is that the longer in the tooth that you are in this career and in this industry, the less you can actually see your own process

You know, the less able you are to articulate just that kind of gut feel or that instinct. So, you know, for example, when you look at a brief and you read through it, and you just know this is a pile of , this is wrong. And if I asked you, explain to me why that's wrong, you wouldn't necessarily be able to articulate it, you can just feel that there's something off in this.

But it's very, very difficult for you to explain why.

And that's because we just have this muscle memory. You know, we just have this way of having moved through this practice so many times, so many iterations, so many years, you know, it kind of gets buried in our bodies in some way. And that's the kind of instinct that previously

has obviously worked in our favor, but it has gone unexamined

And that's what we need to start thinking about building into the surface now.

There was a brilliant kind of English-Hungarian philosopher, a guy called Michael Polany, and he spent the latter half of his career really trying to dig into, like, what is this instinct that we can't name? And so he watched a bunch of different experts across a myriad of different fields, you know, from kind of medicine and sort of surgeons all the way through to architects and metal workers, etc

And what he came up with was this idea that we know more than we can tell

Which is essentially exactly what I was just saying. So we know instinctively so much in our minds, but we can't verbalize it, we can't get it out. And he coined the term tacit knowledge.

And tacit knowledge is something that is instinctual. It lives in your body. You have sometimes a kind of somatic reaction, you know, when you hear a certain idea, and it could be, I don't know, butterflies in your stomach, it could be just a kind of flatness that tells you that there's no energy, there's no dynamism there

And that is all part of this process. And again, if you think about any level of expertise, you know, I just mentioned medicine, a seasoned surgeon may open someone up on a kind of operating table and look at the kind of tissue of their lungs, for example, and just again know instinctively

That something doesn't look right. That doesn't mean they're going through a kind of step-by-step process in their minds that they're articulating, but again, they have that memory, that instinct, that kind of inherent knowledge that they just know when something is off.

And that is the kind of tacit knowledge, you know, that we really need to get to. And as I said, for a really long period of time, we didn't need to articulate this stuff. You know, we had training, we had mentorship programs, you just needed to be close enough to somebody else to, to a certain extent, kind of absorb that tacit knowledge from them

And then you would absorb it, that tacit knowledge would become invisible to you as well, but it would still kind of live in your brain and in your body, and off you would go. And, you know, the kind of humanity managed to move on. But now what we're looking at is we need to be able to verbalize and articulate this tacit knowledge

Because we are in a situation where we have what we're calling kind of abundant intelligence. And this intelligence is going to continue to accelerate and continue to grow to such an extent, for example, that Sam Altman stood on the stage at the BlackRock Investment Infrastructure Conference back in March, and he said

Intelligence will become monitored and bought like a utility, like water, like electricity, for example. It's going to be so cheap that we won't even be able to meter it, you know, which is something that was actually said in 1954 about kind of nuclear energy, which proven to be completely fucking wrong

Never mind, we'll kind of see how it goes. But essentially what he's saying is intelligence will be everywhere. It will be abundant. We will be able to access it as easily as kind of brushing our teeth

But just because you have more intelligence doesn't necessarily mean you have more wisdom, and we need to kind of wield those two things together. We need to be able to navigate this abundance intelligence with that wisdom, and that wisdom comes from our tacit knowledge.

And I think where I'm kind of getting to with this at the moment on tacit knowledge is, you know, we have a bit of a ceiling on our brains at the moment. And that ceiling is how do we extend ourselves with these incredible tools? How do

Really find a way of, as I said, using this as a kind of cognitive prosthetic. How do we expand our remit and our ability to kind of think in new forms on new frontiers? And the ceiling is our own opacity. And what I mean by that is, when you have these

Processes, these instincts, these kind of gut feel that you operate with and you just kind of, you know, shoot them out into the ether and the work comes out, and you just kind of go, awesome, you know, I was great in that moment, but you don't necessarily interrogate that. You have got an opaque process

And as long as that process that you go through is opaque, you are not able to wield it, to see it, to be able to direct it. You know, you just have to have basically the uncertainty that it will arrive, you know, at some stage. And for probably the last 20 years or so, I've kind of referred to this process, and it sounds a bit weird and woo-woo, but I've kind of referred to it as a little sort of fairy sitting in the back of my head

Really patiently unknotting a massive ball of wool, you know, and that's basically how I approach problem solving. So I'll be given a problem, and I've just got to let the fairy in my brain pick it apart and trust the process. And, you know, I'm going through the whole period the entire time of thinking I'm at this, I can't do this.

I'm going to be fired, this is the very last project, I'm going to have to shut down my business. And then obviously, you know, the ferry figures it out, and off we go. And I have used that process for a really long period of time, and it's kind of worked for me. But now I'm in a stage where I don't want to rely on that uncertainty and that maybe I want to find a way to unpick my own processes

I can say, right, now I know how I think and I know how my mind operates. I'm going to take that portion of my mind and I'm going to direct it over in that direction, or I'm going to compound these two elements of how I

And I'm going to go into a completely new area. And so that ability for us to kind of pull apart is going to be something that can really help us move in a much more kind of fluid and frontier-led way with this technology.

The challenge at the moment is that the vast majority of people that I'm speaking to, at least, or that I've come across when it comes to artificial intelligence, and specifically kind of generative AI, are kind of using it in three different ways. They're using it as a Q&A bot, you know, so the amount of people that have said, I put the same prompt as you into Claude or into ChatGPT, and it delivered shit. I'm like, yeah, of course it did.

Because you have not fed it your preferences, you have not trained it on how you think. You have not put the kind of ground roots work into it for it to be able to come back to you in a way that works with your preferences and your idea, and your reality and your brain. So of course it's going to come back with that, but a lot of people just do that, and then they give up

And they think there's no point in this. This thing is not the perfect oracle. It's not going to give me, you know, some incredibly creative idea after I've interacted with it for 2 minutes, and therefore it shits, and I'm not going to kind of touch it again.

Other people are using it as an efficiency platform, so so many people have decided that they can't be bothered to write emails anymore. So they're literally just kind of copying and pasting emails, you know, into ChatGPT and saying, like, give me an email that I can just respond, and, you know, off it goes into the ether. Or, you know, they're finding a way to do kind of Excel macros in a slightly different way, but whatever it is, it's kind of speed, it's productivity. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing

I'm just saying it's kind of one small aspect of actually how we can use these. And then the third is just content machines. So just give me more stuff, you know, give me more volume, give me more options, and then I will just kind of, like, you know, pick one, as if I'm plucking something out of a hat, you know, and that might be better than a blank page that I started with in the first instance.

And all of those seem to be really dominant use cases, especially in our industry, especially in our practice. And I think the challenge with this is that we're going to do it and we're going to keep doing it. And it doesn't look wrong

you know, sometimes when you get an answer out of the kind of content machine and you're going for volume, and you pick something out of the ether, it doesn't inherently look like a crap idea. It looks like an okay idea.

And that's the problem. We are going to start to very, very gently soften our cognitive ability, and specifically our unique cognitive ability, by just accepting an adequate answer that we come up with in 20 minutes versus something that previously could have taken us 2, 5,

you know 6 days to really mull over and digest and kind of get those muscles working. And so, bit by bit, we actually start to move into this kind of space of atrophy. And I think the really scary thing is it's atrophy that we don't notice until it's already happened

An example of this, you know, if you will, kind of let me get a bit weird and creative here, is imagine

space travel, so you're an astronaut and you go off into space and you know you're out in the world of the universe in your spacesuit and you're floating around and it feels fucking amazing. You know, there's no gravity, there's zero gravity in that sense. And that floating feeling, you know, you feel like you're literally on top of the world, and it's amazing

And actually what we don't know at that point, and obviously we do now because of science with astronauts, is that lack of gravity, that lack of friction, means that actually their muscles and their bones start to atrophy, because their bodies are not pushing against anything

And they don't actually realize just how much that atrophy has impacted them from a physicality perspective until they land back on Earth, and they have to stand up and walk under gravity, you know, for the first time in 4 months.

And that's exactly what's happening here, because if you think about what AI is, it is essentially cognitive zero gravity. It feels amazing. We are floating, we are superhuman, we are above the earth, and we're just going to keep doing it. But we have lost the friction. And when we lose the friction

We soften

And we start to kind of lose that ability to kind of build that tacit knowledge and that muscle memory. And that's something that I got really scared of personally, because I noticed myself going down that path. There was a particular project that I did that I spoke about publicly, probably about 18 months, two years ago, I just had my son, I was fucking knackered. I still wanted to work. And so I was like, right, I'm outsourcing this

And a few months later, I could not remember the start nor the end, nor the middle of that project. I had outsourced such an extent of it that I couldn't even remember what I wrote. I hadn't learned from that project because I hadn't put any of myself into it, and it was a kind of friction-free

Super easy. Press the big green AI button and off you go to the races, you know, and I can invoice for that. And, you know, I did invoice for that. I don't think the work was shit necessary, but it wasn't me, and I didn't get any benefit from it. And it was like I had this kind of black hole in my memory, and that really scared me

And so from that day forward, I started to become much more conscious of that idea of softening and of that kind of cognitive zero gravity. And I decided that I really wanted to push against it, and then I wanted to kind of find a different way to move forward, you know, with these systems, not to reject them, because I still think they're incredibly powerful

you know, tools and possibilities, but how could I wield this to my will, as opposed to losing myself in the machine

And this is kind of coordinate four of a series that I've been writing called Terror Incognita. You know, the first was a brand that thinks. So, you know this idea of basically a brand brain that we could build with all of the kind of, again, tacit knowledge of sort of brand development fed into it that actually had the capability of evolving, you know, as we sort of steer it forward.

We had forking futures. So this idea of kind of scenario planning and peripheral vision. We had creative mycelium, so basically pushing back against this idea of AI as these individual isolating rabbit holes. And actually, could it almost be like a mycelial network that could kind of create

between us and actually help us to kind of design a form of a kind of creative serendipity. But this one's slightly different because all of those three were looking at AI possibilities and practices for out there in the external world. They kind of mapped big possibilities and big concepts that we could kind of build

And, you know, push out from an organizational perspective or a brand perspective. This one is about mapping you and yourself. And I would argue that until you've gone through a practice like this, the other coordinates will not be available to you. You need to be able to kind of hone your own skills, hone your own possibilities, and really understand your own unique ability to do this.

Before you can start to explore these other kind of much bigger concepts, because the whole thing connects back to how are you leveraging the system, how are you holding on to your uniqueness, you know, and how are you doing things differently?

So what I want to kind of try and do is walk you through a really basic version of how I did this, and this might not work for everybody. You might have a different way of doing this, but, you know, I think it's kind of useful to take it from the abstract into the kind of practical

So when I first started thinking about doing this, I was like, right, I'm going to get a piece of paper and a pen and I'm going to go on a walk, and I'm just going to really think about what do I think is unique about me and my practice? What is it that I do differently? And can I kind of write all of that stuff down

And this was not a kind of one walk process, by the way. This was like a couple of weeks. And I kept coming back and scribbling stuff out and trying to kind of sharpen, you know, with the knowledge of myself. And I really wanted to go through this process alone in the first instance. I think that's really important to kind of get back in touch with how you think your brain works.

And so this is what I kind of came up with. So the first is this idea of kind of cross-pollination is how I feed thinking. So I'm constantly looking for references in adjacent territories, or, you know, I've mentioned things like, you know, mycelial networks or evolutionary biology, or I'm thinking about

you know, what's happening in terms of, you know, how, I don't know, photosynthesis works, for example, and how can I use those as kind of mechanisms to overlay and help me think in different practices by kind of putting them on, I don't know, brand problems, or business problems, or research problems.

The other one is, I think, in puzzle pieces, so I'm always trying to kind of solve

The next piece of the puzzle, so I kind of get to a certain objective, and I'm just like, right, I think I've got my brain around that. Now we need to go and look somewhere else. And that's kind of been the thinking of my sort of career today. You know, I've not followed one trajectory. I've worked in loads of different spaces from international development to organizational design

And from the outside, that might look quite chaotic, but for me, I'm kind of building the next puzzle piece that allows me to unlock, you know, the kind of bigger picture that I'm working on. I read really widely and weirdly, so I will read everything from, you know, folklore and fairy tales through to

Brene Brown through to, you know Ursula K. Le Guin through to Yanis Varoufakis, and I'm constantly, again, trying to kind of have that cross-pollination and really understand how those ideas intersect. I don't separate personal and professional, you know, for a period of time when I first started writing, I was always thinking that I had to kind of edit myself and be the professional voice

And now I write about motherhood, and I write about grief. And I think that, you know, all of those things make me a multifaceted person and therefore make me a multifaceted thinker, and I kind of want to make sure that all of those things are kind of constantly together.

I've got a real obsession with naming stuff, which, if you follow some of my work, you might have noticed. So I agonize over the naming of my pieces, and I don't just want to put, like, a kind of description headline or something like that, so I kind of call things like the whetstone and, like, creative mycelium, like Mad Men Furious Women

the multiplayer brands. I'm constantly trying to find ways of encapsulating almost the entire argument, but, like, in a name itself. You know, things like rabbit holes, I go down obsessively as well, you know, I get obsessed with the kind of depth of a subject, and I just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper until I kind of figure out, you know, all the kind of the machinations of it.

Range is a big part of what I do, you know, my strategic work is all over the place at the moment, and, you know, I write in order to be able to think. I can't think in slides, I have to write long form, you know, that's why I work through an argument.

So I kind of did this. This was a bit of a painful process, but I finally kind of got there. I was like, this is the stuff that I think makes me unique, that makes me different. Then what I did is I went to Claude. And so Claude has been the system that I've been using, you know, the most to kind of work through this particular process, just because I've been thinking it's kind of been useful

And I said to Claude, like, based on the relationship that we've had thus far and all the work that we've done together and, you know, all of the thinking that, you know, I kind of passed through you, plus this list of my stuff

Help me understand why I do these things from your perspective. I have a certain understanding, but I'd like your lens on this as well.

And so Claude was like, okay, I'm gonna have a go at this. And I think what was really interesting is it was almost like holding up a mirror to my own practice, and it felt like weirdly emotional in some ways as well, because I felt very seen, which is a bit fucked up, you know, seen by an AI system, but, you know nevertheless, it was helpful.

And it started to kind of help me explain why I do what I do and kind of what the meaning is behind it. So things like with cross-pollination, and you know how I feed the thinking, what Claude said is you never, ever use cross-pollination as a metaphor. You're not using it as a kind of decorative example of bringing an idea to life. You're looking for mechanisms.

So when I'm thinking about mycellular networks, for example, I'm not looking at just kind of saying, you know, picture kind of mycellular network of fungi. I'm actually looking at how does the mycelium work and can I pick up the mechanism of how it works and put it onto an organization? So as an example, you know, if you're a kind of a mushroom fan

You will know that the way that mycellular networks work, for example, is they are basically nervous systems, you know, for kind of forests and woodland. And, you know, if one particular tree is dying or is struggling for nutrients, they will actually reroute nutrients and energy towards that dying tree

And actually they have a kind of level of prioritization, which I thought was really interesting. So when I started thinking about mycellular creative network leveraging AI for an organization, the first thing that I was concerned about is like, well, if it was connecting all the dots, wouldn't it just be a network of just noise

Constantly, just constantly sort of surfacing stuff for the sake of surfacing stuff. But when I started overlaying this idea of, you know, prioritization, I was thinking, actually, we have the ability for the AI to be trained on what is signal versus what is noise, what would it surface? Why would it surface that? And how would that surface be something that would be

uniquely valuable to the organization, as opposed to kind of surfacing all the potential connections. So again, what I'm looking for with that cross-pollination is, what is the mechanism that can help me think through this idea differently, as opposed to just kind of make it pretty and metaphorical? There's a bunch of other stuff in here as well, so things like, you know, reading widely and weirdly

You know, I'm obsessed with this idea of, you know, fairy tales as encapsulation of wisdom from kind of generational

collapse, you know, that actually will then help us to kind of figure out how do we navigate the mess that we're going through, you know, in the way that Claude reflected this back to me is this is a kind of competitive advantage. I'm translating stuff into my field for navigation that maybe other people would never have read because their head is just in strategy books or just in business books, but you're kind of picking up

concepts from other fields, and then popping them over and seeing, you know how they fit and how they can help kind of move your thinking forward. And there's a bunch of other things as well. I think probably one of the most interesting one here is that the naming aspect. Claude fed back and said, you know, names are not labeling the work

Names are the way that I complete the work, so when I come up with a name like the whetstone, for example, the entire

narrative around this as a skill changes because the word is so powerful that it's a way of actually not only kind of encapsulating the piece, but helping me finish the piece and helping me finish the thinking as well. So there's a bunch of other stuff there.

And then I also said to Claude, what have I missed? So this is how I think I'm kind of mapping my sort of tacit knowledge, my instincts, my kind of gut reality. What else is there? And Claude said, there are four things. The first one is signal commitment. So I will quite comfortably come out in public and say, I think this is going to be a really big thing

And, you know, sometimes you might see that as bravado, or they might see that as hype. And what Claude interpreted it as is you are committing to a signal publicly because you believe in that and you want to kind of track that, and you want to make sure that that's now in your wheelhouse, and that's kind of another puzzle piece that you want to add in

There's another one where, you know, I use my keynotes as laboratory. I don't have a set keynote piece. Pretty much every single keynote that I do is completely unique, and I will normally only do it once, which is mental. If you think about actually building a business as a keynote speaker. The whole point is you're supposed to come up with your set piece

Repeat it 100 times and get paid for, you know the benefit of doing that. I don't do that, because the way that I use keynotes is I'm practicing my thinking out loud in an audience and using their feedback as a way to then figure out where I go next, and how I tighten this, or how I go down a different rabbit hole.

So it's a very different way of kind of thinking about that. And there's a bunch of other stuff in here as well that I don't need to go through in detail

So once I had that, once I had this idea of here's where I think my tacit knowledge is, here's where Claude thinks the kind of meaning is behind why I do what I do, and here are some additional stuff that I've kind of been blinking to. What do you do with this? Like, how do you actually turn this into something useful?

And the next stage is this idea of encoding

So how do you then dig into why you do this? You cannot build, you know, tacit knowledge within an AI system simply by saying, I read widely and weirdly. Like, there's that's not going to do anything. That's not necessarily going to help in terms of your extension of your knowledge.

So you have to get into like, why do I do this? What does it mean for my practice? How does it help me think differently? And so I went through this process as well. And the first thing that I tried to do, which looking back when it was fucking stupid, is I just tried to just surface my tacit knowledge easily

So I was like, Claude, ask me a bunch of questions about this tacit knowledge and let's see where we get to. And so Claude was just like, okay, why do you have an obsession with cross-pollination? I was like, well, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I just do. Or it would say, you know, why do you read fairy tales and folklore as well as strategy books

And again, I was getting really frustrated because I just couldn't naturally surface that stuff. You know, it's tacit knowledge for a reason. It's so deeply embedded in the way that my brain works and the way that my body works that I can't just suddenly flick a switch and answer that question. So anyway, I went through this process for a good couple of weeks, until I literally wanted to throw my laptop out of the window

And then I started thinking, well, maybe I'm asking myself the wrong questions. You know, so I went into this idea of kind of psychological theory, you know, how do you get people to kind of really share the sort of inner aspects, you know, of their brain and of their mind? And a lot of it is kind of

Instant reaction territory. So rather than asking why do you do what you do, actually, the better question is, help me just react to something. What is wrong with this scenario? How does my brain just instinctively react to that? And how does that start to kind of surface my tacit knowledge in a different way?

So then I asked Claude to build me basically an interrogation. And this interrogation is massive. This is only a couple of examples of it, but I just kind of wanted to bring it to life for you

And this is a process I then went on for a good couple of months, and I'm still going on it, you know, constantly. So one of the questions is, you know, a strategist use photosynthesis as a metaphor for how brands convert culture into commercial energy. What's wrong with this? And so, initially, I'm just reacting

And I'm saying, well, you know, obviously that's , because that is a metaphor that is not necessarily kind of lifting a mechanism that is then useful, that allows me to interrogate a different problem over here through that lens. You know, other questions, three domains, evolutionary biology, Renaissance painting, game theory

A creative community needs to sustain itself after its central figure leaves, which is useful. Don't think, just answer. And again, what it's doing is it's surfacing my initial instinct, my initial kind of tacit knowledge. You know, someone pitches a cross-domain connection, bureaucratic systems work like immune responses, they attack anything unfamiliar. Is that useful, or is that decorative, and I'm reacting

And so bit by bit, I go through this interrogation process. And this is still difficult. This is still a bit of a pain in the ass, to be honest, but it is a much easier process than trying to just naturally surface your tacit knowledge. So it's asking you to react

It is looking at how you think, it is looking at what you're drawn to, how you start going on a rant, you know, about, you know, photosynthesis as a decorative metaphor, for example, and then absorbing all of that, you know, into basically a kind of post-interrogation

process. And I've done this for every single skill that I have built. And as I said, I'm still going through this process

But it has to be ongoing because it's not necessarily something that can ever kind of sit still.

So once you've done that, once you've kind of gone through, you know, the different areas of tacit knowledge and what you would do, by the way, is you would go through, you know, things like keynote is laboratory and you would have an interrogation process for that. You would go through, you know, questions as an organizing principle and you would have an interrogation process for that. So they're different

You know, for all of these different pieces of your practice, of your kind of tacit knowledge that you're trying to surface. And then once you've actually done that, you've just got a fuckload of information. So what do you do with that information? How do you then kind of build something useful with it? And you build something like this. So on the left-hand side here, you can basically see

the skills that I have within Claude at the moment. This is just some of them. So you can see stuff like I've got a tacit knowledge skill for research synthesis. I've got one for keynote presentations. I've got one for writing style. I've got one for investigative instinct, you know, another one for my naming instinct as well, you know, my sparring partner preferences, all of these

And within each of these are these gigantic skill documents, which I'm kind of scrolling through here. So the one that you can see on screen at the moment is for parallel logic. And so this is this kind of cross-contamination, this idea of kind of picking up parallel mechanisms and popping them onto kind of adjacent territories

And in here is just a shitload of stuff. So you can see I've got my domain library. So I've got why I reach for things like my causial networks or evolutionary biology. What is the predictive test that it's passed? When have I used it before? When would I not use it? You know, political economy, very fakis. I've got, you know, ideas of jazz ensembles, speculative fiction spaces that I like going into

And then what I've also got in here is failure modes

So basically this idea of when does this fall short? So, you know, when I'm trying to craft something that's just a metaphor or a beautiful image, or it's an analogy, or it's kind of a force transplant that doesn't really help further my thinking, that's a no-go area. And then I've got, you know, how do I accumulate more frameworks for this? How do I start thinking in more adjacent fields

And then I've got version history. This is version seven, by the way, of this particular skill that I've built. So as I said, this is a kind of constant changing iterative process, and it's so, so important that you do this as a kind of constant iterative process because, you know, there is obviously a danger that you would fall back into a kind of expectation pattern here

So this is what it looks like. It is agonizingly painful. You will swear a lot when you're going through this process. You will want to stop. You should never stop because this is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the only ways to really kind of craft

the leveraging of an AI platform, you know, to your will and kind of to your process. And so some people have asked me this question of, well, if you feed all of this stuff about your tacit knowledge and your instincts in the way of you working into Claude, can't anyone access that? And

You know, the answer is no, of course they can't. You know, if you were to try and recreate this, as anyone on this call, you could not do this, because this is my brain, this is my instinct. I've codified all of this, I've encoded all of this, this is my stuff, and I've kind of fed it all into these documents, and I'm constantly, constantly updating it

So every single time I go into Claude and I'm asking it to kind of help me on a particular brief or a research project or kind of help me solve the tyranny of the blank page, I am not starting from scratch. I am starting from the accumulation of all of these skills

And the kind of real depth within each of those, which is therefore making my practice so much more unique and so much more singular, and it means that it's instantly thinking how I think, and it's looking at the patterns that I would go through, you know, and it's looking at the way of stress testing ideas that, again, you know, I would kind of go through as well.

And so this is kind of what it looks like in practice. Obviously, I've been using Claude for this and I've been doing it for a really long time and I approached Pip and Amy about this a while back and basically said, I think this is a really important aspect of how strategists do strategic work, which is your own personal practice, your own kind of unique aspect.

And being Pip and Amy, they were just like, no problem, we can build that. And about five minutes later, they kind of come back with the concept of it. And so that concept is this. And Pip will talk you through this in a bit more detail as well, but this is profiles.

And this is actually something that you can build within springboards as well to such an extent and apologies, Pip and Amy, if I'm kind of holding over a barrel at this stage, but I have been told that I could actually download my skill files from Claude in the next couple of weeks and just re-upload them directly into Springboards

Which means that I can then leverage this platform with all of that tacit knowledge that I have kind of built elsewhere, so I'm not having to start from scratch with a different platform, so you can actually kind of connect the dots across those two. So again, if you're using springboards, you know, for kind of creative thinking and sort of platform thinking.

You don't have to do it in isolation of the ability of kind of building the skills, and that's tacit knowledge, which then again means that you can kind of pop into springboards and your entire brain has been transplanted over to this platform, over to this system, and you're able to kind of work in that same way, which is super exciting

And thank you, Amy and Pip, for constantly putting up with my jabbing of what's coming next and kind of what to build, which is super exciting.

And so I think, you know, for me, the way to kind of articulate this is the encoding here then becomes your moat. Because, as I said, you know, intelligence is abundant, and it is going to be abundant, you know, like I said, like utility, like energy, everyone is going to have access to this, everyone's going to have access to Claude, to ChatGPT, to springboards, hopefully

And the kind of big thing to say here is that you don't have to be on the same level as everybody else. If you put the effort in, if you find a way of articulating your tacit knowledge, if you find a way of then being able to kind of encode it and build those skill sets and kind of essentially build

The expansion and extension of your own thinking in your own brain into these systems, you are going to level up to a pace that everybody else will find very, very challenging to kind of catch up with, because all of your unique idiosyncratic weirdness

You can actually scale for the very first time

And I think the key thing to then think about and the way we frame AI is it's not just about faster and efficiencies and just more stuff. It is essentially, as I said, a whetstone and a whetstone if people don't know what that is, it is a sharpening stone

You know, it's kind of a big, you know, heavy stone. It's very good at kind of friction, and you kind of run your blade across it to remove all of the , you know, and kind of make sure that you're constantly as sharp as you can possibly be. You would never pick up a whetstone and get it to cut vegetables. That's not the point of it. You know, it is there

as an object of friction to help you to kind of have that blade as sharp as it can possibly be. And if we start thinking about artificial intelligence platforms in that way, it completely changes how you then approach it, because AI is the whetstone. You don't ask it to do the cutting, you don't ask it to do the shaping, you do that.

But you find a way of injecting friction into that process so that your brain becomes sharper, your tacit knowledge becomes articulated, and you can actually wield it in a way that can be incredibly exciting, you know, and effective as well.

There is a big watch out here

If you do this process once and you encode all of those skills, and you go on your walks, and you figure out your tacit knowledge, and then you're like, sweet, I'm just going to run, you know, whatever system I'm working with in this way, and I don't even really have to think anymore, because I've basically taken my brain and shoved it into the system

You are going to fall back into a very seductive trap, and that seductive trap is your back-in zero gravity. You know, you're back in friction-free, you've kind of built this brain, you've built this system, it's going to run for you, and you've only done the process once, and your cognitive ability will start to soften again.

And that's not what we want in this instance. So this has to be a commitment to an ongoing practice. It has to be a commitment to constantly reintroducing the friction, to sharpening those skills, to taking yourself off on walks, and having those kind of random conversations, you know, with platforms such as this to try and figure out what else am I missing

And I think the really exciting thing here is that, you know, if you encode version one of this, how do you then get to version two? And the whole point is that the versioning is a way of you sharpening and expanding and building on that tacit knowledge and leaning into that kind of friction process as

As I said, it's pain in the arse as it's going to be, which it is. It is a way for you to then kind of push yourself further and to expand your mind in a different way. And you have to use it in that way. You can't just stop at version 1 and go back to the softening, because that is just going to take you straight back to, kind of, you know, zero gravity, as I mentioned again.

And, you know, I kind of want you to sort of sit with this question and maybe you're already making notes, I hope some of you are, but, you know, what would be in your skill file, if you were going to pick one of the things that makes you you, that makes you really unique in how you approach your practice, what kind of stuff would be in it? Obviously, mine are

massive, because I've been working on it for such a long time, but just starting that process, starting that kind of mind map, you know, putting yourself in the middle, putting your tacit knowledge in the middle, what is it that you do that you think makes you different, or, you know, kind of special in the way that you approach your work, or the way that you kind of approach

mashing ideas together, for example, and really start to kind of pull that apart and really interrogate it. But, like, why do you do that? Where does that come from? You know, is there a kind of passion attached to that? Is there a reading obsession attached to that? You know, are you obsessed with 17th century literature? Fuck knows. But all of that stuff is so valuable for you to kind of really dig into, you know, and understand

I wanted to show you a couple of examples of actually how this works in practice with actual work, because that's another thing that kind of makes this much more pragmatic. This is an example of a project that I was working on end of last year

And this was for a massive entertainment fandom, a global fandom, probably one of the biggest out there at the moment. And they initially came to me, and they were like, this fandom is amazing, you know, it's kind of really driving the IP forward, but me, it's toxic.

And we do not know how to interact with these people. They scare us. And how should we approach this? And if I had just put how do I manage a toxic fandom into ChatGPT or whatever kind of platform that I was using, it would give me a very sort of simplistic answer. You need community management. You need guardrails, you need to kind of figure out how you bring them closer into the process. Like that would be the norm, right?

I didn't want that. And so what I did is I kind of leant on some of the skills that I had

you know, within, you know, sort of Claude projects that I'd built, and I sort of built this in, and I sort of said, right, how could I look at this in a very different way to kind of stretch it into a new area? And, you know, the first area that I looked at was this kind of, you know, personal-professional mash. I refuse to separate the two, they're always together.

So, you know, I've written through the pandemic and grief and all this kind of stuff. And so I had this kind of direct access to this idea of, you know, trauma and what that feels like from the inside. Then I looked at kind of parallel logic. So what other communities, again, structural mechanism, not metaphor, operate from this space of kind of fierceness, defensiveness, protection

an explosive kind of bond around shared objects. And weirdly, what it spat out was, this is trauma bonding, this is survivor groups, this is refugee communities. That's where it comes from. And then I also looked at, you know, the naming instinct, you know, what would I call this? You know, what is this fandom actually

The relationship they have with this IP, what is this? How do I encapsulate that as a whole argument? Where it led to was this idea of an emotional talisman. So this particular IP, this fandom got really, really big around COVID and a lot of people were turning to it as an escape mechanism to kind of escape from the kind of existential dread that we were all living through during that period of time

And the reason that they were so defensive and angry and kind of toxic around anything that the IP would put out is because they saw it as an emotional talisman, and it was a reflection of themselves and their trauma and their defense mechanisms. So it was less a community management issue

And it was more an emotional navigation problem. And so that necessarily meant that, you know, kind of the strategy for this, the kind of creator obligations, what you were asking of this fandom, had to completely change, because the lens through which we were looking at this was no longer, you know, an IP fandom

It was basically a trauma-bonded group of people who saw this IP as an emotional talisman and everything shifted. So this was a much bigger, much more in-depth way of thinking, you know, about this project. And they loved it, which was amazing, and it turned into a kind of six, seven-month project. I'm still working with them now

And yeah, it was a completely fresh take on how do you approach toxic fandoms basically by really understanding them.

Another one I did, you know, if you are familiar with what I do, I do a lot of work for an NBA player and as well as personal brand, I also run his foundation. We have been building a youth basketball curriculum off the back of a big piece of research that we did in 2024

And we wanted to come at it in a really different way, you know, not like a normal curriculum, not like a kind of, you know, loads of drills and sort of almost like a military-style drill, which was where a lot of kind of youth basketball curriculums have gone. And so, again, I was like, well, you know, where could I look for this? What would be interesting? And the space I ended up with was jazz ensembles

And again, I'm picking up the mechanism of a jazz ensemble, and I'm popping it into youth basketball curriculums. And so I'm looking at, you know, what makes this different? You know, things like jazz is a framework that everybody understands, but it's incredibly individual, and the structure enables individual expression. There's a kind of freedom in that as well

You know, things like, you know, joy is the engine of jazz, not necessarily the reward. More experienced jazz musicians create space for other people to kind of come in, not necessarily dominance, and it's this idea of kind of proximity to mastery that elevates everybody else. And there was a bunch of other stuff in there

And what I found was that actually looking at jazz ensembles was a really strong parallel logic mechanism to then look at the possibilities for a youth basketball curriculum. And, you know, it gave me the ability to look at kind of prediction. And as a result of that, we ended up actually building the curriculum around this

Which was, you know, what does the coach look like if they're a band leader, not a drill sergeant? How do we cultivate ensemble dynamics? So coaching the whole team to play to each other, not to elevate the star. Individual voice development within shared fundamentals and shared frameworks, you know, proximity to mastery as a development tool

Mixed ability as a feature rather than a problem. And and and but you can start to kind of see if I hadn't had that kind of mechanism from the skills that I had built, I wouldn't have gotten to this point in terms of actually how we build that curriculum

And so I think that's the kind of really interesting thing here is, you know, that transplant from Jazz didn't just inspire the work, it actually generated the work and helped us to kind of think much more expansively from it.

And so those are kind of two really great examples. But I think the big thing that I'm learning as well is it's not just about picking on one particular skill. What I'm also starting to find now more and more is actually when you have one practice, super useful, brilliant, big tick, when you have 10 practices, 10 skills

that are then overlapping and compounding for well over a year, which is where I am now, it produces something else entirely. You know, it really starts to kind of expand you in ways that you would never necessarily connect previously. And I think the enrichment that you get as a strategist, as a thinker, you know, as a practitioner

is just something that is so unbelievably exciting, and I really hope that, you know, more of you kind of lean into this to experience that as well, if you haven't already.

I think one last thing that I kind of wanted to leave you on is this idea of, you know, convergence versus divergence, and we're kind of in this

Seesaw at the moment where, as I said, we've got this abundant intelligence, but it is pushing us towards the lowest common denominator because ultimately, you know, what AI is at the moment is they are convergence machines. You know, output volume goes up, distinctiveness goes down, everyone's kind of going to this kind of

you know, central mean, where everything kind of sounds the same, looks the same, you know, we're kind of averaging ourselves out. And I think a practice like the Whetstone, what it really does, what it really does well, is it helps you to really push yourself into divergence. So you have your encoded practice, you have your

you know, deep-seated understanding of tacit knowledge, and as a result of that, you get to a level of irreplaceable output, which I think is incredibly powerful. So for me, you know, the work has gotten weirder. The territories that I've been exploring are

all over the place, but it feels more like me than it ever has before. I literally feel like I've got superpowers. Because I've gone through this agonizingly painful process of trying to take all of that tacit knowledge out of my mind and out of my body and encode it in such a way that I can wield it, I can direct it, I can push it

you know, into new areas. It feels uniquely my own. And that's where I wanted to get to, you know, as I said, two years ago, when I was just kind of pressing the convenience button and moving through at speed and just producing stuff, I scared the out of myself. And I promised myself that actually, if I was going to leverage these tools moving forward

I had to be able to do so in a way that extended my brain and my uniqueness, and I was terrified of kind of losing my mind in this. And I feel like in this instance anyway, I could be wrong in the future, but I feel like I've kind of cracked it, and that's why I wanted to share this with you today as well.

So I think I'll leave it there and I'll leave you on know thyself and just how unbelievably important it is, I think moving forward, it's a 2,000-year-old philosophy that I think we are on the verge of for the very first time, truly being able to

understand and push into, and that, to me, is super exciting. So thank you very much.

Thanks, Savi. Amazing as always. And I want to get into questions while it's hot for everyone. There's about 10 or so in there.

I'm going to interrupt though for three minutes just to show a few things because I think it actually adds to the conversation of everything that Zoe's just meant and it may actually spark a bigger conversation. I also want to be conscious of time. I think some of us can go over, Zoe, I think you're still good to go over a little bit. So if people want to hang around and ask questions, please do.

But I'm just gonna show you something super quick with some things that are coming up which are going to add to this conversation. So I'm just going to do this mega quick so we can get into the conversation, but a couple of things and changes with Springboards. I don't know if you can see that. So Zoe already mentioned profiles. This for us is such a big shift

It is having profiles at both an agency level, an individual level, but giving people the ability to effectively build out what Zoe's just mentioned and port those over in an interesting way. Now, what that makes difference and for us, this is the biggest launch. I'm not sure if everyone saw is that we actually released a model called Flint

In springboards, we are completely agnostic. You can use Anthropic if you prefer that, or Google or OpenAI, so you can actually get different responses from different models, because they are slightly different. But the big thing is this model that is built for divergence, because the biggest problem in the industry, as Zoe was just touching on, is

all the models have started to converge into the same place, and they're highly, highly repetitive. And so what Flint does, it's a tiny model, it's in alpha, but it breaks the distribution to give you different all the time. So when you do ask it the same thing over and over again, it breaks that at the model layer, not at the prompting layer, which is

And I believe the solution. What I wanted to show you, though, because this is the newest kind of coolest thing that's also coming out next week, so this is all next thing, is a discovery tab. Like, part of the reasons we're doing these sessions is we believe in, like, inspiration should come from the real world, from great people like Zoe, and you should learn from the stuff around you

And so one of the things that's come in, I want to show this mega quick because it's super cool, is a discovery tab where you can come in. I don't know if you can still see my screen now, but you can actually go and look at great real work from around the world. But what's interesting about that is you can filter it by campaigns that are like

you know, campaigns about anger, and certain strategic intents, and you can then drag that into a chat, and you can say, tell me about this, and what's better.

you get the idea. And so, that is, like, I think, a massive one to get inspiration and break out of your own head, and into a new space. How's this problem been solved before and the rest of it. I think that's all I was going to say. And then the final thing is, obviously, this is the first of the series. We're going to do these every single month

I think there's a lot of comments which we'll jump into now about particularly juniors and defining their own craft. And for us, we don't want to be a thing that is just like, hey, give us money for this tool. It's like, no, no, no, we want to invest in

the person that you guys are to develop your own craft and your skills by giving you access to other people so that you can do more of this stuff. So I'm going to stop sharing if I learn how to do it on Zoom with this button, and we can jump into the Q&A. So

Let's have a quick look. There's a heap in the Q&A. I don't know if Zoe, Amy, Nikki, you guys just want to grab one and maybe respond to it and just top to bottom if you like. Or we I can just pick up the interesting one. Actually, so I'm going to throw you straight onto the younger generations one because I've seen it come up a lot.

The first one is how to be protecting younger generations so they can create a unique sense, frame, experience and they can work with AI. How do they develop that pace basically

Honest answer, I don't know. I'm trying to work through that at the moment. I think it's a real issue. Well, for a number of different reasons. We have

consistently screwed over younger people coming into this industry for a good decade, probably longer now. You know, we've cut training budgets, they're supposed to hit the ground running, we don't do mentorship or anything like that really anymore, and we just kind of throw them in at the deep end and, you know, sink or swim

And what I'm worried about now is on top of that, on top of the fact that we don't train them, we don't mentor them, and we don't really give a about them, and we pay them like as well, we are then just gonna push them into AI systems and just be like, good luck, figure it out. And so they're never going to be able to develop those heuristics and that kind of tacit knowledge and that profile of their own brains and how they're thinking. And I think that's a real danger

And again, what we're looking at from a kind of junior perspective, the way that we see their value is basically they're just kind of like efficiency monkeys. But we need to change the way that we view them, and therefore, as I said, kind of change the way that we sort of treat them and sort of build that knowledge, because

There's so many agencies at the moment who are pounding this kind of offering of come to us, play a flat fee subscription, you know, like, whatever they're called, monks, for example, and

Xwpp, I can't remember the name Sorrel is kind of pushing this at the moment and saying, actually, we, you don't need juniors. There are kind of cost center. We don't want that. We're just going to give you AI with some super senior practitioners, and and you're off to the races. The problem with that is that model will maybe last a decade, and then it's going to break, because obviously those people are going to bugger off. They're going to retire at some stage.

And we haven't necessarily then created that next generation that can come in and sort of fill that spot, which I think is a really short-sighted view of the industry as a whole. But we're very good at short-sightedness and very shit at long term thinking. And so I think we need to actually construct proper programmes

that start to actually say, how do we help them develop tacit knowledge? How do we give them, you know, wide-ranging reading lists, for example? How do we bring back mentoring so they're literally sitting, like, physically side by side with someone, kind of helping them do that thinking

You know, I was so lucky that I had that at Naked, you know, I was 24 when I was at Naked, so I was one of the youngest people they'd hired. And it was a mentoring model. The entire setup was a mentoring model. It was always a slightly more junior strategist with a much more seasoned strategist, and you worked as a duo. And basically, you know, the benefit was

But the benefit for me is that I got kind of, you know, to sit next to this woman who, for me was Carla Pritchard, who I still adore to this day. And she taught me everything that she knew. And that was one of the best experiences I've ever had when it comes to, you know, sort of training and really helping me develop my voice and the way that I think

And we need to bring that stuff back. And right now in agencies, it's all about efficiencies, it's all about cutting headcount, it's all about margin. And so we see that as something that we don't want to invest in. But if we don't invest in that in ten years time, we're going to be fucked. And I don't think enough of us are thinking about

properly. And as I said, you know, I wrote a piece called The Pipeline Problem recently, which went into that, which looked at everything from football academies to, you know, the medical teams and industries and actually how they do this. And I think there's a lot that we can learn from adjacent industries and how critically important it is not to kind of lose those

you know, those skills and those abilities, and also to kind of really mentor that next generation coming through

Yeah, massive.

It's a fucking problem. That's why you need to do, like, try and spend more time with people. You need to study good work, you need to create your own point of view on it, and

Yeah, it's a big one. Another question that's come up quite a bit that I'm going to jump to is someone anonymous attendees, like, how do you balance the risk of passing along your own biases

That often remain submerged within your own tacit, but also there's another one around, like, echo chambers and, like, avoiding your own echo chamber when you go down this path.

So I think in the first instance, you can't avoid encoding your own biases because we are human and that's how our brains work and whether we like it or not, we are all living within a very specific lens that has been partly hoisted upon us and partly kind of cultivated by us as well. So I think that's a real challenge

What I've been trying to do, which I wrote another piece about, I think last year was I built a project in Claude, which is basically like a little walled garden where I can attack my own thinking and my own assumptions from kind of personas that I built that are very different to me, because

No matter how hard I try, I cannot put myself in the shoes of someone who is a hardcore incel, for example. I can't understand them. Like, my kind of my whole body reaction is, like, negative and defensive and angry, and so I'm never going to understand the world from their point of view. So what I can do

And again, this is not perfect because this is kind of, you know, down the synthetic research rabbit hole, but it's something is I can build a persona around that, and I can challenge Claude to make sure that that persona is, you know, still coming from a place of empathy. It's still coming from a place of humanity, maybe of trauma

You know, maybe of different world believes, and then I can basically attack my own thinking from those different spaces, and it helps me to kind of see where some of my, you know, that my kind of blind areas are. And I may not agree, you know, I may go through that process and still be like, I'm the best, I'm high and mighty, you're still a dickhead

But at least it kind of helps me to sort of think, you know, more expansively and differently, and maybe start to kind of see things from another angle. And I've been using this specifically, so I'm doing a project at the moment with the Green Party, which is focused on Clacton. And if you're not familiar with Clacton, if you're not familiar with the Green Party.

Clacton is the seat of Nigel Farage, who is the leader of the Reform Party in the UK, who I am not a fan of, and he has held onto that seat for a very long time. And Clacton is also one of the poorest and saddest areas in the whole of the UK. Not that he gives a about it.

And so I'm doing this kind of 10-year strategy, which is how do we unseat Farage from his own seat in Clacton? And, you know, one of the big things we need to understand in the first instance is why are these people such fans of him and such fans of reform? And it's not because they're not educated

It's not because they're idiots, it's not because they're racist. You know, there are other kind of empathetic factors that sit underneath that that we really need to get to, you know, the heart of. And I've been building kind of personas of these people, you know, in AI as a first instance to almost kind of test questions and, you know, what would we do if we turned up to someone's doorstep and we spoke to them about a particular issue in this way? How would that go down versus this way? How do we start to kind of build rapport and empathy

and see them as humans who are navigating a really difficult time. And that's been super helpful just in terms of, you know, really expanding my thinking on how to approach that project.

There was another one I was looking at past it.

It was kind of similar to this, is it like

Language models, ChatGPT are known to like tell you you're brilliant and that all ideas are great.

Yes, thank you for

And even if you tell it, like, don't smoke, don't blow smoke up my ass, it still does it.

How do you break yourself

out of that trap

So then I've built another thing, which I think I've also written about, which is basically my own worst critic. And I run all of my ideas through that critic, and it just basically tells me that I'm terrible and that I'm lack originality, and I'm thinking hard enough, and like sometimes it's a little bit harsh, but honestly, I'm quite prolific in what I write

85-90% of the pieces that I start never see the light of day, because I put them through that particular version, and it shuts them down, and it basically says this is derivative, this is an argument that you've already made, now you're making it even worse. This is not your remit, you have no credibility to write about this space, like, go back to the drawing board and think about what your angle is

And it really helps me to kind of knock myself down a couple of pegs, which sometimes we all need, and then to almost think, like, why am I operating in this space? What am I bringing to this conversation that's actually of value, as opposed to just assuming that I can, you know, do all things amazingly well, which obviously I cannot

But it's a great way of making sure that I'm critiquing my own thinking in a slightly more honest way.

Yeah, I'm going to go back to another question on the genius side because it's come up heaps in the chats. I'm 23, I'm junior, how do I do this? And so I'm going to collapse some of these into a overall comment

How can someone in the middle of the road more junior with less experience, don't have the guidance, don't have the mentorship

build that practice in the first place. Like, what are your suggestions to learning your own craft? And particularly not in an AI world, obviously how do you do it outside of the world of AI? Where do you go to learn

Maybe just, like, the top 3 tips you have for juniors on developing craft.

Well, I mean, again, I have written a piece about this called So You Want to Be a Strategist, you know about how you kind of go around this and

There's loads of information in there which I… which is better articulated than how I'm going to articulate it, so if you haven't read that piece, so you want to be a strategist, please go and do read that. One thing I would say about doing this particular practice as someone who is more junior or middle of the road, I'm doing it from the perspective of, you know, 20 plus years in this industry that I'm then kind of encoding my tacit knowledge

What you can also do is you can encode your initial version and then you can ask a system, you know, like Claude, or you can have a look in Springboards and you can sort of say, where are the areas that I am not yet even looking at or that I need to mature into

And then what's the reading list? What should I go and do? Like, how do I do this? I'm still doing this now, so, you know, one of the things that I was saying to Claude recently is, like, I'm super interested in… in Indigenous wisdom and, you know, stuff that we've kind of pushed aside as provincial or trivial

You know, because we've got kind of this kind of, like, West is best for the last couple of centuries. What am I missing? And, Claude went back and said, you need to read the I Ching

And I was like, okay. And so I'm currently doing the audio book, the translated version of the I Ching, which is all about basically divination back in ancient China, and basically, you know some of the stuff that they were talking about, the makeup of societies and ideas and all that kind of stuff. And it's fascinating.

And I would not have surfaced that on my own

So I think that there is a way of doing this process where you encode your tacit knowledge and then you ask for help in filling out that tacit knowledge, and you kind of say, look, these are some of the areas that I want to get into. This is where I think I'm quite strong, this is where I think I'm quite weak, this is an area that I want to learn about. Help me

You know, kind of give me pointers. Where should I kind of push my, you know, inquiry into? And I think that's a really good use of this as well. So it's not a kind of finished version of your mind. It is the first version that you encode, and then obviously just constantly think about how do you stretch that, how do you explore new territories

And, you know, and that's what I'm doing. So, you know, I'm rereading Yanis Barry Fakis Techno-feudalism, whilst also listening to the translated version of the I Ching. There's so much that I don't know, but I'm still trying to stretch myself into those new territories and constantly fill out that mind map

Yeah. I might do one last question. I want to give people in chat just one last thing is if there's a question that I haven't asked

Or a thing that I haven't asked

Chuck it in the chat now if there's something you desperately want to hear before we wrap it up

If not, there is one last question that's on my mind because I think it is an Axel Haverman's kind of asked the same question. He's like, the first step of your whole presentation was like, know thyself.

And that requires a great deal of, like, self-knowledge

Is there any tips on doing that? I think you mentioned getting away, going for walks. And then the other part I'm going to add to it from my own sense is that your own thoughts, beliefs, emotions change

Yes.

And like we're all contradictions. We can't even describe how we are as people

in an accurate way. And so where's, I guess, the risk of getting it wrong? And so I guess there's two parts this is, like, one, the any tips for like really looking internally, and then two, any watch outs

Yeah.

Tip number one, go to therapy. I've spent years therapy on and off

That's actually a great one

Yeah, which is one of the best ways to kind of really get to know yourself and to unpick a lot of the kind of toxic that you've taught yourself, which was a big one for me. So I've been doing therapy on and off for years, which I think is super helpful. The other thing is be comfortable with the evolution and the changing, and I think, as I said, this is an iterative process, this is not a fixed process. You don't encode your brain once and then you're done

You're constantly looking at new areas of exploration, you know, like, I'm going really deep into, as I said, like, Indigenous wisdom and philosophy and folklore and stuff at the moment, and next year I might go into a different direction. But that's okay, and I'm constantly kind of building all of that stuff out and sort of pulling on different threads

you know, I was talking to someone yesterday who was asking me, you know, how do you feel about shape-shifting in your career? And I was like, it's fucking brilliant. You know, I probably shapeshifted 50 times since I've started in terms of all of the different areas that I've gone into, all of the different lenses that I've had on, you know, our work and our industry, and I'm constantly changing.

And I reserve the right to change, and I think we all should be able to do that. As I said, you know, we're multifaceted individuals. We should be delving into all of those facets and really kind of broadening them out, and then adding more.

And that is a lifelong process, and I think I would always describe myself as a lifelong learner, and that's the best part of the job for me.

Yeah, so easy. All right, Amy, do you want to like just close it out, or if there's anyone that wants to jump in, go for it, but I'm going to shut the fuck up. I'm just going to say a big thank you to Zoe. As always, it's a pleasure. So thank you personally.

Yeah, yeah, closing it out, just wanted to obviously say thank you to Zoe for sharing this. I actually think I need to go back and watch it a billion times and make sense of it all as well in my head

Because you said so many incredible things, so thank you, and I think

I'm almost a little bit terrified to go that deep on myself and go through that process, but it sounds like a good one. And then thank you to the amazing, everyone that joined. We had people from all over the world. I'm keen to hear what people thought,

What speakers you want next. And yeah, keep coming. I had a great time. So thank you. Thanks. Thanks, everyone, and we'll speak to you soon.

Thank you so much.

Peace everyone. Bye.