Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent more time at events than at my desk.

Rooms packed to the rafters with energy, ideas, and stories. The buzz, the mental stimulation, the ideas, the connection with other humans.

It reminded me of something that I think is rather important.

Everywhere you look right now, it’s all about AI. Automation. Streamlining process. More efficiencies. From the Government to the Private Sector to the Third Sector. The world is about speed. Quicker answers. Quicker results. The pressure to move, to react, to get to the next thing.

I fear that in our rush to go faster, we often forget the one thing that allows us to go further.

Thinking.

Anthropic has launched Keep Thinking, its first major brand campaign for Claude.

On a flight back from an event last week, I watched Gary Neville interview Paul Scholes. Both were part of the record-breaking Manchester United team.

Neville asked him a simple question: “Who was your favourite teammate to play with?”

Scholes didn’t hesitate. “Ruud van Nistelrooy.”

Neville pressed him: “Why Ruud?”

New pencil case, freshly sharpened pencils, shiny new notebook.

Does the September back to school feeling ever leave us? 

Even now, long after schooldays, autumn for me always brings that same invitation: reset.

Resets don’t happen by accident. All too easy for the days and weeks to accelerate and our fresh energy disappears in a haze of meetings, deadlines, and obligations.

This summer, I’ve been chasing bass along the Devon coastline. 

Not just casting in the same spot with the same lure, but switching marks, different states of tide, trolling versus drifting, adjusting retrieve speeds, swapping colours and styles of lure.

Every change, whether it brought a hit or an empty line is a data point. The more loops I ran, the faster I learned what worked in that moment.

Have you ever had that thing where you do something, it works brilliantly… and then, over time, you forget to do it and it gradully slips out of your week?

Like going to the gym, journaling, flossing, setting aside proper time to think, or a host of other things?

It wasn’t an active decision to stop. It was as simple as life getting busy. Other things crowd in. And the habit that actually worked pretty well quietly disappears.

I had a reminder this week that at some point I mislaid along the way one of the most powerful routines I ever had…

The story of two 18 year olds using AI well to the tune of $2m a month, the risks of using AI badly and why it’s so damaging, a book to remind on the power of deep thinking and three experiments to play with.

All wrapped up in one pithy article and with a suggested musical accompaniment of Simple Minds and a reminder not to forget to use our brains!!

When was the last time you asked someone if they were ok, and you got back “I’m fine”?

On hearing those words, you knew that “I’m fine” was the last thing they were.

What about you?

Ever caught yourself saying those words or similar?

My bet is we’ve all been on both sides of that conversation.

The reason I raise this is that one of the most common patterns I see of people who are both successful AND fulfilled is that they work hard to create Alignment with those around them,

A pattern I see time and again working with world-class leaders all over the world.

It’s that the teams they are a part of work hard to create powerful leadership experiences that aren’t about individual brilliance. They’re about the impact of the whole.

At a slew of recent events focused on senior leadership teams, the feedback that really stood out hasn’t been about any one person or speaker . It’s been about the experience as a whole. The sense of shared clarity, of feeling a part of something much bigger.

Drives me mad when I hear language like this.

It’s lazy cliched thinking which happens all too often at work, around the dinner table and down the pub.

Worse, I think it does real damage to our culture as a society.

Don’t take my word for it. Last month, Intergenerational England published a report titled, A Divided Kingdom. To quote:

"The UK is facing a stark level of age segregation.…