Antonym: The My Kink Is Complexity Edition
We've been away for a month. Mainly listening to Chappell Roan and building AI tool proof-of-concepts.
Dear Reader
Have you ever wondered why resource planning for a team of more than about six people is impossible?
Until recently, weekly resourcing planning meetings with half the company on a Thursday afternoon were half trading pit, half peace summit, as we tried to understand how x number of people would do y number of tasks. Call it 20 hours of effort, supported by expert operations and project managers and state-of-the-art software. A plan would be agreed, and by Monday everything would have changed.
Watch the first five minutes of WPP CAIO Daniel Hulme’s talk at the recent Brighton AI meet-up and he explains why: there are more possible solutions to the problem than there are atoms in the universe. Or something like that. In a nutshell:
“One rule to take away with you today don’t use a human. You’re wasting your time.”
Then stay for the rest and enjoy the quantity and depth of insights about AI that are by turns vertiginous, provocative and compelling. Utterly brilliant.
In a typical organisation, we try to solve resourcing and other complex tasks with spreadsheets, check-lists, flow-charts and meetings and then are depressed when they don’t seem to work.
We may be mistaking or not seeing things for the complex problems – the wicked problems, as they are sometimes known – that they really are.
One more word on mistaking wicked problems for complicated problems or treating them in the same way breaking them down and “solving” them in pieces. The logic tree method is and example, as is putting things into a speadsheet or Gannt chart to bring order.
There is an inherent blind spot that these cause later. By solving each of the issues in a problem tree without being mindful of system dynamics we can be unprepared for new issues that will spring up. Wicked problems respond to tactical fixes with more problems, which can be disorientating and demoralising for those trying to deal with them.
This is where generative AI right now offers a complexity managing opportunity for us non-maths genius mortals. We can use it to begin to see complexity and find ways to work with it.
Bubble trouble
If you’re an investor, the Gen-AI wave or bubble is something to be ridden. If you’re a human interested in how humans can think with machines. All the market noise is to be ignored. I got into why on a LinkedIn post this week.
[…] on “Gen-AI good/bad?” cynics are as dumb as utopians. The number one rule of Gen AI is Nobody Knows Anything.
Inspired by the Economist article here.
A related article by Andrew Bruce Smith on LinkedIn on adoption is also well worth a read.
The real failure is ad-tracking
The terrible disinformation-fuelled, far-right violence in the UK has been faced down for the moment with competent government, policing and anti-racism protests. Incredibly, the owner of one of the world’s biggest social media has been stoking the flames of unrest, while suing advertisers for not spending enough money with his platform.
Nick Asbury, a branding expert and author, makes a persuasive case that boycotting X is a side-show to the bigger problems of surveillance capitalism (also it makes advertisers arbiters of morality, which is far from ideal for anyone) and that the real problem is ad-tracking. It kills creativity, annoys users, doesn’t work very well (and is riddled with fraud).
Some of the calls for the ad industry to ‘step up’ no doubt have good intentions behind them. But there’s a saying about where good intentions can lead. It’s not enough to trim surveillance advertising at the edges to cut out X or whoever is the current bête noire, then keeping the whole show on the road. Nor is it about continuing to buy the ads, but covering yourself with self-consciously purposeful messages. It’s about a radical change that shifts the rules of the game.
For now, I suspect we’ll see a lot of advertisers talking about anything but tracking, and continuing to turn the attention onto useful villains like Musk. But I’d love to see more agencies and clients joining the calls for an end to tracking and a revival in non-creepy, non-stalky, creative advertising. That would be a good way to step up.
Asbury has a book called The Road To Hell: How purposeful business leads to bad marketing and a worse world which looks interesting.
Nike nixed
Brian Morrissey, the publishing and marketing expert, thinks McKinsey consultants are to blame for the shocking downturn in Nike's fortunes. TL;DR: the company decided direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales rather than through retailers was the future and got caught in a paid-media spiral to the bottom trying to get consumers to buy from its website...
The company’s stock is down 30% this year, as Nike flails with an ill-considered reorganization that has the fingerprints of McKinsey all over it, a botched focus on DTC at the expense of wholesale relationships and a seeming overreliance on performance marketing over brand advertising. CEO John Donahue is at risk of becoming a modern John Scully. ([View Highlight]())
(Note for younger readers: John Scully was the Pepsi exec who became CEO of Apple, chucked out Steve Jobs and nearly drove a great company into the ground.)
Two free amazing image generators to try
SAM 2, or Segment Anything Model 2, is an advanced tool from Meta AI that can quickly identify and separate objects in photos and videos. It’s a smart assistant for editing—by simply clicking on an object or drawing a box around it, SAM 2 can highlight or isolate it for you. This makes tasks like video editing, creating presentations, or enhancing personal projects much easier and more precise. The model can process about 44 frames per second. This means it can quickly handle tasks that need immediate results, like editing videos or using augmented reality.
Flux AI image generator is an open-source tool for creating photorealistic images, seen as a potential successor to Stable Diffusion. Available in Pro, Dev, and Schnell24 versions, Flux allows users to modify and integrate it into their projects. It excels in generating realistic images, especially of people, although close inspection may reveal AI-generated elements. Usable locally or via platforms like Poe and Nightcafe, Flux rivals Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly.
Here’s an example comparing Flux and Midjourney, the current leader.
[Prompt: Paparazzi shot of a litre stein of golden Helles beer, bearded monk, St Augustine, sitting in the Augustiner biergarten in modern day Munich with a plate of sasages in front of him and 35mm, paparazzi.]
This week…
Reading
An Immense World, by Ed Yong. A tour of the senses that build the worlds that animals live in, this book is both accessible to the general reader while constantly astounding in its description of how different the experiences of the world are by different animals. I’m taking my time with this book and often listening to an audible version while I walk my dogs, and seeing creatures with my human eyes that are seeing very different worlds to me. My dogs have diochromatic eyes, for instance (they don’t see red), but the seagulls screeching above have tetratchromatic eyes, that include colours mixed between ones I can see and ultraviolet. The dogs have no conception of red, and if they speak wouldn’t be able to describe what it might be like. The birds meanwhile are seeing colours like “yurple”, a mix of UV and yellow that I will never be able to even imagine.
Dictionary People, by Sarah Ogilvie. Another book I’m taking at a leisurely pace. Stories of the team and the 6,000 volunteers who created the Oxford English Dictionary. They are fascinating and in the process of hearing them we learn about the great dictionary movement in Europe, the science of tracking words origins through time and all sorts of other wonderful things.
On The Beach, Neville Shute. Sometime in the 1950 or 60s, there has been a nuclear war so rapid and complete that it has destroyed the Northern Hemisphere leaving survivors in the south unclear about exactly what happened. Six months later, life in southern Australia is eerily similar to the beforetimes, but petrol has run out and fatal radiation is spreading inexorably toward them. Written by an expert on doomsday weapons – as in, he made some of them – in the 50s, this a strange book. It's from a different time – attitudes about gender are alcohol are very different – but the feelings and attitudes of the characters feel like memories of the pandemic. Life goes on in a strange way, even with the hugeness of the catastrophe and the uncertainty-certainty tension of death is all around them. This book is a strange thing, a challenging experience, and deeply engaging.
Here's a sample passage where crew on a submarine checking on cities that have "gone quiet" are talking.
They learned nothing, save for the inference that when the end had come the people had died tidily. “It’s what animals do,” John Osborne said. “Creep away into holes to die. They’re probably all in bed.” “That’s enough about that,” the captain said. “It’s true,” the scientist remarked. “Okay, it’s true. Now let’s not talk about it any more."
Cheerful stuff.
Watching
The Olympics. Obvs. Random sports. Thrilling battles. Lovely stories. 1000x better than the Euros.
The Kingdom Of The Planet of The Apes (Disney+). The modern (everything after and not including the Wahleberg/Tim Burton version) versions of the Planet of the Apes films are great fun. This one kicks off a new trilogy in the same universe as the previous three and, as the youth say, I am so there for it.
Have a great week,
Antony
PS Lastly, if you are unaware of Chappell Roan, she’s a Gen Z superstar and the shockwave of her rapid rise will hit you soon. An inheritor of Cyndi Lauper, Kate Bush and Lady Gaga’s best traits, her music is a welcome lift in these weird times. Almost every song on her Midwest Princess album is both a certified banger and a candidate for a modern pop classic.
Do yourself a favour, and annoy your Gen Z relatives by listening to the album as soon as possible before they tell you about it. Killer tracks include Pink Pony Club, My Kink is Karma and the irresistible Hot To Go, which I think we’ll sign off with. Er, but don’t start playing it to the family without listening to the lyrics first. I said Gen Z - not Alpha.