Apr 24, 2025 | AI, Marketing, Strategy
‘Lean thinking’ is a mindset and toolbox to drive optimisation. Little more, beyond the use of common sense and humanity.
Prominent amongst the tools, and the one I probably use the most is ‘5 why’.
AI has given us an entirely new use case that leverages the insights that a 5 why process when done thoughtfully can deliver.
Prompt development.
There are now hundreds of prompt templates and mnemonics emerging from the woodwork, many claiming to be ‘the one’.
All I have seen use a variation of the Lean ‘5 why’ tool.
Most AI users look at the first output of a prompt into any of the LLM tools, and it is sub-par. Generic recitations of what the trained information base reflects as best practice. The beauty of these data driven assistants is that you can push back as much as you like without them taking it personally.
You can point out areas of failure, misinformation, gobbledy-gook, or imagined fairy tales. You can ask for specifics, deeper analysis, sources, or give it examples. The output then improves with each iteration.
You can also ask it what you might have forgotten to ask, or has been missed for some reason, and ask for suggestions. This interrogation of the tool can reveal things you would not have thought of under normal circumstances.
Go through that process 5 times, and in all likelihood, you will not only have something entirely different to the first response, but it will also be infinitely better, and tailored to the need. You will have cleared away the unnecessary, banal, insignificant, and generic, leaving a response that equates to a first principle response to your evolved prompting.
Continuous improvement by AI driven lean thinking.
What a boon!
Apr 17, 2025 | Governance, Leadership
Like most, I have watched the videos of President Trump and his Vice President deliberately undoing the fabric of European security that has served us well since 1945.
The Marshall Plan after WWII saw the US invest hugely in former enemies, Germany and Japan, to rebuild their shattered economies. The belief was that helping them also helped the rest of us, and history proved that belief to be right.
Now, in just a few months since November 5 last year, Trump has flipped that post-war consensus on its head.
Change requires a catalyst, something or someone that triggers a shift and galvanizes others to follow. But change also always triggers resistance. Most initiatives fail when the resistance is greater than the momentum for change. However, when resistance is weak, change can run rampant.
That seems to be what we’re seeing now, and it presents a three-cornered problem.
First, the US empire is crumbling. Not just because of Trump’s antics or his disdain for democratic norms. It’s deeper. It’s the rot of internal decay: a crumbling infrastructure, rising inequality, a broken political culture, and a staggering $2 trillion deficit on top of $30 trillion in debt. Interest payments alone are chewing up 27% of government spending. If the US were a company, the receivers would have been called in long ago. But it’s not a company. It is still the world’s largest economy, tightly intertwined with everyone else.
Second, Europe. With a combined GDP larger than China’s, Europe is the US’s biggest trading and investment partner. But it has become complacent under the American security umbrella, protected and prosperous without paying the full cost of its own defence. That may be about to change.
Third, China. In 40 years, China has leapt from an agrarian backwater to a global power. It now demands a louder voice in world affairs, and if it’s not given freely, it will be taken. Their strategy is long-term. Ours is tomorrow’s news cycle.
The post-war world order is being forcefully reshaped by the new US administration.
Like it or not, Trump won. The question now is: what happens next?
Smart people everywhere are asking that question. So far, the answers are foggy. But from where I sit, a few likely outcomes are coming into view.
- US tariffs will be met with reciprocal tariffs. Global trade will shrink. As trade shrinks, the capacity for mutual cooperation goes with it. When mutual benefit disappears, self-interest takes over, and we risk an accelerating downward spiral.
- The US will enter recession. The wealth gap will widen, especially if Trump follows through on further tax cuts for the wealthy. Social unrest will follow. The 2025 mid-terms might bring some course correction, but the real hope lies in November 2028. The clock is ticking.
- Europe will be forced to step up support for Ukraine. This will mean massive increases in defence spending, much of it still sourced from the US, which will create tensions. Either taxes rise or social services get gutted. EU nations will also scramble to build defence capacity independent of the unreliable US.
- China will double down on its global push. Diplomatic soft power and military posturing will both increase. Their lens is generational. Short-term pain is an accepted cost for long-term strategic gain.
- Russia is likely to become a failed state. Its economy, barely larger than Australia’s, cannot survive prolonged isolation and war. China’s quiet support may prolong its agony. India will continue to play both sides, enjoying cheap commodities to fuel its own rise.
- And Australia? We’re caught in the middle. A commodity exporter with little pricing power and few alternatives, we rely heavily on China, especially for coal and iron ore exports. If China gets a cold from clashing with the US, we’ll catch pneumonia. The Morrison-era trade troubles will look like a stubbed toe by comparison.
The old order is breaking down. The new one is not yet clear, and the immediate outlook is global financial chaos on an unprecedented scale.
Apr 14, 2025 | Change, Communication, Governance, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
When you look you see Hofstadter’s law around you everywhere, every day.
We all understand Murphy’s law, which accurately states that is something can go wrong it will, probably at the worst time. Murphy has a sibling, articulated by Douglas Hofstadter which states: ‘A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law’.
Planning is a part of our lives. Some things are easy to plan, the consistent characteristic of these is that there are very few variables over which you do not have control. For example planning a trip to the supermarket, you can check what you need you control the time, the choice of supermarket, where you park, how you work the store, the choices you make between brands. Very few uncontrolled variables.
By contrast strategy is an exercise not just in predicting the future, but then making choices how best to deploy your resources in a way that enables you to shape the future to your benefit by exerting some influence over the range of variables over which you have no control.
Entirely different challenge, as there is never an explicit ‘right’ answer.
When we talk about strategic planning we are effectively mixing two incompatible factors. The uncertainty of the future and the forces over which we have no control, and the certainty of the resources we have to deploy, with uncertain outcomes.
Currently in this country we have a huge black hole called defence planning into which billions of taxpayers dollars are being poured, in the mistaken view that we are able to predict the future and therefore plan as if we could control the variables.
The better way is to have a robust strategy which enables flexibility in the way assets are deployed short term.
Projects tend to expand to fill a time available, while at the same time we habitually underestimate the time that is required to complete any given task, no matter how rigorous we are in the planning.
Apr 11, 2025 | AI, Governance, Management
Anyone who has engaged with any bureaucracy at multiple levels will tell you that what is said at the top often does not get down to the operational levels.
It seems not to matter whether the bureaucracy is private or public, multiple levels result in an increasingly dense set of rules and regulations that should be followed and are often a default excuse for not thinking.
However, it does seem also that public bureaucracies are less able to accommodate any sort of flexibility in the absence of instructions from on high, and even then, it is difficult.
AI has invaded and won significant ground in private domains and will be rapidly deployed as businesses seek the potential productivity gains as a source of competitive advantage.
What of government?
There is no competition in the public bureaucracies, their political masters come and go, policies change, as do some senior people, but largely, they remain intact. How will they adapt to the new world of AI?
In a word, very slowly indeed.
Regulations, behavioural rules, and protocols set at the top level, are filtered down through organisations. At each level, they are imposed with the addition of seemingly necessary additions in order to stop those who seek to find ways around the rules, and in the eyes of the bureaucrats subvert the intent of the rule.
This imposition of rules compounds to the point at the operational end that navigating the imposed landscape becomes incomprehensible to normal people.
I spent time recently navigating the minefield surrounding the simple transition of my mother from her own home to an aged care facility.
The process required two apparently warring bureaucracies to simply recognise the assets Mum had, combined with the aged pension through Centrelink, and the War widows’ allowances due to Dads military service in New Guinea. My sister who did most of the work required, is an intelligent educated woman, but was driven almost to despair. The nonsensical overlapping and duplicated requirements of both departments, where it seems a comma in a different place in similar lodgements to each department necessitated we start from scratch with both after the applications were deferred or judged void.
The operational individuals were largely helpful but completely restricted by rules to which no variation was allowed. Yet, the policies stated from the top are designed to make the lives of aged Australians, particularly those who have given much to the country as have war widows as comfortable as possible.
What happens in between these levels.
Regulation begets regulation upon regulation as the rules are cascaded down through the organisations. As each level sets about ensuring they are not accountable for any misdirection of funds, and therefore difficult questions, the mess becomes ‘Gordian’.
All this does is catch and frustrate those trying to do the right thing, while the ‘smarties will always find a way through,
Into this maelstrom walks AI.
In theory AI should ease the logjam, making most of the necessary form-filling and translation of details from one point to another automatic and easy.
In practice, the flexibility and agility that AI platforms are capable of will be adopted very slowly by public bureaucracies. They require changes in culture, operating processes, and inter-departmental collaboration in more than just words and press releases.
Those changes seem unlikely despite the urgent need.
Apr 7, 2025 | AI, Governance
As we come to rely more and more on the output of machines, we tend to forget that they are intrinsically binary operations.
The output is either black or white.
One little mistake or variation in the output that can be driven by something as simple as the placement of a punctuation mark in your prompt, can deliver very different outcomes.
When you string a series of tasks together even simple ones that rely on the output of the previous output, any error that is not picked up will be compounded.
Therefore, my contention is the greatest problem with AI is not technical but our belief in the output and that any error anywhere in the system compounds.
The danger of compounding errors is obvious. One simple O-ring worth a couple of dollars that was not malleable enough to accommodate the cold weather on that January morning in 1986 led to the end of the Challenger space shuttle. The unusually low temperature that morning was not anticipated, and so not included in the variables that determined the specifications of every piece in that multi-billion dollar vehicle.
Boom.
The only antidote to this misleading, erroneous and potentially nasty outcome is human scrutiny. We may have been released from the repetitive and mundane parts of all our jobs, but that release comes with a price: we simply must be highly sceptical of the outputs, and subject them to vigorous scrutiny starting with first principles.
