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In yesterday’s newsletter I wrote ‘coherence is the new moat’ and that you arrive at coherence through careful and repeated Structured Thought. But knowing that isn’t the same as building it. Today I want to talk about where you actually begin. Not with tools. Not with software. With thinking.

Here’s what nobody wants to hear: the moment you start to operationalise ‘coherence’, you discover how much of your understanding lives only in your head.

My friend and erstwhile colleague John Caswell - who’s been thinking about this longer than most - commented on yesterday’s post here - to paraphrase

Coherence is a practice, and requires something unexpected: analogue work before digital infrastructure. Digital makes it too easy to skip the hard part, which is thinking before execution. You cannot give AI a mental model you haven't articulated, and real articulation happens when humans slow down and make that thinking explicit.

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We spent ‘The Age of Reason’ waxing lyrical over ‘productivity’ and ‘efficiency’. That’s changing now. In ‘The Age of Experience’, Systems of Record are making way for Systems of Engagement. And it all starts not with another app on top of your stack. It's a totally new way of thinking about your business. Here's what actually happens when you operationalise coherence.

Structured Thought, made operational, is the moat. Not because it’s faster. Not because it’s cheaper. But because it’s the only way to scale without losing your mind.

An engagement platform is the infrastructure that makes this possible. It’s where your operating model lives along with your decision logs and your strategic context. When you’ve done the thinking work and made your understanding explicit, the platform holds it, makes it available to your team, and lets your AI tools access your actual reasoning instead of guessing from generic training.

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Your team can ask …

“why did we decide that?”

… and get a real answer grounded in your model, not a guess filtered through email chains. New employees don’t have to reverse-engineer your thinking. AI doesn’t get to amplify fragmentation. Yes, I hear you say …

"We're already giving everyone AI tools. That'll solve this."

Sorry. That's hoping coherence emerges. It won't.

Engagement platforms amplify whatever thinking you’ve put into them. If the thinking is clear and explicit, they amplify coherence. If it’s fuzzy and fragmented, they amplify fragmentation - but at scale. Everyone having AI tools doesn’t create coherence. It accelerates fragmentation.

This is why you start with Structured Thought. To make your understanding explicit.

So What Now?

If you’re serious about this, the best place to start is where you already are. You have an operating model - it lives in your head and in the decisions you’ve made. You have constraints, a thesis for why your approach works, a voice that’s distinctly yours. The work isn’t creating something new. It’s making what you already know explicit.

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Start here. Three questions. Honest answers only please.

• Can you articulate your operating model? The actual model - not the version you talk about. In one page? If not, it’s too fuzzy to scale.

• Can you hand that model to someone new and have them make decisions that align with your intent? If not, you don’t have structure. Yet.

• Can your AI tools access that logic? Not just your prompts, but your actual reasoning? If not, AI will amplify your fragmentation.

And that right there is the opportunity. The ones that win aren’t the fastest or the biggest. They’re the ones who stop and get this right first.

Structured Thought isn’t a methodology. It’s the work of making your mind legible - to your team, your systems and most importantly yourself.

Everything else follows.

If you reached this far and want to talk more - I certainly do.

Let’s set up some time to explore how Structured Thought can be used to help your business transition into the ‘Age of Experience’. Let’s book some time.

More context? Some links for you1

I’ve been doing this every year since 2019 - which means that this is my 8th rodeo. (My previous words are here.)

After eight years of ‘three words’, you’d think I’d have this all figured out by now. BUT - Intentional | Inspired | Impactful ? To be honest - not as much as it could have been.

• ‘Intentional’ was meant to be about something more than preparation.

• ‘Inspired’ is meaningless if it is only in my head.

• ‘Impact’ requires you to impact something. It hasn’t. At least not in a meaningful way.

Turns out that 2025 was a lot of ‘getting ready’. Not enough ‘doing’. Not to say ‘doing’ was totally absent - but maybe ‘the wrong doing’? Although ‘bread was placed on the table’ - so there is that. Bottom line - it all adds up to 2026 needing to - being - different.

My 3 words for 2026

To remind you dear reader - the words are neither plan, nor strategy - nor even ‘resolutions’ (Freakanomics on that topic). Rather my guardrails for the year ahead - and yes - alliteration once more rears its head.

Engage

Engage by Leighton Robinson on Unsplash

Enable

Enable by Leighton Robinson on Unsplash

Excite

Excite by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Does this resonate? Want to talk more? I would love to.

Let’s set up some time to explore how Structured Thought can be used to help your business transition from the ‘Age of Compliance’ to the ‘Age of Experience’.

Until Then - Have A Great Year.

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And then it happened
Ooh, and then it happened
Ooh, and then it happened
Ooh, and then it happened

💬 Holland Dozier and Holland (‘H-D-H’ to their friends.)

If you have been following along (and if not - why not?) since the early days of People First, my work in Structured Thought and more recently, the consolidation into PHI⑊PIN then this is for you.

Finally. It happened. Sometimes you think that you might just be ‘🔗🎵 blowing in the wind’ - until one day it changes and you think ‘maybe not’.

Today is one such day - because whilst spinning through this morning’s ‘thought review’ - 6 articles caught my eye1 that all connected. With each other, with me and with Structured Thought.

Six Voices. One Message.

Paolo Valdemarin | Laid out the job of what I call an ‘Engagement Platform’ by externalising your operating model so AI can translate between contexts while maintaining a single understanding.

Ben Thompson | Microsoft chose ‘coherence over scale’ by prioritising its own product suite. Why? Because maintaining a coherent vision across a portfolio matters more than maximising any single dimension.

Joan Westenberg | Solo operators using Structured Thought beat out large organisations because coherence compounds while incoherence fragments.

Christopher Lochhead | Execution is automated, knowledge is commoditised and real value has moved ‘upstream’ to problem framing. Which is exactly the point of ‘avoiding solving the wrong problem really well’ as my friend John Caswell has it and indeed, provides a ‘why’ of Structured Thought.

Geoffrey Moore | Agentic AI needs to be deployed atop proven, reliable structures with guardrails built in, not improvised on the fly.

Om Malik | The ‘announcement economy’ is a world of velocity and noise. Coherence matters precisely because everything else is optimised for attention rather than truth. I called it the ‘noise economy’ when I wrote about this last September in a piece called ‘Sound of Silence’.

The Convergence

You might think that these are isolated observations. They are not. Nor are they unique (other than they all appeared in my feed this morning). Bottom line - they are all describing the same shift. A shift that is unspoken - but at the heart of Structured Thought.

In large organisations, this is nearly impossible. Different departments operate from different mental models and information fragments at every handoff. AI amplifies the disagreement rather than resolving it. But a small team with explicit structure working with a clear operating model, documented constraints, decision rationale, voice guidelines can scale without fragmenting and AI becomes a tool for executing within that coherence, not a way to hope disparate teams accidentally align. This is what structured thought actually means in practice: externalising your logic so thoroughly that it can guide people, process and systems.

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There’s a disclaimer you see everywhere in investment materials:

“Past performance is not an indication of future results.”

… It's a hedge (pun intended) against the assumption that ‘if it happened yesterday, it happens tomorrow’ because yesterday's consistency isn't tomorrow's guarantee.

(SIDENOTE: Has NYPD always had a branch next door to The Nasdaq? Sure seems convenient - and possibly appropriate?)1

In tech we don’t have such a disclaimer. But we might well need one. Because as AI increasingly takes hold, the pundits and wizards behind the curtains are taking to referencing history as part of our ‘education process’.

… they declare - and then go on to provide a brief history lesson (in case we missed school that day) …

.. information went from ‘scarce’ and ‘controlled’ to everywhere. The Catholic Church wasn’t happy. Wars were fought. But society restructured around it. Literacy exploded. New professions emerged. The world absorbed it.

… all while conveniently omitting the timescale.

The press was invented and 15 years later they printed the first Bible, taking another 50 years to spread across Europe (let alone ‘RoW’) and then a full 160 years passed before it finally fuelled the Reformation.

They would also be advised to have a read of Harari’s latest volume - Nexus, on this particular narrative - but let’s stay on this track for now.

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During the Industrial Revolution around the 17th to 18th century (we are reminded that … ) people moved from farms to factories. Labour patterns were inverted. Social structures shattered and rebuilt. There was real societal upheaval. But wages eventually rose. Living standards eventually improved - and the world kept going.

History also tells us that the steam engine first appeared in 1712 with another 40 years passing before James Watt refined it for rotary power and another 50 years to get to the first steam locomotive.

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Well - how about electricity? Can’t you just hear their breathlessness?

It ‘arrived’ in the late 19th century and transformed production, communication, daily life simultaneously. It changed when and where people worked, how they lived, what was possible. Massive disruption. Fundamental restructuring. But humans found new equilibrium - and the world was okay.

Again. ‘Timescale’ and ‘Scale’ … 40 years from Faraday’s dynamo to the first light bulb. The first power station served 60 customers. A full 70 years passed before the first 50 per cent of America was electrified.

Don’t you feel so much better when you realise through all this tumultuous change that the world …

• absorbed it.

• kept going.

• was okay.

Makes you feel good. Right?

But there’s more. When you next tune in to the pundits rabbiting on about this ‘AI stuff’ .. and they say;

Keep that disclaimer ‘front and center’ …

.. because this time it is different.

This time it’s …

Faster – Previous disruptions took generations to fully absorb. This one is compressing years into months.

Affects everyone – The printing press needed readers. Factories needed workers. Electricity needed infrastructure. AI doesn’t require permission or literacy and it’s already everywhere.

Global – There’s no where to escape to. No place where the old rules still apply. No opt-out.

It learns from us. It will learn from itself. (Even though every time I read that my mind jumps to ‘Multiplicity’ with Michael Keaton - but that’s yet another different thread.) The printing press was static. A combine harvester does one thing. But this? It learns from what you feed it, then uses that to ‘improve’ itself, then learns from those improvements. The loop is closing, the tool gets ‘smarter’ (more convincing?) - all while you are re still figuring out how best to use it.

Nobody actually knows how it works. You can understand a printing press. You can understand a combine harvester. Even the people building those things grasped the mechanics. But AI? Even the engineers building it can’t fully explain why it makes the decisions it makes. You’re delegating thinking to something you don’t understand.

It’s adaptive. Every other technology was fundamentally the same yesterday as today. This one changes. Morphs. Responds. You can’t treat it as a fixed tool because it isn’t.

One More Thing

Previous disruptions changed what humans did.
This one changes how humans think .. and maybe what?

If you reached this far and want to talk more - I certainly do.

Let’s set up some time to explore how Structured Thought can be used to help your business transition into the ‘Age of Experience’. Let’s book some time.

Lenny is Great - and with well over a million subscribers it seems that I might not be the only person that has come to that conclusion. The thing about him is his guests, their openness and their different way of thinking. Take ‘Elena’ on his latest Podcast.

Listen to it. This is why …

The whole Podcast is worth a listen, but read this and then look at your organisation …

Elena highlights that she spends 95% of her time on growth innovation. That leaves just 5% on optimisation - the exact inverse of traditional growth teams where the common wisdom suggests that once you find a working loop, optimise it relentlessly.

Let’s Explore more. Trust me - these aren’t the only nuggets - they are just the ones that best highlight the ideas I talk about in this transition to ‘The Age of Engagement’.

Spend 95% of Your Time on Innovation

Why?

• In fast-moving categories, optimising yesterday’s playbook makes you irrelevant in 3 months

• Competitors constantly launch new features that change the game

• The market moves so fast that refinement is pointless before fundamentals shift

“To be ahead of them is not optimisation of the problem. It’s reinvention of the solution.”

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Product-Market Fit Isn’t a Milestone - It’s a 3-Month Treadmill

Why?

• New LLM releases every 3 months change what’s possible with AI

• User expectations change monthly, not yearly

• Competitors iterate at light speed

• Companies can lose PMF overnight (OpenAI lost 6% market share in a week to Gemini 3)

“Every single AI LLM provider creates a step function change in what is possible every three months.

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Hire New Grads and Failed Founders Over Corporate Veterans

Why?

• New grads are AI-native and don’t carry ‘baggage’ from old playbooks

• Failed founders have high agency and autonomy because they are used to owning everything

• Corporate veterans bring assumptions that don’t apply in hypergrowth AI companies

• In rapidly changing environments, fresh thinking beats experience

“You need people that don’t look for clarity but can create clarity out of chaos because it is absolutely chaotic otherwise.”

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Designers Must Be The First Hire, Not Afterthoughts

Why?

• The cost of building software is collapsing (AI does it cheaply)

• Functionality parity is inevitable—everything looks similar

• Differentiation is now how it feels (emotional design, microinteractions, personality)

• “Lovable” is enforced through design discipline from day one, not retrofitted

“The cost of software is coming down so much to develop that we now can actually invest in the emotional feel of the software.”

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Build A Minimum Lovable Product, Not Minimum Viable Product

Why?

• Viability is table stakes now

• Everyone can build a viable product

• If your product doesn’t delight on first interaction, users won’t stick around

• Emotional response matters as much as functional response

Viability is left back in the 2010s.

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Let’s set up some time to explore how Structured Thought can be used to help your business transition into the ‘Age of Experience’.

My podcast launches next week and this week was more than a little hectic, so sharing an unpublished story from Travels Without Charlie.

“You’re a long way from home,” I said looking at the man I’d just overheard talking.

“Not really,” he said. “I live just around the corner.” … looking me straight in the eyes and smiling right back.

We both laughed. He knew what I was talking about. We were thousands of miles away from England, the country where we both hailed from and here we were talking to each other as if we were in an English pub. I guess like all people we pick up our accent in others when we hear it - sometimes trying to nail the region of origin, if not the county or even city.

Photo: Sarag Groblechner on Unsplash

I nailed the region. I failed the city. Turns out he moved here 12 years ago, in that time I guess his regional accent had been ‘smoothed over’.

“Alone?”

“No, with my wife and 4 children.”

“Wow … I guess someone made you an offer you couldn’t refuse? I mean that is a big move.”

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“It was. A lot bigger than either of us had foreseen - and no - there was no corporate pull, no job waiting. We both just felt that the time had come. We wanted our children to see another part of the world. So we made the decision to jump.

I sometimes wonder if we knew then what we came to learn whether we would have had the courage to make that jump. It was nerve-racking.

You forget the importance of connections. Back in England, I was a known quantity. People called me up with contract opportunities. After we moved here I spent what seemed like an eternity in a wilderness. The only calls were when I made them, introducing myself, hustling. I mean, even when somebody calls you there’s always an element of that - but this was different. Half of the conversations over here were explaining who I was. I was unknown, In the end, I got work but spent the first 4 years on success contracts only - no fixed payment of any kind. Nerve-racking doesn’t even get to it. My oldest was 7 years old, my youngest was 7 months old and my wife was not allowed to work.

The early contracts started paying off in year 5. In year 6 - I started getting the calls.

By then I’d proved myself. It didn’t matter what I’d done somewhere else. What mattered was that I could do it on their turf. I did. I had - in spades. The shoe was now on the other foot. Now they wanted me.

In the next few years, I took fixed fee-only, just so that I could fill-up the bank account again and the early contracts were paying out, so I could invest on top of working the contracts.

That’s been the way now for the past 4 years. Funny third - third - third - never thought of that before.

Would I do it again? I’m not sure. It turned out well in the end - really well - but the journey was gruelling. It was hard on the children. Even harder on my wife.

I guess if you really want something, you should just go for it. That wasn’t me. I wanted something different. I wanted adventures for my family, but ….”

… his voice trailed away as he was shaking his head. He looked up.

“BUT at the end of the day, here I am. In the past 4 years, I have achieved what would only have been a dream back home - and I still have a lot of life in me, so really - I shouldn’t regret it. Had I stayed there, I wouldn’t have known that I’d missed this. Then again, I wouldn’t have missed being close to bankruptcy and the poverty line.

The fact is, you just don’t know. You pick your route through life and live with the consequences.”

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‘Regrets’ is a story from the ‘Travels Without Charlie’ series. A recurring theme in the series is one of picking up and starting again. It seems so easy. If you're young, you have nothing to lose. If you are older, but the corporate expat package protects you ... no problem. If it all works out - the stories get told. But when it doesn’t - where are those stories? How do we learn? Keith isn't his real name, but I thank him for opening up his heart and telling his story. In the end it worked for him, but the journey was hard.

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