Why investment is accelerating and outcomes aren’t. I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL, the ship’s artificial intelligence, killed the crew not because he broke down, but because he was optimising correctly for the wrong goal. He’d been given two conflicting instructions: complete the mission, and keep […]
When I joined a large telco, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the product. It was the calls. Customers were ringing in, for things they should have been able to find themselves. Billing questions. Setup help. Basic troubleshooting. The digital help experience existed — it just didn’t work. Sixteen thousand broken links. Content so fragmented
And what it’s costing you. In 2001, I sailed across the Pacific Ocean on a 37-foot sailboat named Madeline. The longest stretch without touching land was 28 days. There were flat calms and nights where the wind howled and the boat heeled hard into swells you couldn’t see coming. Moments of unimaginable beauty mixed with
At my first job out of college, I built a book inventory database. An older colleague — the kind of woman who thought she was always right — was frustrated it didn’t match her paper records and wanted to know what I’d broken. “A computer can never be wrong,” she told me. I said, “It
