#36 – The joy of underperforming, thinking in systems, and using AI tools for creativity
Hello & happy Friday,
This week’s Strategy Bites looks at the joy of underperforming and why we should embrace it all a bit more; Systems Thinking for designers; a big presentation on AI; how anxiety has gone from a health issue to a trending topic; some exciting AI tools; and an AI take on some meta trends.
Enjoy the clicks!
This week’s Six Links of Inspiration:
Systems Thinking for Brand Designers. This is a long-ish but well-worth it read on Systems Thinking and how it is helpful for developing (and designing) brands. There’s no easy way of summarising a post that is in itself a big summary – so please go and read it. Overall, the notion of a brand being greater than the sum of its parts is something that immediately resonates and is intuitively true – even though it’s always hard to prove and even harder to achieve. (Despite it sounding so easy in theory.) “In Systems Thinking, emergence is the advantage gained when individual elements connect. It's the brand magic when purpose, people, platforms and products all work together. To put it simply, people have a better experience if your products, services and story are part of the same connected system. The brand becomes greater than the sum of its parts.”
The Joy of Underperforming. For all the Linkedin highfliers out there, this one is for you. At least the headline. What the article really is about is balance – and finding balance in a world that expects a lot of us to always perform at our highest levels. (Or we expect that from ourselves.) The article introduces the concept of “seasons” in life – from a religious and cultural point of view. “Even in a challenging time, though, the idea of ‘seasons’ is hopeful, suggesting that there can be periods of your life when you emphasize different things—family, work, hobbies, friendship—and one or two of the other areas can shrink for a while. The birth of a baby is an obvious one, but many things can prompt a shift in seasons—a graduation, a breakup, a new job, moving to a new city.” I, for one, am not surprised why I am drawn to anything that gives me reason to be a bit more patient and forgiving to myself, considering I’m counting down the days to the arrival of my second child. A new season.
AI and everything else. Ben Evans, the cultural analyst that often provides much needed clarity and perspective on technological (r)evolutions, has published a new presentation on AI (and other things.) Click through it, it’s posing (and partly answering) some big questions, it will make you think, and it delivers some steal-worthy quotes. Like this one: “AI gives you infinite interns.” Which is a much more accurate way of thinking about GenAI than when I call it focus groups of 1.
How Anxiety Became Content. Sharing, in general, is a good thing. It creates awareness for the things that give us joy, elate us, or pain us. Derek Thompson, who has done a lot of work around America’s mental health crisis can’t help to wonder what the downside of this public dissemination of our personal anxieties is: “In the past few years, I’ve become more convinced that the way we commonly discuss mental-health issues, especially on the internet, isn’t helping us. Watching and listening to so much anxiety content, which transforms a medical diagnosis into a kind of popular media category, might be contributing to our national anxiety crisis.” He goes on talking about potential reasons why mental health interventions fail, but keeps coming back to a concept coined “Prevalence Inflation” (the fact that we talk more about a certain topic and therefore we interpret our reality through the lens of that topic): “But it’s also conceivable that the programs haphazardly increased the salience of anxiety, depression, and distress for students without giving them the proper tools to dispel those negative feelings.”
AI Experiments at Google. A lot has been said about Gemini killing ChatGPT etcetera etcetera. I’m less interested in who beats who – and more excited about the tools these platforms provide. Ben Malbon shared a video to a couple of Google’s AI experiments that are genuinely quite helpful for creatives and strategists. I can’t wait to get my hands on NotebookLM, which is currently limited to the US only. In the meantime, play around with TextFX, it’s good fun – and might just spark an idea or two.
Trends on trends. Matt Bell did a bit of a meta analysis on the massive curation of trend reports I shared last week. His takeout: “Inflation concerns are cooling, 'Metaverse' and 'Crypto' are out. Ai has eaten all other trends (4x mentions YOY) and we see ChatGPT arrive…but ‘Creative’ jumps from 7th most mentioned to 3rd most. Creativity will always be the engine.” For more, check out his post – and read the comments.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this issue, please consider sharing it with some of your friends – or your wider network. That would be much appreciated.
Next week will be the final issue for this year – and will feature some longer reads (maybe even books!) So I hope to see you then!
Maximilian