Writing
Occasional pieces, mostly about judgement, decisions and the things people carry at work.
Choosing a counsellor or a coach is difficult partly because everybody’s website says the same handful of warm words. This page is here so you can read me thinking about something and form your own view, which might be a better basis for a decision than any description I could write of myself.
These are written for the coaching side of the practice more than the counselling side, though the line between the two is often thinner than it looks. Nothing here is advice, and none of it is about anybody I have worked with.
- The message nobody wrote You use AI to write something difficult and experience it as help with the wording. The person reading it is working out what you were prepared to go through in order to send it, and the research says those are not the same transaction.
- Good at the job, or good at the work Producing good work and becoming good at the work are separate processes. Randomised trials now show that AI can improve the first while degrading the second, and nothing in your organisation measures the difference.
- It isn’t impostor syndrome if they really are judging you Nearly half of UK employees have passed off AI-generated work as their own. The research says their fear of being found out is accurate, and the name we have given it sends the response to the wrong place.
- A well-briefed stranger Every AI tool being sold to you promises to get to know your business over time. What actually carries over between one conversation and the next, and why briefed is a different category of thing from known.
- Your AI agrees with you. That is not the same as being right. What the research on AI sycophancy says about flattery, certainty and the decisions that follow from both. And why installing a challenge process rarely fixes it.
More will appear here when there is something worth adding rather than on a schedule. If you would like to know when, feel free to ask.
I’m also open to commissions. If you would like something written for a publication, a professional body or an organisation, do get in touch.
The first conversation is free. About twenty minutes, no obligation, and nothing is booked or paid for until after we’ve spoken.