tl;dr: Most people use “AI business” to mean one of two things — building the AI itself, or building products that call AI at runtime. There are

Here and there; navigation, many games; slop, possums, agency, immaturity.

Tacit knowledge, motivation, and negotiation; writing with machines; Smart Bricks, being kinded, and specs.

tl;dr: Innovation requires uncomfortable unfamiliar work, but people instinctively resist discomfort. Incentives and motivation programmes don’t

tl;dr: The most important knowledge in any organisation—what makes your work distinctively yours—can’t be written down or taught through training

tl;dr: Small-medium businesses are missing a huge opportunity because of three imagination failures: they believe digital transformation must be big

Judgment from the ground up; labour-intensive and industrial foods, prompting as teaching; maintenance and replacement; Boring Tiny Tools in India, Chinese peptides, shoveling snow.

Why Boring Tiny Tools are good; what to do when there's nothing to do; being uncomfortable; billionaire babies, moneymaking, choosing deviance.

tl;dr: This essay is about Boring Tiny Tools—why they’re the way forward for digital transformation. Generative AI coding tools now enable

For 3 years during Covid, I lived in crumbling houses in depopulated hamlets on two different mountains in the Haute-Loire, one of the departements

Online workshops; finding books in space with situated memory; headlessness, 3D-printed boats, AI energy usage, climate models, mendacity.

tl;dr: Online workshops rarely work well, and we keep on doing them because they would be too expensive/infeasible to do in-person. This is the

On not-knowing—what it is, how it affects us, and how to relate to it—and other stuff. Click to read The Uncertainty Mindset (soon to become tbd), by Vaughn Tan, a Substack publication with thousands ...

The last time I wrote here, it was 20 July, 2025. The late summer and fall months between then and now were unusually densely packed. July I was in

tl;dr: Why borrowing private sector strategic thinking and values undermines public strategy — and a practical tool for using tradeoffs to develop

Infrastructure for human subjective reasoning; walking in a forest; dynamic moulds, San Francisco malls, Kryptos, television; coloured water.

tl;dr: Every important decision requires subjective reasoning about objective facts—deciding what matters and why. Yet we have almost no explicit

tl;dr: I’ve been prototyping an AI tool that uses Socratic mirroring to build a reasoning scaffold that helps users develop stronger arguments.

On not-knowing—what it is, how it affects us, and how to relate to it—and other stuff. Click to read The Uncertainty Mindset (soon to become tbd), by Vaughn Tan, a Substack publication with thousands ...

Meaningmaking is a simple concept but one that is counterintuitively powerful, concrete, and applicable to understanding how we think about work and

An AI tool for learning critical thinking while using AI tools; Tunisia and structured elicitation; various perspectives on how to use AI; developments in zippertech.

tl;dr: Students now have access to LLMs that can write essays, but seem to be losing the capacity to think critically. I solve this problem by

This form is for collecting expressions of interest in a new public sector strategy course developed by Vaughn Tan. Click on this link to learn more about the design intent and pedagogical innovations...

A breakthrough in cases; taking the public sector seriously; the practical value of thinking about meaningmaking; dissolving vs. solving, quant knowability breaks down, materiality.

What if you could experience what it’s like to make decisions when you truly don’t know what’s possible? That’s what FOUNDATION, a new interactive

AI tools that support critical thinking; not-knowings, on demand; organisational interventions for uncertainty; subliminal learning, K4, satisfying toys, cat trains, bromism, and convincing others.

Current AI interfaces lull us into thinking we’re talking to something that can make meaningful judgments about what’s valuable. We’re not — we’re

In June, I ran a workshop with 15 researchers from diverse fields to develop practical, implementable mechanisms for experiencing different types of

In June, I ran a workshop with 15 researchers from diverse fields to develop practical, implementable mechanisms for experiencing different types of

What is Boris?: Boris is a service I provide for businesses, not-for-profits, and public organisations — it’s a 1-2 day workshop designed to help

Good categorisation wins over pure empiricism; Singapore's 60th birthday; a low-intervention wine experiment; the concept of enlightenment in Zen/Chan, aliveness in things and humans, drone delivery.

tl;dr: Categories aren’t academic conceits—they’re tools that enable more effective practical action. If you care about making AI work in real-world

Years of not-knowing in 1 diagramme; stacking spaces; desert salmon, observances of death, apples and flags ranked, radioactive fruit flies, wasps, and tumbleweeds, dubious assessments of AI.

tl;dr: Hidden behind an unmarked doorway in Barcelona, two coffee businesses share the same small space — one roasting and selling, the other

At base, I’ve been interested in the strategy implications of partial knowledge since 2008. Back then, I was investigating how people and

Games of uncertainty (not risk); art thinking and generative uncertainty; veal parts; accidents of the knee and of wine; patterns in fashion, AI consultants, editable drawings, AI4HR; coffee time.

The logistics of delivering from Singapore on consulting obligations entered into while based in France are complicated and unpleasant. So … I

Human mRNA; strategy for resilience and uncertainty; meaning-making and work in a time of AI; Slovenian stone; art thinking, stovetop espresso, more clothing manufacturers, our weird timeline.

The AI expertise conundrum; strong winds and forest fires, frosty fingers, household goods, tuna collar; animal chiropractors, making clothing in various places, exceptional R&D contractors.

Optimisation as fallacy; business as meaning-making act; the drudgery of administration; the search for good manufacture; working in a canicule.

Optimisation as fallacy; business as meaning-making act; the drudgery of administration; the search for good manufacture; working in a canicule.

tl;dr: A futurist friend recently made an expensive, early exit from the Middle East during a flare-up in the Israel-Iran conflict … then felt

tl;dr: Anthropic’s experiment with using Claude as an autonomous shopkeeper (“Claudius”) failed — not just because the AI was gullible, but because

Uncomfortable questions about unknowns; building AI tools for better meaning-making; problems, learned helplessness, performance, comfort, and dissonance.

tl;dr: Instead of building tools that are designed to generate outputs indistinguishable from human outputs, we should be building AI tools that