The Agile Strategies Podcast: Intelligence, Strategy, and OKRs

Chuck Whetsell is an old friend and classmate, an accomplished Rolfer, body worker, therapist and meditation teacher. In this episode we take a deep dive into the nature of somatic intelligence. In times of rapid change, cognitive flexibility - our ability to change our mind and see things differently - is absolutely critical. But the mind can't change itself. Chuck's perspective is that we can only get out of our heads by cultivating somatic intelligence, which can only happen through expanding our sense of our bodies and our repertoire of movement. Somatic intelligence, unlike logical intelligence, is a product of a complex interaction grounded in the body, which produces insights that seem to arrive in a single moment. We talk about practices for cultivating somatic intelligence, including mindfulness of our breath and the practice of pausing.

Christian Ulstrup is an MIT graduate and startup founder turned OKR consultant. He has gone further than anyone I know in the field using AI as a productivity tool. He'd be the last person to say that AI can generate strategy, but has found ways to make the process faster and get the best out of the humans. He produces new content on LinkedIn every week with his latest thoughts on how to use the best AI tools for developing strategy and OKRs. As he says, in AI there are no experts, only pioneers. We talk about AI's role in helping us move forward more intelligently in the face of uncertainty and complexity, and the uses of AI to crunch warm data, that is, information that is not quantitative but qualitative. And, he introduces a great new term, "information liquidity."

Giles Crouch is a Digital Anthropologist and Marketing Consultant who produces provocative (and prolific) content on culture and technology on both Medium and Substack. Giles is a student of how culture absorbs technology, and he predicts that before long, AI will actually become boring. He talks about how earlier technologies like the telephone have gone from being bright shiny objects to just part of the woodwork of our lives. He cautions against having too many wild expectations for AI as a creative aid, and we focus on the kind of intelligence and experience that consultants like ourselves have to bring to our work. Today's AI tools recycle a lot of previous patterns and lack understanding of context that humans have. This results in a reduction to a kind of "beigeness" that can't support real innovation. We talk about the ideas some techno visionaries have about the idea of putting a "brain on a chip" which seems to betray a lack of understanding of intelligence and consciousness. We talk about impact on professional services consulting, but in fact the whole topic opens up huge philosophical and religious issues.