Spicy Thinking.

Image by Gemini

Charles’s conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone’s ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie”

―Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Today there is a surfeit of data and reports and white papers and podcasts and…

AI is enabling the creation of content, video, presentations, graphics at exponential scale.

Presentations are getting longer, more beautiful to look at, filled with charts and numbers and screeching statistics.

But watch people in presentations and their eyes glaze over.

Read the posts on LinkedIn and you wonder whether the person writing it is alive or if they have ever had an original thought.

Everywhere a bland soup of buzz-word bingo.

A damp stew of retreaded ideas.

A mumbo jumbo of cocktail puffery and regurgitated goo.

I recall a third grade teacher advising our elder daughter on something she had written:

“Spicy words. Use spicy words. Make it special”

Today we need spicy thinking.

Thoughts and ideas with zest, verve and elan.

Thinking that makes one see, think and feel differently versus a diarrhea of diction or a warmed over plate of common bunk.

In a world filled with increasing amounts of data, computational power and advances in AI, talent will matter even more if we a) focus on what is unique to humans and b) do so in a way that leverages the power of technology.

After the math does its stuff it will be time for us to add the meaning.

Today the two most common words in earnings calls and in lay-off announcements are the words AI and uncertainty.

AI will not be a differentiator and uncertainty is not an acceptable excuse.

AI is like electricity.

No business or leader will be able to survive without it.

But just as no company differentiates itself through its use of electricity, AI alone will rarely differentiate a company or leader.

True leaders do not hide behind numbers and say things like “there is too much uncertainty.”

Life is uncertain.

If things were certain, a machine could do our jobs.

So let us be glad the future cannot be lived forward with only backward-looking databases.

What do we bring to the data and next generation tools when we bring the data and tools to our management, clients or to meetings?

What matters is not the data and technology and the reality that we cannot predict the future but the perspectives, points of view, provocations, and plan of action we bring.

Our unique spices that turn data to insights, observations to ideas, the seen to the imagined.

The 4P’s of Spicy Thinking.

Perspective: How is what we are recommending today or what is happening today look from different vantage points? For instance, the vantage point of a longer time horizon or the vantage point of a different person. This is often what machines or less experienced people do not have.

One way to ensure thinking from different perspectives is to build a case for the exact opposite of what we believe or are recommending. This allows one to stress test one’s thinking and also defend against competitors who might target the weakness in an argument.

Points of View: We often bring well documented cases and facts to buttress our arguments. These are essential. But the documentation and facts will never differentiate us versus others or machines since most people will bring the same facts. It is the point of view which matters. What do we believe this means versus what others say or what the facts state. What do we believe especially when we believe differently. Points of view matter.

Many years ago when I worked for Jim Jenness the Chief Operating Officer of Leo Burnett ( Jim eventually became CEO and Chairman of The Kellogg Company) he would ask me a question after I reviewed a deck that I was going to take to a Client that went something like this:

“Forget this deck. If this was Jim’s Garage and I asked you for some advice what would you tell me. What is the right thing to do? What do you believe?”

Jim wanted my point of view. What was the right thing to do for the Client? He was clear that he wanted what I thought rather than all the data and charts one might hide behind.

Provocations: The best organizations and teams find ways to balance, unify and integrate different and diverse points of view including those that challenge the status quo, speak up to power and question accepted thinking. It is when the internal challenges go missing does a company and leader begin to miss delivering results.

Thinking provocatively is often key.

Here is a provocation if you are in marketing and advertising. Could it be that in the future with the deep interactions (multiple questions that reveal a persons true needs and state of mind at that time not in the past) and increasing length of time that people are spending with conversation engines ( even with the right answer people are spending more time in conversations than when they were searching ) such as Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini mean that first party data will be less important than mindset relevance ?

When everybody believes the competitive edge is going to be first party data what if that is no longer true in world of conversation engines and agentic commerce?

Plans of Action: While perspectives, points of view and provocations help determine what needs to be done, we do eventually have to “make happen”, “to do” and to take ideas and convert them to reality.

Machines will often suggest potential actions and we may calibrate different paths with probabilities of success but sooner or later true leaders and successful individuals suggest a clear-cut plan of action.

A plan of action that may be revised once data suggests otherwise but it is key to commit to action.

To succeed in an age where data is plentiful, pattern matching cheap, and machines are becoming smarter we should all begin lots of valid data and the best of technology including AI.

But to add true value to a company and our careers it will be key to ask ourselves all the time what we offer as a) a perspective, b) a point of view, c) a provocation and/or d) a plan of action on everything we have imbibed versus just reporting facts and process.

If we do, we will forever grow and succeed.

If we do not, we will be undifferentiated and will be automated away…