Insights (blog)

Eric Ries has a book coming out on May 26th. Incorruptible asks why organisations that build something genuinely worth building so often end up betraying it — and argues that the answer is structural, not moral. When the systems governing an organisation are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pulled toward outcomes they never intended. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, bending companies away from their original purpose. From reading the early revi

What if the way you run decisions is the biggest risk in your organisation? There is a version of leadership that gets rewarded, promoted, and celebrated in organisations every day. The leader who cuts through ambiguity. Who reads the room and makes the call. Who is decisive when others hesitate. Decision science says that leader is often the biggest risk in the room. Not because they lack intelligence. Not because their instincts are wrong. But because the moment a leader si

The question shaping our technological future is not what AI can do — it is what we want it to do to us, for us, and with us. The Question We Keep Avoiding There is a question embedded in almost every conversation about artificial intelligence that rarely gets asked directly. Not whether AI is powerful — that is settled. Not whether it will change the shape of work, education, relationships, and public life — that is also settled. The question is simpler and more uncomfortab

How three decades of independent research converge on a single conclusion — and what it means for how your organisation decides. The Problem Has Never Been Intelligence When decisions go wrong inside capable organisations, the instinct is to question the quality of the people involved. That instinct is usually wrong. The research is unambiguous on this point. Organisations do not fail at decisions because they lack smart people. They fail because those smart people are too si

Companies are using AI agents to conduct surveys There's a striking development in market research right now. Companies are replacing human survey respondents with AI-generated digital replicas — trained on real behavioural data — and getting results that match known findings with up to 95% accuracy. CVS Health is already using it. Gallup is piloting the approach for policy research. What once took months now takes minutes. That's a reasonable use of AI. Simulating consumer p

Decision science is unambiguous on one point: the quality of a decision is determined less by the intelligence of the individuals involved and more by the architecture of the group making it. This is the decision room — not the physical space, but the deliberate composition of who influences a decision, what thinking they bring, and whether the conditions exist for that thinking to be heard. Getting this right is not instinctive. It requires a different set of questions than