This week I have learned:
- I didn’t have “get a group of Civil Servants playing Pass the Parcel” on my 2026 bingo card, but this is why prediction is a mug’s game.
To explain – I ran a session with a large group of senior civil servants this week exploring the role of luck and randomness in innovation. I needed a game of chance to find a winner at the start of the session to illustrate how we often discount the luck that made successful people and businesses successful. And the Pass the Parcel was digital. - I’ve long believed leaders should act in congruence with the changes they try to drive. The reality of that for me was that the workshop was probably the most complicated thing I’ve run technically, and there was a sense of jeopardy for me, if not for the participants. If you are trying to convince people that innovation means taking small but bold steps into experimentation, your argument will be weakened if you do that by simply paging through a bunch of PowerPoint slides.
- Ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t even use PowerPoint. I had a custom-built presentation tool.
- Why? Because something interesting might happen.
- I still believe that, beyond the logic and strategy, if you really want to understand how an organisation operates, start by looking at the people at the top and how well they interact.
- Something really interesting is happening in the world of music technology. The arch copiers Behringer announced an open-source competitor to Akai’s much-loved but relatively expensive MPC devices. Akai responded by announcing they were opening the operating systems for their new MPC keyboard and the entry-level MPC Sample, and they accompanied the announcement with a video of Claude-coded modifications to their instruments.
- Meanwhile, I Claude-coded a drum machine for Schwung, which is a shadow OS for the Ableton Move device. It’s not very good, and it seems to crash the device once in a while, but the musical potential of LLM-created instruments to play with is genuinely fascinating.
The week in media:
Saw
- Colin Farrell in Sugar on Apple TV, which I was really enjoying up until the part that it turned out that they were all aliens.
Read
- Continuing Joey D’Urso’s More Than A Shirt
- This excellent article about the state of hybrid working and workplace power from John Amaechi.
Listened
- The new album from Joyce Moreno.
Next week:
- Glasgow, apparently.
The week in photos:
