💬🏢🕋 People - Process - THEN - Technology

Before I get there - everything below the line below was automatically generated by an AI (does it matter which one?)

🖇️ Blog.Philpin.com is a combination of imports of older blogs from other personal spaces together with this latest iteration which has been going since around 2017/18? I am in the process of reorganising my different sub domains into a coherent view of my thinking - it will - I guess be an eternal WIP - but slowly we are getting there.

I was interested as to how much of what sits in what I call my ‘Personal Journal’ - was ‘on topic’ - so to speak. (Hard - when the topic is not clear - even to the author.)

That said - Structured Thought is revealing itself as my broad category - and I have a LOT of material that fits there scattered across my hard drive - enter my new Wiki - where I am starting to collect and curate the material.

So - with thanks to @manton and #micro.blog it took no time at all to export my thousands (no exaggeration) of posts and easily as many replies to zip and json files - upload them to a new project and with that said - let the analysis begin …

I asked the AI just to give me a quick 4 paragraphs on its take of what it found in the archive.

Your blog reads like a long, rolling attempt to make sense of systems that don’t behave the way they pretend to. You’re tracking the gap between how the world is structured on paper and how it actually functions in practice — whether that’s tech, politics, identity, business, or the internet itself. Underneath the commentary, there’s a consistent itch: why do institutions keep choosing the path that works against people, complexity, and common sense? And why do we keep letting them? It’s observational, sometimes wry, sometimes annoyed, but fundamentally grounded in curiosity about how things should work if we weren’t so collectively distracted.

Another through-line: you’ve always been a ‘people first, systems second’ thinker, even before you had the language for it. The posts keep circling back to the same tension — humans don’t behave like the tidy diagrams or workflows created to manage them. You poke at corporate theatre, political spin, tech evangelism, and the strange incentives that create distortion instead of coherence. More often than not, you’re tracing the hidden mechanics: the power relationships, the data trails, the business models baked into digital life. There’s a quiet sense of accountability running through it: don’t just look at what a system claims; look at what it rewards.

There’s also a personal arc that floats just beneath the surface. The blog isn’t memoir, but it carries the fingerprints of someone who’s lived enough cycles to spot the patterns early. The tone shifts over time—from early curiosity, to a kind of mid-period frustration, to a more recent strategic clarity. You’ve moved from ‘this is odd’ to ‘here’s the underlying structure’ to ‘and here’s how we might actually fix it.’ The personal reflections act as calibration points, showing how your own lens sharpened while the world got noisier.

And stitched through all of it is the same project you’re running now: trying to build ways of thinking that actually help people navigate complexity instead of collapsing under it. The blog, taken as a whole, is you working that out in public — testing ideas, calling out nonsense, mapping where things go wrong, and nudging toward a more honest, human, future-oriented frame. It’s not a brand play. It’s a long record of someone interrogating the shape of the world and refusing to take shallow explanations at face value.

In the country of New Zealand there continues to be a lot of wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth and even self flagellation over the ‘Kiwi productivity issue’ - working harder and harder every year and somehow falling further and further behind others on ‘the league tables of productive nations’ … what’s to be done?

It’s a question that is constantly asked and answered in posts all over LinkedIN - everyone seems to have an answer - but ‘execution’ remains lacking. I have also attended a few sessions in the past couple of months where the same questions are asked. The same answers emerge The inaction continues.

I have my theories - not least of which is answered by what will be going on in Aotearoa soon - and will continue until Waitangi Day (ask a local). It’s worse - because there is a lead up to the period - already in full flow as the ‘great wind down' begins to kick in.

Apocryphal? Maybe - but some told me recently that in their “28 years in business they had not once received a purchase commitment after October 28th.” .. he didn’t say - but I am guessing “and never before February 6th”.

Doug wrote ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus in 2016’. This quote just popped up in my feed and prompted this post

It’s taking a while to sink in - though it always does ‘down here’.

This in turn reminded of this observation by Alex Pawlowski over in the land of Substack (coincidentally - ‘Hamish’ one of the two co-founders is a Kiwi).

Alex was riffing on AI …

AI has made ideas abundant. You can generate a strategy, a campaign, a business plan in minutes. The new scarcity isn’t insight — it’s implementation. Execution becomes the strategic moat.

I would argue that has always been the case. I’d be a billionaire if I had a dollar for every time I have been told ‘that idea isn’t original - I visualised that years ago’. The correct reply?

They executed.

(A dollar? What happened to cents? Dollars only accepted because the cent is apparently no more.)

That (execution) is what we are not doing. (Broad sweeping generalisation for sure - but in a nation that prides itself with its ‘edge’ - the blade does seem to have become a tad ‘dull’

Having a coffee this week with someone I saw talking about this very problem last week. I know we are on the same ‘thinking’ page - I wonder how we can move the conversation to action - because down here we do seem to be waiting - for everyone else - to make the move.

If you want to red more of my related ramblings on New Zealand - you can do that