Month: January 2026

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Backwards thinking

I like thinking. Forwards and backwards, but particularly backwards.

What do I mean?

Well, seeing something in the public domain and seeing if you can work out the stragegy behind it, or at least taking a guess at it.

I enjoy doing this as sometimes the strategy isn’t as obvious as it might appear. Also, certainly in the advertising, brand and marketing worlds I once inhabited, it’s easy for people to criticise some work without knowledge of the strategy could be. Critically pulling it apart and thinking about what the starting point might have been can often uncover some interesting points of view. Also, you start to see the work as part of a bigger piece.

I started doing this after a workshop at a conference I was invited to. I was amazed at how much people couldn’t unpick a creative idea and work back towards the strategic thought that generated it. Even at the most base level. I also saw the benefit of doing it when I once thought about some Sony work in Miami where they filled the streets with foam and concluded it wasn’t very good. What I didn’t know at the time was they’d provided hundreds of creatives with Sony kit to capture it. These became the campaign, which meant the kit used showcased its own abilities without those needing to be spelled out in the usual product-benefit way. Smart.

It also stops Hot Take Syndrome (HTS) which really needs to get in the sea.

Oh, that means there are now two things I need to articulate in longer form: backwards thinking and slow strategy.

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Money w̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶spent

Okay, so strikethrough text in a headline doesn’t appear to be as easy as it should be, but really that’s not the point of this post.

Today I read about a PwC website for the newly minted ai training much trumpeted by the UK government and lambasted by just about everyone else. Turns out the website cost a whopping £4.1m to make. And all it does is list links to places where you can get some training. Mahad Kalam has all the info. Basically, a bookmarking site.

Then I caught a thread on BlueSky that detailed what it’s like to try and use it. I think the term is Epic Fail. (Some people noted that this wasn’t able to be read as they are blocked by the author due to following someone who isn’t liked by the author of that thread, so here’s a post that collects the thread into a single web page you can read.)

Turns out it’s not money well spent, it’s just money spent trying to show how amazing ai is and not only failing to do so, also making a mockery of government procurement, internal testing, and testing at any point with its core audience. So in some ways it’s a success. Er, right?

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One or the other

I think I have a choice. A binary choice, too.

I can either pretend I want to work in a professional context and put in the effort, get paid (relatively) well and (mostly) enjoy it, or I can get a job that brings in some income but I probably won’t give any fucks about it and if I think too much about it I’ll hate it.

Sort of leaning towards the latter right now.

That said, the Indeed website is absolutely awful. It’s like wading through shit.

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No comment

I went back to LinkedIn a little while back. I didn’t want to, but people kept asking to see my work history and so, well, it was the easiest way to provide it. Not that sharing it has brought about any positive work opportunities.

However, when I do post (not that often) I’ve started removing the ability to comment. I get a lot of emails about the comments being off. It seems to make people uncomfortable in some way, although when comments are on rarely do people actually comment.

I like the idea of not allowing comments when people have an expectation of them being available. The reason I like it is that I don’t think my posts on LinkedIn deserve any reply. They’re designed to be read or ignored and, in desperate times, to be shared. Emoji reactions are more than enough nuance.

If – and it’s a fucking big if – I ever write something that I feel deserves the chance to reply, then I’ll pop the comments on for that post. The chances of that happening are, at best, very fucking slim.

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Boundaries and systems and jigsaws

I love a jigsaw puzzle. I find it stimulating and relaxing in equal measure, similar to reading. There’s a high level of satisfaction in completing one, too.

Yesterday evening I started doing a puzzle. It’s an image of the London Underground map, or rather it’s an image of the wider Transport for London (TfL) map, so includes the Overground lines and Croydon Tramlink. The entire border of the puzzle is a collection of all the different roundels that TfL uses, or has used.

I was thinking about it today as I was out for a walk with the dog.
I started to think about it as I wanted to get today’s writing and work done so I could sit down and start working on finishing it. The outer edge pieces are all in place, so it’s just the middle ‘map’ that I need to get done.

However, I had two thoughts that I want to come back to – two of many thoughts about many things that I need to get around to writing – but they feel relevant to me:

  1. Boundaries are set in jigsaw puzzles, but I’ve learned to question any boundary judgement and so I got to wondering whether jigsaws that have no percieved edge was possible; if so, what would it look like?
  2. The TfL map is something I know well; however, when I break it up into 1000 tiny pieces, I start to look at it in new ways. This is similar to how I might think about a problem, how it comes together and in which order (process) or how things relate to one another and what that means for the situation in front of me (systems thinking). I might also consider shuffling things around to see how they might fit together, or look for meaningful patterns to see if that can help me (in this instance, I noticed very quickly that it was easier to build out the roundels and then the straight edge rather than what might be considered the ‘traditional’ way of approaching a jigsaw puzzle).

Ultimately, puzzles are not just good for my mental health, they’re good for thinking about how I work, why I work the way I do, and what I can learn from not doign things the way that seems the best from the outset – or be prepared to shift my methods intentionally.

Jigsaw are frameworks, then? Or they’re like maps? Which likely means they’re both.

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Two weeks in a row

I’ve managed to post something for two weeks consecutively now. Okay, I had two days away in Bristol where I didn’t post anything but there will always be situations where this happens.

I’ve also managed to not think of these Friday blog posts as weeknotes, as that would compel me to do a round-up of what I’ve learned or done or whatever. I have to be honest: I don’t do anything much these days. A lot of reading, some posting on social media, listening to vinyl records or my streaming service of choice, or walking the dog. Sometimes I get to sit in hospital waiting rooms, or take calls from a doctor or clinical nurse specialist, or GP surgery. Occasionally I get blood taken. There’s no routine to these activities, though. Certainly not anything that warrants writing down my observations and -ugh – learnings.

However, the daily ritual of writing means I’m waking up my laptop more often and putting my fingers to the keys and, which I guess is the whole point, thinking about things in more depth than I was before.

Which I suppose means I will see this text field input screen again on Monday.

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Hard things look easy and simple things are complex

When I started Unspun Heroes I thought the most difficult part would be finding artists and bands willing to let me take their music and press it into bio-plastic discs. Turns out, that’s quite easy to get sorted. It’s definitely a binary thing: yes you can, no you can’t.

I thought handling all the manufacturing and design myself, across multiple suppliers, might also be difficult. However, that’s just about getting a process organised and managing it as things move forward.

Fulfilment always seemed like a nightmare. And it is. Above a certain limit it’s not easy to do yourself. I found this out when I agreed to ship albums and CDs on behalf of another indie label. Getting 1000+ products out to people around the world was quite the task. I made three mistakes, although the customer feedback each time was as if I’d demolished their house, stolen their life savings and killed their cat. Ultimately, on each occasion all I’d done is send them a tracking code earlier than expected. Michael is a popular name in the vinyl-buying demographic.

Turns out the hardest bit of selling product. Not only do I need to convince people they need this album which will likely be a little more expensive than, say, a band who sell hundreds of thousands of records, I also have to factor in postage. Let me tell you, postal costs are enormous!

I met someone at a record industry event and they asked me what I thought was the thing I didn’t think about enough that turned out to be the most important. I replied: go-to-market strategy. Not having a clear strategy in place to begin with stymied my ability to sell albums. It still does, despite me getting better at it and with a clearer proposition.

However, when I think about what I’ve learned between album one and soon-to-be organised album six, I can see how far I’ve come. Whether I’ll get to reach a critical mass that means sales come to me more often rather than me going to the market all the time remains to be seen.

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Online promotion in the 2020s

I posted this on LinkedIn the other day. It’s SEO for the 2020s.

An image of a nail salon in London that is called Nail Shop Near Me to take advantage of what is often the first search term that is offered by Google’s Autocomplete when you search in maps or on a mobile phone.

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Polar opposites

I’ve noticed more and more that LinkedIn posts about ai come in two very distinct flavours:

  1. I love ai and use it for everything
  2. I detest ai and I won’t use it for anything, and will actively turn it off or not use a product or service that has it

Now, I probably fall into the latter for most things, and there’s a reason for this. ai is a lens. It looks at tasks, say summarising a document, through a lens. It’s not a lens I know or can know, and therefore I am less trustful of it’s summary. I can read it myself and get a summary in a reasonably short time and I also get the context around that summary. I can know it.

Where ai (by which I mean machine learning) is great is where you’re needing to find the equivalent of a needle in a haystack and to know if it’s hay or the needle. It’s brute force summarising, as it were. I don’t care how it’s done, it’ll find the needle and present it to me.

Sometimes I need both. I need to find the needle quickly, but also need to know that I can find the needle myself – or better, understand how the needle was found – as I can build out context from this. An example would be video call transriptions. I don’t find them helpful on their own, but with notes I make about body language and cadence, etc, I can build a really interesting picture about what’s important. ai, as yet, cannot. I suspect it won’t. Certainly in my lifetime. Because it’s good at using the past to determine its output and not very good at understanding the present and all its nuances and then using these to add colour.

It’s quantitative not qualitative.

Oh, and the reason I don’t want to use ai in products and actively turn it off? They’re using it to feed their machine, even when they say they aren’t. I can’t trust them. I mean, it’s not like tech companies have proven themselves to be trusted, right?

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Hands in the air and shrug emoji

I stupidly started my day looking at social media. And then the news. Idiot, I am.

How did the world get into this shape? Why do we put the least qualified people in charge?

Anyway, it completely fucked me over mentally and I just can’t even.

So the emoji is all you get.

🤷🏼‍♂️