Cleaning the toilet
This is less a newsletter and more an old-school blog post, riffing on the thinking of another blogger. It started on Bluesky, where old-school things are happening, making old-school people happy. Blog riffing is old-school too, and writing this is making me happy.
The riffee in this case is John (Willsh) Willshire. He posted a five-part thread on Bluesky, reflecting on what we might lose in our headlong rush to embrace AI in the name of productivity.
He, in turn, had been moved to write by something that Nick Sherrard had posted: “Maybe we’ll just write much less. Video with AI tools to edit and make look nice will take over.” (I can’t find the source for this to link to.)
I was particularly struck by the first sentence in the final post of John’s thread:
What a waste it would be if we started to write less as a culture.
John Willshire
I don’t have to think critically about that sentence to endorse it. The sense of rectitude is visceral and strong.
‘Strategy is your words’ is the title of Mark Pollard’s singular book on advertising planning. So much of strategy is in the writing. In our line of work, writing is the culture pretty much.
The weaving is the work
‘The weaving is the work’ is another idea from John’s thread. It succinctly captures the persistent disquiet I feel about outsourcing the hard work of thinking to these technologies.
Strategy work has three phases:
Discovery
Agony
Epiphany
In the agony phase it feels like you’re making ridiculously hard work of everything. It feels like the fog is never going to lift.
And then you stop trying and the epiphany happens. I’m convinced that you have to make hard work of it in order to make it look easy. The apparently fruitless huffing and puffing is an inevitable and necessary part of the process.
For this reason I’m deeply suspicious of outsourcing - by which I mean abdicating - the agony to a machine.
Much of the early-adopter commentary I’ve read seems to suggest that it’s in this agony phase that AI can work its productivity magic. By shortcutting or bypassing the agony, AI doesn’t replace human creativity, it enhances it. So they say.
Hmmm.
Cleaning the toilet
I took my daughter to see Holly Black and Cassandra Clare - her young adult fiction idols back then - at the Edinburgh Book Festival. After the interview and the readings, an audience member asked a question about editing. This was one of the responses, which I think was from Holly Black.
Editing is like cleaning the toilet. No one likes doing it. But it never makes things worse.
Holly Black (or Cassandra Clare)
I feel the same about the agony phase of developing strategy, only more so. The agony doesn’t just make strategy better, it makes it possible.
But who wouldn’t delegate toilet cleaning to a robot if they could? What a fine use of technology! Dispense with the drudgery and free yourself up to spend your time on more creative, self-actualising pursuits!
Here ends the similarity between brandishing a toilet brush and brandishing a brain. You might want to delegate the brick-wall head-banging aspect of strategy work. But you shouldn’t.
At some point I have to present my work and defend the choices that I’m recommending. This is when the agony pays off. The time I spent tangled in the weeds equips me to explain my choices and make the case for why they’re better than the alternatives. I explored the alternatives. I have A3 layout pages covered in alternatives and their pros, cons, and implications.
The agony means that the thinking behind the recommendation isn’t locked in a black box. It’s in my head.
Artificial Intuition?
I’m working on a project just now as part of a team. They’re great and it makes a lovely change for me.
The discovery work included nineteen stakeholder interviews. Someone on the team uploaded the transcripts to NotebookLM and asked some good questions to pull out the main themes and impose some structure on them. I was impressed. Seriously impressed. For anyone coming to the project cold, who needs to get up to speed fast, the output is an excellent resource and it was produced much faster than a person doing it on their own.
However…
To do the strategy work I went back to the raw data: to the recordings and the transcripts.
Having conducted the interviews, I had an intuitive feel for where to look for an insight from Stakeholder A, or the revealing turn of phrase used by Stakeholder B. And by going back in I stumbled across forgotten gems from Stakeholders C, D, E, F and more. A few of these had been picked up in the AI summary, but the majority hadn’t.
NotebookLM might be intelligent but it doesn’t have human intuition.
Transcript quotes are good, but there’s another layer of feel that you get from hearing the voices in the recordings. I don’t know if this is science, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that your brain processes voice data differently to text.
Sorry, but there’s no substitute for doing the hard, agonising work at source.
What a waste
NotebookLM’s slogan is, ‘Think smarter, not harder.’ And there’s the rub. For strategy work, I don’t see working smarter as an alternative to working harder. The hard work begets the smart work. And the hard work serves you well when you’re in the room with the client.
What a waste it would be if we started to write less as a culture.
As I said on Bluesky, a writing practice becomes even more of an advantage if this comes to pass.
What a waste it would be if we started to agonise less as a discipline.
As I’m saying here, hard work at source becomes even more of an advantage if this comes to pass.
Maybe try this too: How the work really gets done - ideas as data and the fine art of post-rationalisation.