Strategy Resources

My bookshelf at work.


A few weeks months ago, a former colleague of mine reached out to ask if I had any advice on how to get her team to think more strategically. 

It’s a good question—and one I wish I had a better answer to, seeing as a large part of my role is doing that for my team. 

But it’s also a tough question with no easy answers. Since she reached out, I’ve been noodling on a longer blog post to summarize more accurately what I’ve done with my team, what I can do better, and advice I might have for my former colleague. 

In the meantime, I promised to share with her a few resources that have helped my work, that I’ve enjoyed reading, or that I think other people in the strategy world might enjoy. 

First of all, I love reading. I think that books are one of the most incredible things ever invented. With the magic of a few symbols recreated electronically or mechanically, someone can transport their innermost thoughts through space and time and have them appear within my own head. Absolute magic. 

And so some of my first recommendations are for books. I’ve only recently started reading books about strategy, and about my career, and about my industry, but here are a few that I’ve really liked: 

Strategy Books

  1. Mark Pollard’s Strategy Is Your Words is “a 400-page journey into the words that help and hurt strategists.”

  2. Bullet Proof Problem Solving isn’t specifically about communications strategy. What it does is provide readers with some tools they need to start to make recommendations that are based on real choices and sacrifice. 

  3. APG’s How Not To Plan is a book that I wish I’d read earlier in my career. Every chapter breaks down a concept in communications planning in simple terms, from research through to briefing and measurement and media planning, dispels myths or misconceptions, and provides a great little case study. 

  4. Everything I Know I Learned From Powerpoint is the book I regularly recommend to people as the single book that will make you better at your (office) job. It’s not so much about Powerpoint or slides as it is about being a better communicator, and nearly all strategy work is made better with stronger, more persuasive communication. 

  5. Richard Shotton’s Choice Factory is a great primer on how people make choices, and how we can start to use some of that in communications work. 



What else? 

Roger Martin’s “A Plan Is Not A Strategy” video is a really good primer on the distinction between the two and about how a good strategy will lead to a competitive advantage. His weekly email on strategy and choices is also excellent. 

From The Account Planning Group:

Other Strategy Writing: 

  • John Crowley has been writing some really well-considered blog posts about strategy, and they’re worth checking out. Specifically: 

  • The Undercurrent’s Skills Maturity Matrix isn’t necessarily about strategy. However, many of the skills outlined there are immediately applicable to strategy roles. It’s a great way for someone junior to evaluate (with their manager) where they can improve or where they need support to grow. 

  • Alex Morris’ Strat Scraps is one of my favourite newsletters out there. It’s casual and scrappy and esoteric and a real look inside the mind of someone truly doing strategy for a living. 

  • Salmon Theory is also worth reading for Rob’s insightful look at the meaning of being a strategist  “A newsletter about compassion, clarity, and creativity.” 

More on BlogCampaigning about Strategy: 

Simply consuming all of the above won’t make someone more strategic or a better strategist (if it did, I would be significantly better at my job). I think, though, that they are a good starting point for thinking about how to get better.

The Best Science Fiction To Read In 2024

I’m obsessed with Science Fiction. It’s almost all I read. I used to run a Sci-Fi Book Club here in Vancouver (you can see a few posts from it like our short story contest and some of our reviews). And I’ve previously covered my love for the genre here about cyberpunk and here about why we should read more Sci-fi to understand AI.

About every six years or so (it seems) I put together a list of what I think the best science fiction books are. You can see 2017’s list here and 2011’s list here.

The criteria for being on this list is that I have to absolutely love the book. Most of the books on this list I’ve re-read many times. I’ve gifted most of these books to people (“You HAVE to read this!”). 

Most of the books on this list also aren’t for everyone. I like slow-moving books. I like subtle world-building. I like “big concept” sci-fi. I like big, depressing spaceships. I like stories about robots and Artificial Intelligence that make us question what it means to be human. I like series, as opposed to short stories, because they let me spend more time diving deeply into a new world. 

I like sci-fi that asks “What if…?” and then lays out a thoughtful answer complete with implications, considerations, and complications over the span of a few hundred or more pages. 

There are also always exceptions. The first book on my list below is a collection of three short stories and doesn’t have any robots. Wasp, also below, isn’t slow moving at all and doesn’t really have any spaceships. 

With that, and in no particular order, my current favorite Science Fiction Books: 

Worlds of Exile & Illusion by Ursula K. Le Guin: Technically not a singular book but three novellas: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exiles, and City of Illusions. You can read them in any order, and they’re linked mostly by being part of the Hainish Cycle. But they’re also linked by being haunting stories of being isolated across time, space and knowledge. And Le Guin’s Hainish civilization is a a beautiful example of minimalist world-building, the kind that forces you to fill in the edges with your imagination.

Everything Ursula K Le Guin writes is absolute poetry. It can be hard to pick up a book by a lesser author after spending time in her pages. I’ve also been diving into a lot of her writing on writing, which has made me want to be a better writer myself. 

The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson: Kinda the opposite of the previous entry: rather than being three books in one this pick is one book across three. The story follows the first generation of colonists on Mars from when they landed all the way through to a hundred or so years later. It can be slow moving, and there are long chapters devoted to loving and detailed explanations of the Martian landscape. This is balanced with a few great action pieces and a truly human-centred view of exploring of space exploration.

I just recently re-read this entire series over the last year and it holds up on the 10th read through as much as it does the first. Every time I fall in love with the characters and the planet all over again, and every time I find another detail to make me think about what it means to be human. If you liked this, I’d also recommend the Three Californias trilogy by Robinson. Each one imagines a slightly different future (or asks a slightly different “what if…”?) About what might happen. Fun fact: Ursula K. Le Guin led some of the writing workshops where KSR honed his craft. You can sometimes feel her rhythm come alive in his work. 

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson: I read somewhere that KSR wrote Aurora as a way of recanting for his Mars trilogy, and a way of letting us know that there is no real escape from Earth. No plan B, no planet B. 

It’s the story of a generation ship, halfway through a multi-hundred year journey to another star with the hopes of finding a hospitable place to live. It’s a story of science, of orbital mechanics, entropy, and a coming of age story of an Artificial Intelligence. 

If this sounds interesting to you then you might also like Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. I’m obsessed with the fact that it was published just a few months apart from Aurora, and that both books have such similar themes: how hard it is to leave Earth, entropy, orbital mechanisms, and group behaviour in a closed system.  

Blindsight, The Colonel & Echopraxia by Peter Watts: If Kim Stanley Robinson’s books are about understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos where we are most definitely alone, then Blindsight is about understanding what it means to be sentient in a place where we’re most definitely (and terrifyingly) not alone. It’s science and jargon HEAVY. And grim. I love it, and the follow-ups. 

Wasp by Eric Frank Russell: Probably one of the most criminally underrated sci-fi books of all time. Wasp takes its name from the idea that a small insect can make a car crash, despite the massive size difference, by distracting the driver or passengers. The Wasp in this case is a special agent sent to infiltrate and disrupt an enemy planet. With a few minor changes this could very easily be the story of an Allied spy disrupting enemy supply lines and avoiding capture during the Cold War in an un-named Soviet Bloc country and all of the action that goes along with a story like that. What I love about it is that. sci-fi or not, the story keeps up an incredible pace and delivers on the feeling of the protagonist getting closed in on by enemy forces. 

Neuromancer by William Gibson: If the Mars Trilogy was my entry point into loving sci-fi then Neuromancer was the gateway drug to an obsession with cyberpunk specifically. In fact, it was likely that for a lot of people. As my friend pointed out, it feels derivative if you read it now. But that’s only because so much of our popular conception of “high tech, low life” stems directly from Neuromancer. 

For more cyberpunk, read When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger. It takes some of the familiar genre tropes (inserting chips directly into brains, hackers in bars) but sets them in an unnamed country in the Middle East. The result feels super modern and is a blend of culture, high tech and low life that you won’t find elsewhere. Titanium Noir by Nick Harkway brings us a few great variations on the cyberpunk detective story, as does The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. 

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein will always have a soft spot in my heart. But it’s good to balance it out with the Old Man’s War by Scalzi and The Forever War by Joe Halderman for a few different view points on what military action in our future probably won’t look like. All of them touch on the idea of fighting far from home, and how coming back will be difficult if not impossible. 

Matter by Iain Banks: All of the books in The Culture Series are good. Matter is particularly good. It's good enough that it almost makes me want to add another category to the type of books I like: Medieval worlds and characters existing in futuristic universes.  

If you like the idea of the medieval/future combo I’d recommend: Eifelheim by Michael Flynn (not THAT Michael Flynn), which asks the question of “What if an alien ship crashed in Germany during the black plague?”) and Hard To Be A God by the Strugatsky Brothers, which is about a group of scientists from futuristic Earth who visit a medieval planet that is profoundly anti-intellectual. Although I’m sure the Strugaksys were making a commentary about Russia in 1964, their message feels even more clear today.

Also in this category is Anathem, by Neal Stephenson: Imagine a group of monks who are devoted to the study of science, physics and mathematics inside the walls of their monastery, while the outside world is obsessed with religion. When something incredible happens the monks are called to make sense of it. What follows results in the most amount of profound “whoahs” I’ve muttered while reading a book, even on multiple re-reads. 

Ilium & Olympos by Dan Simmons might also fit into this category and is an absolute treat every time I read it. It’s the Trojan War reenacted by super-advanced humans playing the role of Gods & Goddesses. There are plucky robots, Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban, and an incredible Odysseus. Nothing should really fit together, and yet it does. The Hyperion series, also by Simmons, deserves an honourable mention here. It might be bolder in scope but not quite as imaginative. 


And finally, House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. An incredible journey across time and space with some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever read. The story imagines 1,000 clones who spend hundreds of thousands of years exploring the galaxy. When they reunite, they spend 1,000 nights together, each night sharing one of their memories with the others, as a way of living forever. There are some incredible locations the characters visit, and the book features Hesperus, who is maybe my favourite character of all time. 

The book is as much a mystery as it is a space opera, and in that respect is a bit like the slightly less epic 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. More of a tour of the solar system as it might look in 2312 (complete with hollowed-out asteroids and most of the moons occupied) it also has a confusing mystery plot to keep you interested. 

For something MORE epic and sprawling than House of Suns, read The Marrow Series by Robert Reed, which follows a planet-sized spaceship as it navigates around the universe of the span of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years. I’m also 90% sure that Robert Reed’s book Sister Alice as a bit source of inspiration for House of Suns (there are a lot of plot similarities). 

After writing this out I want to pick up every single one of those books and read them for the first time again. I know that I already have copies of each of them, and that I’ll still seek out old copies hidden in the dusty, musty shelves of used bookstores or old copies with beautiful new covers in new bookstores. I’ll get some to keep, but most to give away, to push into someone’s hands and say “here, read this: it’s so rad: It’s got space vampires” or “you gotta read this, man - it’s so epic.” 

But it also makes me want to keep exploring what else is out there in science-fiction. There is still so much great stuff being written and I can’t wait to read it.

Ryan Gosling Is The Antidote To An Artificial Intelligence Hellscape

Last week a Saturday Night Live skit broke the internet. I’ve seen it referred to as viral, and also “generational.” I cracked up watching it and asked my partner to rewind it so I could watch it again. And again. One news article referred to it as “the Best SNL skit ever.”

The skit doesn’t hold up to deeper analysis, though: Kenan Thompson is good in the way he’s always the perfect straight-man foil, but it’s not his best performance. There are no catchphrases or one-liners to take away from this. The joke itself - that there are two guys who are unaware that they look like Beavis and Butt-Head - isn’t even that clever. The “King of the Hill” closer to the scene was weak, and felt tacked on. 

What I think we all collectively connected with was the absolute humanity of the cast: Ryan Gosling was barely able to contain himself. Heidi Gardner was not able to contain herself. 

It was bizarre and surreal, and unpolished and perfect for all of those reasons, in the face of the machine-generated nonsense that is slickly taking over the web.


The popularity of Nanalan clips on Instagram and TikTok was an earlier sign of this (you’ve probably heard the “Most Beautiful Girl” song). After so much sameness, so much artificial voiceover content, I think we craved something more real. And the show’s creator says it perfectly, in an interview they did with the New York Times a few months ago:

“The world is so, so difficult and scary right now, and the show’s very comforting. Everything looks soft. There’s no special effects. It heralds to what I think people want to see, which is just something that’s real and authentic in the, you know, fake, fake, fake world. Everything’s A.I., and people don’t know what’s real.”

Similarly, Harold Halibut is being heralded as the the next big game, partially due to it’s bizarre but touching story, but also because the entire game was created using stop-motion puppets. That’s an artistic choice, and it’s one that matters when all AAA game titles look the same. The top comment on that nailed it when they said that the world’s main gaming studios have become “too big to innovate.” They’re the same sum of average that AI is. 

It’s not that I don’t think Generative AI can write comedy scripts today or in the future. Or design shoes or video games. Or that the pursuit of better Generative AI (and the General AI to follow it) is a useless or dangerous path to follow.

It’s not a giant leap to say that over the next several years almost everything we interact with will be part of AI, will be AI-generated, or will have AI baked into it in some way. Immersive worlds virtual worlds, meetings, and generated experiences will be commonplace.  We’re on the verge of being absolutely overrun by garbage content produced at scale. 

And it’s not just content: Casey Newton suggests that if the first wave of social media was about interacting with people you knew and that the second wave was about interacting with celebrities and influencers (people you didn’t know), the third wave was going to be people who don’t exist: Virtual avatars, Chatbot replicas of celebrities. Virtual Snoop Dogg.

He writes, terrifyingly: 

And my guess is that what happens next is that the more we’re pushed, pulled, and dragged into a machine-generated world, the more parts of us will reject it. As the saying goes, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” 

The AI conclusion we’re racing to is soulless and lonely. 

And the antidote to all of those things is to embrace the handmade. The improv-ed. The in-person and imperfect. 

We’ll see a return to theatre (Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival has seen growing crowds, and I expect them to be even bigger this year) , and we’ll see live music become even more in-demand. After more days of Zoom and headsets and artificiality, we’ll spend more time craving an afternoon on a picnic blanket on the grass or on the beach.  

It was fitting that the setting for the Beavis and Butt-Head SNL skit was a news program talking, in as dry of terms as possible, about the future of AI. 

A Reminder To Notice More Things (Like The Age Of The Planet).

A few weeks ago I finished reading “Notice. Collect. Share” by Russell Davies. It’s a reminder that in order to get better at the work of strategy (which is sense-making by another name) you need to get better at noticing the interesting things that are out there, collecting what you notice, and sharing the best of that.

Today on my morning walk I came across this plack on a rock:

“12,000 to 15,000 years ago retreating glaciers deposited this stone. In 1997 Vancouver Works Department dug a hole on 6th Avenue & Larch to lay storm drains and came across this huge rock.

Rather than blow it up they were able to put it down where it now sits, one third in the ground but above the ground it is 145cm tall and 480cm around at the base.

This stone is to remind us all of how recently come here. All too soon we forget the age of the planet that is home to us all.

A century is 100 years, and 15,000 years is 150 centuries”

A huge glacial stone.

There is a lot to love - and question - about this plaque:

1.) Is it a rock or a stone? They mix the terms up, but a bit of research tells us it is certainly a rock (stones are smaller, often hand-sized)

2.) The simplicity of language here is beautiful: It doesn’t say something like” Rather than deconstruct the obstruction using an explosive device…”. The plaque writers are clear and concise.

3.). Yet…they don’t actually tell us the age of the Earth: About 4.5 billion years.

Winnie for scale.

*If you’ve been following here for a while you might remember me talking about Russell Davies as the author of Everything I Know About Life I Learned From Powerpoint, the singular book that will make you a better strategist and communicator.

Narrative & Pitch Decks

A few weeks ago my friends at Method & Metric (Vancouver’s best SEO agency) invited me to speak at one of their SEO Conversations evening events about “How To Create A More Effective Pitch Deck.”

I’ve spent a big part of the latter half of my career pitching new business, both for agencies and for myself as a consultant.

In that time, I’ve been part of a lot of losing pitches.

But I’ve also won a few along the way.

And I’ve learned a ton about what makes for a good pitch (hint: it’s not just how slick the presentation is), but also a bit more broadly about what makes for a good deck.

Below is a bit of a summary of what I took the group through:

  • Your Job Is To Sell - You might not be selling a new service or piece of business. But every presentation means you’re selling something: your way of thinking, your research, your point of view, your opinion, or you. You’re likely hoping that someone will say “Yes!” to what you’re sharing.

  • The Best Way To Sell Is With Stories - Telling stories helps us comprehend the information better so that we can deliver it more confidently. But it also provides a framework for laying out the information so that our audience can receive it and understand it more easily. Stories also help us connect emotionally with our audience.

  • Presentations Need A Narrative - And a narrative is not just “Once Upon A Time.” A narrative means a choice in taking a point of view and choosing what pieces of information to reveal (or not to reveal) based on that.

  • Presentations - like stories - need drama. Drama is rising and falling action within a story. It’s what keeps us interested. It’s what drives the presentation forward, and makes us lean in to see what’s next (instead of leaning back to check our phones).

    • The example that I always like to use is a Detective Story: It might start with something exciting, like the discovery of a body or a clue. It slows down a bit as we are introduced:

We can take that same framework and apply it to what a strategy presentation might look like:

For more on this, I highly recommend reading David Mamet’s memo to the writers of The Unit:

  • Flow Is everything - How you transition between sections in a presentation matters, whether you’re presenting alone or with a group. Nothing kills a good presentation more than an awkward shift in topics or the dreaded “And now I’ll pass it over to…”.

    • Questions are a great way to handle flow AND continue to build in drama. End one section with a question to get your audience to try and answer it themselves. Then answer it in the next section.

    • Having an easy-to-follow structure can help with flow as well: Three acts, the Stephen King Planning Cycle, or a timeline can all help with flow and transition.

In the age of Google Slides and remote work, I feel like flow has become a bit of a lost art. In the olden days, we’d print the entire deck up and put it on the wall as we walked through it to understand the pacing and transitions.

  • Open With A Hook - The worst way to start a presentation is with a title slide. It puts people to sleep. It lets the presentation blend directly into the other presentations they’ve seen that day.

    • Movies are a great place to look for inspiration for what makes a great opening.

    • For my session, I had the group split into pairs and present their 2-minute pitch to each other, even before I introduced myself. it set the tone that this would be a collaborative event. Pushing people outside their comfort zone after a long day also helped bring the energy in the room up.

  • Finish Strong - One of the best pieces of advice I’ve had for a presentation is to bookend it with whatever your opening was. Even if the rest of the presentation was scattered, it makes it feel like you tied everything together.

    • For this presentation, one of my opening pieces was to tell the group that their job was to sell and had them present to each other. I finished this presentation by reminding them of this and having them re-present their updated slides to see how improved they were.

    • I often start presentations with a question, and resolve the question (using the same language) on the last slide).

I absolutely love presentations. I love planning them, I love writing them, I love making them (and I feel that the planning, writing and making are all truly distinct activities) and I love giving presentations. But I also don’t think they’re always the best way to communicate information or to win a pitch.


Some notes:

  • I treated my presentation as a bit of a workshop, and had the participants present 2 minute pitches to each other, then re-write those, then re-plan them, then re-write them, and finally re-present them, as we went through different ways of looking at decks. It was a bit of a test of a new way of running a session like this and I’ve got few things to iron out. Thanks to the everyone who joined!

  • As I write out this blog post and re-look at my deck I realized that I didn’t even heed my own advice: except for a strong start and some minimal structure, there was no rising or falling drama. No tension to resolve. Time to re-draft this deck for the next time!




Newsletters Are The New Blogs (and 5 you should read)

Russell Davies’ book Notice, Collect, Share starts off with some great instruction: To get better at the act of sense-making, you need to practice three things:

1.) Noticing what is interesting or useful in the world.

2.) Collecting the things that you’ve noticed.

3.) Sharing the most interesting of the things you collect in a way that helps you and other people understand it.

For years, BlogCampaigning was the tool I used for collecting and sharing. Because I had that tool - and the discipline to use it regularly - I was also in the habit of noticing.

The practice of all three has fallen out of habit for me. Being busy is my excuse, but it’s a poor one.

And in the spirit of getting back into it the work of Noticing, Collecting, and Sharing I’m going to get back to blogging. Or maybe even “newslettering.”

It feels like newsletters are filling that space that blogs did back in the day: A place for us to share our thoughts and research with the world on a channel that we mostly own and control with our readers and subscribers. A channel that isn’t subject to the same control or algorithms as posting on a social network.

Below are 5 newsletters that are quickly becoming replacements for blogs, and must-reads in my inbox:

Strat Scraps by Alex Morris - is the newsletter I wish I’d written. It’s thoughtful and cool and esoteric and meandering and edgy and artsy.

Aisha’s Saves by Aisha Hakim - A visual feast of inspiration. Admittedly, I’ve only just started subscribing to this, but that’s because Aisha just launched it a few weeks ago. She’s behind the incredible Art of Deck Making

Humour & Brands by Paddy Gilmore - I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Paddy Gilmore over the past few year or so, and have enjoyed his “Humour & Brands” news letter just as much. As Richard Shotton reminds us in Media Cat magazine, humour is a powerful tool to use in communications.

Playing To Win by Roger Martin - Really in-depth articles about different nuances of actual, real, capital-S “Strategy” vs the ‘strategy’ of planning out marketing.

Marketing Truths by Will Green - Punchy, short and really useful. Just like the copy that Will talks about.

2023 In Photos

Over the past several years I’ve had a few different conversions about blogging: Who actually blogs? Why? Why do I blog?

And I think that my answer has changed over time. What started as a research project has now turned into a personal one. For me, this blog is a place to post my interests, memories, and opinions. I don’t care so much if it’s read or viewed by anyone.

In the ephemeral world of the late internet era, it’s nice to have a place to call your own.

This post is one of those personal ones. It’s a way to remind myself of the highlights of the past year, and a place where I can go back and relive them.

I’m cheating a bit with this one - it’s actually from New Years Eve 2022, but was an incredibly special moment with my partner and her family somewhere in the mountains of New York state. We were gathered around a fire having a few drinks (including an incredible hot, spiced wine) after a day of snowshoeing.

The year ACTUALLY started on New Years day at this incredible cabin.

Part of the beauty of the cabin where we spent New Year’s was that there was no car access, and getting there meant a ~2km hike uphill while hauling all your luggage, groceries, and wine for the family. Even after a day of skiing and afternoon drinks in Lake Placid!

I also made it out to Whistler in February for a great bluebird day with a friend. We finished the day by by sitting on the side of the slope and having a couple of cans.

This little weirdo will never not be a highlight of my days.

We had a lot of great couch cuddles.

I made it to Washington DC to see the Air & Space Museum, and had a former fighter pilot as our guide.

We had our annual skip trip with an incredible group of friends - this time at Silver Star.

In March she said “Yes!” and me me the happiest man around.

For my birthday she took me out to our local bar for a game of pool and a VERY sweet and strong drink that had gummy sharks and a light in it (she knows me well - I loved it).

Beach walks and beers with friends are always great.

Lots of time walking around the neighbourhood.

And foggy, rainy hikes up the chief with my little gremlin.

I found time for quite a few beautiful sunsets (and sunrises).

And sailboat rides with good friends.

And seeing my dog graduate from Advanced Puppy School was maybe the proudest moment of my life.

And I got to hang out with my dad on some great boat trips.

And nice times hanging out having wine with my parents.

And forest walks with my mom.

And beach walks with my girls

Hangouts with my Cousin were always a highlight.

Gaming.

And seeing friends get into grappling.

…and book club meet-ups all contributed to a well-rounded year.

We all had a blast at her birthday.

And we followed it up with an incredible mountain adventure to camp at this lake, totally alone.

Just the two of us, and our little gremlin carrying her own food.

A business trip to LA meant a great new client.

We also moved offices, which brought with it new energy.

Another new client meant another great trip - this time to the farthest west coast of Vancouver island.

Another trip - this time to Toronto- meant catching up with some of the industry’s finest ad men.

And a game of pool with one of my oldest and best friends.

Forest walks with good friends….

….and their owners.

Some incredible news :-)

Finished the year in one of my favourite places…

Scoring some great waves.

Hi.



If you made it this far, good for you.

That was a lot of photos. And I skipped a lot of highlights, because of space, time, because I didn’t have the photos.

It was a pretty incredible year. Here’s to 2024!



Saying Goodbye To Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter since May 2007. Before hashtags were a thing. Before you could post photos or probably even emojis. When TwitFox was a thing it felt more like a chat room than a broadcast channel. 

I met an amazing community of people on it then. From the #ThirdTuesday crew and more. 

In about 2009 I set up over 200 unique Twitter accounts for different categories of news releases that CNW Group (Newswire.ca) published on behalf of clients. 

I told friends about Twitter - and helped them get started on it. I wrote guides for my company about how to use Twitter. I wrote about how Twitter was foundational for journalism. I believed that it could be an incredible new technology that would replace RSS and make it easy to get news and information.  

It was a huge part of my early career. For a long time, it continued to be an amazing community. I believed that it was an incredibly powerful tool to learn, connect, and build a career on.  

I believed in it. 

But I can no longer support what the site has become. 

I believe that to continue to use Twitter is to endorse hate of all kinds. 

No platform is perfect, free from hate, or ideologically neutral. All the sites and platforms we visit, post on, and use sit somewhere on a spectrum of “Good” to “Bad,” and we must each choose where we’re comfortable being. 

Based on the direction Twitter is going, under the direction of its leader, and the behaviour of an increasingly large base of users, I will no longer be using Twitter. 


For now, I will leave my account up but inactive. 

Find me on: 

Threads

LinkedIn 

Instagram

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Building Strategy Into Agency Culture

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Our Strategic Mission Patches

Almost a year ago at Major Tom, we realized that in order to continue being competitive and delivering great work for our clients we would need to improve the way we think about projects.

From that, we launched the Strategy Propulsion Lab. This agency-wide initiative included regular in-house training sessions, encouraged more conversation around what made for great work, and encouraged (and paid for!) staff to take courses with Sweathead, Account Planning Group of Canada - APG Canada, and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising).

The name was inspired by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division responsible for creating robotic spacecraft to explore the solar system and beyond. Those little rovers on Mars? That’s JPL. Missions to study Jupiter and Saturn? Also JPL. Their unofficial motto is Dare Mighty Things (which comes from a Teddy Roosevelt speech), and is inspiration for them to aim for great results and not be held back by the fear of failure.

Further inspired by NASA and their work, we also created a series of "Mission Patches" to celebrate some of the great thinking that we were seeing from the team, and also to remind ourselves to think a bit differently. We’ve built these mission patches and their language into our own internal feedback tools, and regularly celebrate them at company meetings and our work.

The "Always Ask Why" patch features a cut-away of a planet, revealing the molten core within, and reminding us of the importance of getting to the centre of the problem.

The "Always Ask How" patch is a space-age Swiss Army Knife to remind us that there are a lot of different tools we can use to approach projects and problems. And that some of those tools might not even exist until we create them.

The "Always Ask What If" patch is my favourite: an image of an astronaut's hand flipping a coin (the animated version has a helmet on one side of the coin and an alien head on the other). It's both a tribute to Ursula K Le Guin who said that Science-Fiction is about asking "What if..?" about the present, and a reminder to our team that there are an infinite number of paths we can take.

The internal training sessions have been really fun to organize, and I’ve loved seeing some of my team get involved in running them. Some of the topics we’ve covered include:

  • Reverse-engineering Cannes-winning media and creative campaigns to understand what made them work

  • Marketing effectiveness, where the team has shared what they’ve learned from their own work and APG/IPA coursework

  • Sessions to make our writing and communication more precise and concise


It's been amazing seeing the way this has started to change the way we think, to see some of the work it's helped us win, and to see some of the results we're seeing for our clients.

Big thanks to Jay Chaney for printing out a piece of paper that said "ALWAYS ASK WHY?" to the desks of the planning team at DDB over 10 years ago, and to Mitchell Fawcett for coming up with the idea for the Strategy Propulsion Lab in the first place.

Optimistic Terror: Science-Fiction Books You Should Read To Understand Artificial Intelligence.

“Science-Fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive.” 

-Ursula K. Le Guin. 


I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life being obsessed with sci fi. It probably started with Space Lego, and imagining the lore behind Blacktron, The Space Police, and the Ice Planet folks. 

I loved Star Wars for a few years, but only truly between that wild west frontier time of post-Return of The Jedi, but pre-prequel. The Expanded Universe was unpolished, infinite, and amazing. Midichlorian hand-waving replaced mystique with…nonsense. 

As I grew older I started to take science fiction more seriously. 

In 2006 I pursued a Master’s in Arts & Media, and was focused on the area of “cyberculture”: online communities, and the intersection of our physical lives with digital ones. A lot of my research and papers explored this blurring by looking deeply at Ghost In the Shell, Neuromancer, and The Matrix (and this blog is an artefact of that time of my life). Even before then and during my undergraduate degree as early as 2002 (going by my old term papers) I was starting to mull over the possibility that machines could think, create, and feel on the same level as humans. 

For the past four or five years I’ve run a Sci-fi book club out of Vancouver. Even through the pandemic we kept meeting (virtually) on a fairly regular cadence to discuss what we’d just read, what it meant to us, and to explore the themes and stories. 

I give all of this not as evidence of my expertise in the world of Artificial Intelligence, but of my interest. 

Like many people, I’m grappling with what this means for me. For us. For everyone. 

Like many people with blogs, a way of processing that change is by thinking. And then writing. 

As a science-fiction enthusiast, that thinking uses what I’ve read as the basis for frameworks to ask “What if?” 


In the introduction to The Left Hand Of Darkness (from which the quote that starts this article is pulled), Le Guin reminds us that the purpose of science-fiction is as a thought experiment. To ask that “What if?” about the current world, to add a variable, and to use the novel to explore that. As a friend of mine often says at our book club meetings, “Everything we read is about the time it was written.” 

In Neuromancer by William Gibson the characters plug their minds directly into a highly digitized matrix and fight blocky ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) in a virtual realm, but don’t have mobile devices and rely on pay phones. The descriptions of a dirty, wired world full of neon and chrome feel like a futuristic version of the 80s.  It was a product of its time. 

At the same time, our time is a product of Neuromancer. It came out in 1984, and shaped the way we think about the concepts of cyberspace and Artificial Intelligence. It feels derivative when you read it in 2023, but only because it was the source code for so many other instances of hackers and cyberpunk in popular culture. And I firmly believe that the creators of today’s current crop of Artificial Intelligence tools were familiar with or influenced by Neuromancer and its derivatives. It indirectly shaped the Artificial Intelligence we’re seeing now.

Blindsight by Peter Watts , which I’ve regularly referred to as the best book about marketing and human behaviour that also has space vampires.

It was published in 2006, just as the world of “web 2.0” was taking off and we were starting to embrace the idea of distributed memory: your photos and thoughts could live on the cloud just as easily as in the journal or photo albums on your desk. And, like now, we were starting to think about how invasive computers had become in our lives, and how they might take jobs away. How digitization meant a boom of one kind of creativity, but a decline in other more important areas. About how it was a little less clear about the role we had for ourselves in the world. To say too much more about the book would be to spoil it. The book also introduced me to the idea of a “Chinese Room” which helped me understand the differences between Strong AI and Weak AI.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is about a generation ship from Earth a few hundred years after its departure and a few hundred years before its planned arrival. Like a lot of his books it deals primarily with our very human response to climate change. But nestled within the pages, partially as narrator and partially as character, is the Artificial Intelligence assistant Pauline. In 2023, it’s hard not to read the first few interactions with her as someone’s first flailing questions with ChatGPT as both sides figure out how they work.

It was published in 2015, a few years after Siri had launched in 2011. While KSR had explored the idea of AI assistants as early as the 1993 in his books, it felt like fleshing out Pauline as capable of so much more might have been a bit of a response to seeing what Siri might amount to with more time and processing power. 

The Culture Series is about a far-future version of humanity that lives onboard enormous ships that are controlled by Minds, Artificial Intelligences with almost god-like powers over matter and energy. The books can be read in any order, the Minds aren’t really the main characters or focus (with the exception of the book Excession), but at the same time the books are about the minds. The main characters - who mostly live at the edge of the Culture - have their stories and adventures. But throughout it you’re left with this lingering feeling that their entire plot, and the plot of all of humanity in the books, might just be cleverly orchestrated by the all-powerful Minds. On the surface living in the Culture seems perfectly utopian. They were also written over the span of 25 years (1987-2012) and represent a spectrum of how AI might influence our individual lives as well as the entire direction of humanity.

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My feeling of optimistic terror about our own present is absolutely because of how often I’ve read these books. It’s less a sense of déjà vu (seen before), and more one of déjà lu (read before). 

The terror comes from the fact that in all these books the motivations of Artificial General Intelligence is opaque, and possibly even incomprehensible to us. The code might not be truly sentient, but that doesn’t mean we’ll understand it. We don’t know what it wants. We don’t know how they’ll act. And we’re not even capable of understanding why.

Today’s AI doesn’t have motivation beyond that of its programmers and developers. But it eventually will. And that’s frightening.

And more frightening is that, with AI, with might have reduced art down to an algorithm. We’ve taken the act of creating something to evoke emotion, one of the most profoundly human acts, and given it up in favour of efficiency.

The optimism stems from the fact that in all these books humans are still at the forefront. They live. They love. They have agency. We’re still the authors of our own world and the story ahead of us. 

And there are probably other books out there that are better at predicting our future. Or maybe better, to use Le Guin’s words, to describe our present.