Qual informed Art Playwright Alecky Blythe spoke at our recent UK event on communication. Alecky uses recorded conversations to build her scripts and make them more engaging. And Alecky isn’t alone. For those of you who remember the band Underworld (Born Slippy? From Trainspotting?), you might be surprised to hear Karl Hyde used a similar …

Happy days are good days and last week, I had a very happy day. We had almost 300 people in a room in London to listen to 10 ace speakers and a super client panel, all on the subject of ‘Communication: Less conversation, more action’.  It’s a subject that’s extremely relevant in today’s world, and …

Before we get into this issue of The100, I wanted to say a huge thank you to the whole Watch Me Think team. All 3 of our offices (the UK, US and Australia) came together in Spain last week to spend some quality time together. I wrote more about it here, but all I can …

AI’m not crying, you are Young & Rubicam made an ad called ‘Computers Can’t Cry’ back in 1964.  To Eddie Shleyner’s point it’s still hugely relevant today. And weirdly comforting that even prior generations thought they were going to be usurped by machines.  Artificial empathy Sophie Henson has uncorked today’s daily dose of sense, in …

“Did the Beatles ever mention television in their songs?” In an article that’s both worrying and funny, Nicholas Carr shares Gemini’s problems: “First, with the confidence characteristic of chatbots, Gemini declares that, yes, indeed, the words “television” and “TV” appear in Beatles lyrics. It offers “Yellow Submarine” and “Here Comes the Sun” as prominent examples. …

Stories stir, numbers numb I enjoyed listening to strategist Kevin Chesters talk about crafting stories that drive behaviour change. As part of his research into storytelling, he spoke to a wide range of communicators, including a vicar who said:  “Often the only thing people remember about a sermon is not the words, but how the …

“Treat the AI like an infinitely patient research assistant” Sharing a metric tonne of sense, Neil Perkin has some great tips on using GenAI as a thought partner. I particularly like the idea of using LLMs to play the role of your audience and asking it to critique presentations: “You can give it context like …

Negative social proof We’re a funny bunch of fish, us humans. And Richard Shotton has been reminding us why. He’s been looking at the pitfalls of trying to shock people into action by flagging negative behaviours, because you either excuse yourself (‘not me’) or you plead helplessness: “Either way, our behaviour is unlikely to change. …

It’s like ray-eee-aaaain A bit like Turkeys voting for Christmas, Microsoft has co-authored a paper showing that using AI can weaken humans’ critical thinking skills.  “[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement …

Prediction Pre-mortems Tim Harford wrote this fascinating piece on the forecasting paradox and “prospective hindsight”. One sentence stood out to me, especially with the plethora of trend reports that float around at this time of year: “Thinking seriously about the future can be a worthwhile exercise, not because the future is knowable but because the …