Things Only You Can Do

Thinking like a strategist, not a search engine

I’ll confess something.

I used to pride myself on being well-read.

But then AI arrived and I realised reading and thinking are not the same thing. I can read a Claude spiel (or a chapter of a book for that matter), and not tell you anything I was actually thinking about it.

The ancient Greeks had a framework to get around this. They called it the Trivium.

It was these three questions, in order: What does this say? (The grammar) What does it mean? (Logic) What should I do? (Rhetoric).

Super simple. And devastating in its rigour.

It turns out that, for years, I’ve used a version of the Trivium with clients. After a briefing on a strategic topic (the ‘grammar’), I ask people for three a-ha’s (logic) and three so whats (rhetoric).

Recently, one of a client’s ‘a-ha’s was: “Our customers don’t trust digital channels; they want a human first.” That’s kinda predictable, isn’t it?

But what isn’t is what came next. Their ‘so what’ was this: “Our customer onboarding process should make sure every new referral gets a personal phone call within 48 hours, before we send a single on-line form.”

One insight. One concrete decision. Whole service model shifted.

This gap — between knowing something and deciding what it demands of you — is where strategy really happens.

Question: What are your leadership team's 3 'so whats' from your last strategic conversation?

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You are not a co-writer. You cannot perceive.

I read a line this week from Jasmine Sun that stopped me cold.

She describes how she uses AI as an editing tool and had given it a clear instruction: “You are not a co-writer. You cannot perceive. Your only job is to make me smarter.”

She was talking about Substack essays. But she could have been talking about medicine.

A British Medical Journal study tested seven AI ambient scribes across simulated GP consultations. Every single one produced errors. What were they? Yes, hallucinations. And, yes, inaccuracies. But the dominant error was omission.

The things the AI simply didn’t notice. In this study, it was only the obvious and factual (like missed smoking history, or family dynamics). But in the real world, it’s also the hesitations. The downcast eyes. The thing the patient almost said.

AI is extraordinary at grammar: capturing what was said. It struggles with logic: what it means. And it’s essentially blind to rhetoric: what the clinician should do next.

The same is true in a strategy meeting.

Your AI tool can summarise the meeting. It cannot perceive what went unsaid.

Question: What are the critical signals in your organisation that only a human in the room could possibly notice?

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The data organisations pretend doesn't exist

I’ve been invited to a salon-style gathering of consultants and practitioners; the kind of room where the conversation is genuinely dangerous in the best possible way.

The focus?

Venting, bragging and judging.

Three things most organisations have quietly declared off-limits.

Here’s what interests me. We treat these impulses as noise: unprofessional static to be managed, suppressed, performed away.

But they’re not noise. They’re data.

What you vent about reveals what you actually value. What you brag about shows where genuine achievement lives. What you judge exposes your real standards. Not the ones on the wall, the ones in your bones.

Emotions in organisations work like electrical charge.

You can suppress them. But charge doesn’t disappear. It finds another path. The vent that never happened becomes the resignation. The brag that wasn’t permitted becomes disengagement. The judgment that couldn’t be spoken becomes a sabotaged decision.

The strategic cost of enforced emotional neutrality is enormous. And almost never counted.

Question: Where in your organisation is the emotional charge building? And where is it likely to arc?

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Three pieces this week about the same thing, really: what only you can bring. Think well, notice everything, and let the charge build where it needs to.

If you’re feeling a slight current somewhere, click the heart and let the nano-particles of the internet do their work in letting me know you’re out there. I always appreciate it.

See you next Friday,

Andrew