Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ 10 years ago I was trying to celebrate independent thinking.
Still trying ☹️
In this prior post I gave some context as to how this total thread came to be. But what does that mean to you❓
The Engagement Platform as Coherence Infrastructure
This is why engagement platforms …
And then it happened > Ooh, and then it happened > Ooh, and then it happened > Ooh, and then it happened
💬 Holland Dozier and HJolland (‘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 Thinking and more recently, the consolidation into PHI⑊PIN then this is for you. If you haven’t - it is - still - for you.
Finally. It happened. Sometimes you think that you might just be ‘🔗🎵 blowing in the wind’ - until one day you think ‘maybe not’.
Today is one such day - because today, whilst spinning through this morning’s daily ‘thinking’ catch up - 6 - SIX! articles caught my eye (I added the URLs at the end.) that all connected, with each other, with me and with Structured Thought.
Six Voices. One Message.
Paolo Valdemarin | Lays out the job of what I call an ‘Engagement Platform’ - Externalise your operating model so AI can translate between contexts while maintaining a single understanding.
Ben Thompson | Microsoft has chosen ‘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 the 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 the why of Structured Thought.
Talking of John - one of his ‘works of art’.
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 post 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 inversion:
competitive advantage is no longer scale, speed, or even access to AI. It’s coherence - the degree to which every decision, every output, every interaction derives from the same underlying model of reality.
In large organisations, this is nearly impossible. Different departments operate from different mental models. 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 thinking actually means in practice: externalising your logic so thoroughly that it can guide both people and systems.
The Articles
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Paolo Valdemarin: 🔗 AI as a communication tool
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Ben Thompson: 🔗 Microsoft and Software Survival
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Joan Westenberg : 🔗 The Coherence Premium
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Om Malik : 🔗 The Announcement Economy
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Chris Lockhead: 🔗 The Value of Your Value (LinkedIN)
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Geoffrey Moore : 🔗 When will Agentic AI Cross The Chasm (LinkedIN)
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Value - it’s all about the promise. In more ways than one.
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In that late 80s period Terence is writing about - I was part of Oracle and had email on my DEC terminal for communicating with others in the company around the world. Just gnashing my teeth over why people outside the company couldn’t see the benefit.
Probably because they understood that …
a single computer terminal was likely to set you back around £3,000 - and that’s before you take into account message transmission costs.
… better than I did
When Oracle moved me to California - I even had one of those terminals at home.
Of course - come the PC and laptop revolution they were so slow in adoption it was hard to understand that it was the same company.
It was kind of like how use of mobiles in geographies with bad landline coverage resulted in exponentially faster adoption