In the 1980s, Athens was battling crippling pollution. Smog sat over the city and congestion was spiralling. 

Officials introduced what seemed like a perfectly sensible solution:

Cars with odd-numbered licence plates could drive on odd-numbered days, and even-numbered plates on even-numbered days.

For a short while, it worked. Traffic fell. Pollution dipped. Job done. Until it wasn’t.

Taking Ownership

Maybe it’s just my filter on the world, but have you noticed how so much of the public conversation slips into blame?

“It’s their fault”

“They should have fixed it”

“Poor decision making”

“Someone else is the problem”

Politics, Business, Culture….all seem to me to have the same echo, the same finger-pointing, frustration, outrage….

“God, I wish they’d show a bit more humility and just admit when they’ve got it wrong.”

Ever caught yourself saying that about someone?

Perhaps you’ve also said this about someone else:

“You have to admire their confidence, they really back themselves.”

What’s the tension between these two statements?

What do you think is the most important quality we need to face change and uncertainty?

Might it be our speed of learning and adaptation, perhaps resilience or maybe greater levels of curiousity and experimentation?

Those are all of course very good contenders to be the most important quality.

I think though, there’s something important that sits just befopre that.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent more time at events than at my desk.

Rooms packed to the rafters with energy, ideas, and stories. The buzz, the mental stimulation, the ideas, the connection with other humans.

It reminded me of something that I think is rather important.

Everywhere you look right now, it’s all about AI. Automation. Streamlining process. More efficiencies. From the Government to the Private Sector to the Third Sector. The world is about speed. Quicker answers. Quicker results. The pressure to move, to react, to get to the next thing.

I fear that in our rush to go faster, we often forget the one thing that allows us to go further.

Thinking.

Anthropic has launched Keep Thinking, its first major brand campaign for Claude.

On a flight back from an event last week, I watched Gary Neville interview Paul Scholes. Both were part of the record-breaking Manchester United team.

Neville asked him a simple question: “Who was your favourite teammate to play with?”

Scholes didn’t hesitate. “Ruud van Nistelrooy.”

Neville pressed him: “Why Ruud?”

New pencil case, freshly sharpened pencils, shiny new notebook.

Does the September back to school feeling ever leave us? 

Even now, long after schooldays, autumn for me always brings that same invitation: reset.

Resets don’t happen by accident. All too easy for the days and weeks to accelerate and our fresh energy disappears in a haze of meetings, deadlines, and obligations.

This summer, I’ve been chasing bass along the Devon coastline. 

Not just casting in the same spot with the same lure, but switching marks, different states of tide, trolling versus drifting, adjusting retrieve speeds, swapping colours and styles of lure.

Every change, whether it brought a hit or an empty line is a data point. The more loops I ran, the faster I learned what worked in that moment.

Have you ever had that thing where you do something, it works brilliantly… and then, over time, you forget to do it and it gradully slips out of your week?

Like going to the gym, journaling, flossing, setting aside proper time to think, or a host of other things?

It wasn’t an active decision to stop. It was as simple as life getting busy. Other things crowd in. And the habit that actually worked pretty well quietly disappears.

I had a reminder this week that at some point I mislaid along the way one of the most powerful routines I ever had…