"PowerPoint makes us stupid" — so said General James Mattis, later US Secretary of Defense, at a military conference in 2010. Mattis's point (I think) was that forcing everything into presentation format degrades thinking, over-simplifies problems, and gives the illusion you've planned or understood
Earlier this year I wrote about using NotebookLM as a personal leadership coach, drawing on my own learning blog posts as the source material. That proved useful, but a it was ad-hoc, not a habit. Over the past few months I've built something more deliberate: a weekly
In my previous post on vibe coding in Defence, I built a simple web app that scrapes GOV.UK pages and plots military range activity on a map. That experiment showed that someone without a software development background could use AI coding tools to build something real and useful. But
In a series of blog posts I'll be talking through my academic research into AI in large organisations - undertaken as part of my AI MSc, which I completed in 2025. In this first post I'll simply summarise my research and the main conclusions. Later, I'
"PowerPoint makes us stupid" — so said General James Mattis, later US Secretary of Defense, at a military conference in 2010. Mattis's point (I think) was that forcing everything into presentation format degrades thinking, over-simplifies problems, and gives the illusion you've planned or understood
Earlier this year I wrote about using NotebookLM as a personal leadership coach, drawing on my own learning blog posts as the source material. That proved useful, but a it was ad-hoc, not a habit. Over the past few months I've built something more deliberate: a weekly
In my previous post on vibe coding in Defence, I built a simple web app that scrapes GOV.UK pages and plots military range activity on a map. That experiment showed that someone without a software development background could use AI coding tools to build something real and useful. But
As part of my technical learning I decided to conduct an experiment. Could I - not a software developer - use AI coding tools to build a working, public-facing web service from scratch, using real UK MOD data? And if so, what might that mean for Defence? The result is here:
Planning my team's activities for the coming year has required us to do some thinking about the near-term activities we can do, to help ensure that UK Defence can exploit AI at scale and pace. While conversations around the cutting-edge of AI tend to focus on
In a series of blog posts I'll be talking through my academic research into AI in large organisations - undertaken as part of my AI MSc, which I completed in 2025. In this first post I'll simply summarise my research and the main conclusions. Later, I'
I've made some changes to this site over the past few days: * A new presence which is simpler to use, simpler to maintain, and more secure. The old self-hosted WordPress blog was becoming untenable. I might go into the reasons in a future post. I've
What it was Self-guided experimentation, on how I could use AI to augment my personal development, by turning my existing learning blog posts into a personal leadership coach. Originally (in late 2023) I used the OpenAI GPT3.5 API with embeddings, and a custom system prompt, to generate a
What it was: A session of positive thinking and planning, from a group exercise and a one-to-one co-coaching session, aimed at drawing up an action plan for achieving some of my professional aims. This was part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme held in London on 28
What it was A one-day session on what it means to "lead self" in the context of a changing civil service, through being present and leading with emotional intelligence. Part of the Deputy Director Leadership Programme. Held in London on 28 January 2020. What I learned Emotional
What it was This Christmas I encountered 'Kurosu' - a japanese grid-based logic puzzle in the same vein as Sudoku (albeit a lot simpler than Sudoku). As a Christmas puzzle - and to top-up my coding skills development over the holiday - I set myself the challenge of writing
What it was A meeting to reflect on our collective learning with a cohort of people who had completed the Civil Service Future Leaders Scheme in 2017/18/19, chaired by Director-General at MOD and held in February 2019. In this blog post I have pasted the content of