John PHI⑊PIN

🖋️ A Thought For Every Day

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:56:29 +1200

I hope that the people that throw wisdom, inspiration and support into my world know that they do - but if they are anything like me - they probably do not know.

Some I celebrate in public - others in private - not all of us want to live in this spotlight.
Many live in different time zones - on different continents.
Some have no idea who I am - others have known me for decades.
Some just write something and it penetrates - others have spent hours and days shaping me as a human.

Thank you for helping make me who I am today - for better and/or worse.

Each of. you in some way has opened me to opportunity I couldn’t see alone. Pushed back when I needed pushing. Offered understanding when I was lost. Modelled possibility before I believed it existed. You threw in inspiration and curiosity. You challenged me, questioned me, told me - tell me - hard truth instead of the easy lie - and each of you showed belief in what I was becoming - have become - before I could see it myself.

It is your inspiration that keeps me going - every day - each little stone adding to the story, because it’s not always the big things, it’s the constant reminder of the little things that keep adding up - yet get quietly forgotten.

Thank you.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:43:18 +1200

📺 I just finished watching 🔗 Shining Girls. Most excellent and no idea how I have not seen this before given that it dates back to 2022.

★★★★

🖇️ Review Ratings

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:27:59 +1200

I heard it on Lockhead’s ‘Category Pirates’.

Knowledge is a Commodity - Wisdom is not.

💬 Ray Wang

One of the many reasons why PHI⑊PIN and the Systems of Engagement we build for The Age of Experience uses the DIKIWI framework.

John PHI⑊PIN https://john.philpin.com/2026/06/28/knowledge-is-a-commodity-wisdom.html

The podcast typically works for me - depending on the guest. But they just disappeared down the ‘what the socialists don’t get’ rabbit hole and just totally lost me - so I switched them off. I might try it again later.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:07:25 +1200

Another Johnism from the past that leans into this story.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:05:30 +1200

Knowledge is a Commodity - Wisdom is not.

💬 Ray Wang

One of the many reasons why PHI⑊PIN and the Systems of Engagement we build for The Age of Experience uses the DIKIWI framework.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:58:37 +1200

The Internet has none of those evil things. All of them are layers above. To reinvent the Internet at this point is like to reinvent the Earth. Not a good idea. But reinventing, or turning inside out the assholes that have fucked it up is a good idea.

💬 Doc Searls

🔗 Source - LinkedIN

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:56:17 +1200

🖇️ You Can’t Scale Conviction

Business is still trying to prove Newton works everywhere.

For 300 years, Newton’s rules worked perfectly. Then Einstein broke physics in half. Your marketing systems just hit the same wall.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:56:06 +1200

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who led the 7th Cavalry, lost his entire command to Lakota warriors after falling on them unexpectedly in their own territory. The only army survivor of the battle was a horse, Comanche, who became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot, trotted out draped in ceremonial black for years after the event itself.

💬 Heather Cox Richardson

I watched 🎥 Little Big Man at the time. (In case you are wondering - ★★★★) - but it just occurred to me that at that point the film was about history from 94 years prior.

Today that would be equivalent to watching a movie about an historical event in 1932. Choices would include;

the lowest point in the Great Depression when unemployment was 25% and millions lost their life savings.
the election of Roosevelt.
the beginning of the end of prohibition.
hoover forcibly 🔗📼 emptying vet camps

They all seem a lot closer to present time than Little Big Man did in 1970.

Getting older or history rhyming at a faster pace.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:37:31 +1200

🔗 Learning first AI-d - William Gallagher

So let me focus on that specific thing of new writers being left behind. Forgive me, this is quite a technical point: if you get AI to do your writing for you, why the fuck should I use you? Commission you? Publish you?

➕

I mean it. There is nothing you can do with AI that cannot be done by absolutely every single person else on the planet. So you are demonstrating to me that you are entirely worthless.

Me - sometime between 2016 and 2019. Same principle.

If a nameless wonk on the end of a wire without your qualifications can replace you - it’s on you.

🖋️ You Can't Scale Conviction

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:25:57 +1200

Your email marketing works great - until one customer actually reads it and decides to ignore it. Your ‘data’ says that ‘people in your demographic’ will behave a certain way. Then someone chooses not to.

The challenge is that your campaigns target ‘segments’ - an abstract marketing concept designed to find prospects and sell to them. But you’re actually trying to reach individual humans who don’t fit those segments.

We’ve long understood that our theories around ‘population behaviour’ work fine - for populations. But as you segment down to the ultimate ‘Market of One’¹ - it all falls apart.

This isn’t a new problem. Physics hit it first.

But before Physics could develop the theories, the artists - as usual - were way ahead of their time.

Dostoevsky, James, and Kafka wrote about shattered determinism;
Yeats, Eliot, and Whitman wrote about fragmented truth;
Picasso and the Cubists painted superposition.
They were all describing aspects of the quantum world decades before Einstein had the physics.

And then came the science.

For 300 years, Newton’s rules explained everything we could see. They worked perfectly. The theory was so good that nobody could break it. Until they did. In the early 1900s, Einstein and quantum mechanics arrived. Suddenly we had two completely different sets of rules. One worked for big objects moving through space. The other worked for tiny atoms and particles moving through the ‘Quantum Realm’. Both were right. Neither could explain the other.

At the time - most scientists couldn’t understand what Einstein was hypothesising. But over time we learnt that we had two parallel theories that could co-exist. They didn’t need to merge.

Or do they?² The search became the dream.The search for a Universal Theory to describe both the physical world and the quantum realm became the dream.

Organization Development, Marketing and Business is in the same spot.

By this timeline, business finds itself squarely in the equivalent of the 1900s. The artists have been sensing it. The thinkers have been describing it. But we still have two completely different - and incompatible - theories about how people behave:

Population theory: Everyone acts predictably in groups. We can forecast trends, segment markets, predict behaviour through statistics and demographics. This is the theory that built marketing, sales strategy, and organisational management. It works brilliantly… until it doesn’t.

Individual theory: People have psychology, values, identity, choice. They act from conviction, not from probabilities. A single person can ignore every rule. We have no framework for understanding them - so we build our systems to ignore them entirely.

And given this, there is certainly no unified theory to bridge them.

If there is a parallel - where are the artists?

Plath wrote of ‘the self’ that won’t conform to prediction;
Ginsberg .. an individual consumed by a system that can’t contain him;
Bacon painted distorted figures that refused to stay rational;
Arendt theorised the unpredictable human act as the moment when genuine freedom breaks the system.
They were all describing the same dichotomy: the individual whose conviction shatters every model designed to predict them.

And yet.

My clearest example: Isaac Asimov, who imagined Psychohistory through science fiction. In Foundation, he described the exact moment when individual conviction collapses a population model. He wrote it 70 years ago. We’re still living it.

That’s what’s happening now. For 50 years we built systems based on ‘population’ thinking - marketing segmentation, CRM systems, HR bands, organisational charts, analytics dashboards. All of it assumes people behave predictably in groups. And all that information is stored in ‘Systems of Record’.

And yet, the moment you need to engage with an individual - not as a segment, not as a data point - the system breaks. You can’t apply population rules to a person. And you can’t scale individual rules to a population.

We need a completely different way of thinking about this.

In my models - ‘Systems of Engagement’ are the systems that we need to design , develop and build for this brave new world. Not to replace SoRs - not to cull ‘population’ thinking, but a parallel system that acknowledges individuals operating with agency and conviction.

As to the ‘Unified Theory’? Well, you can’t have that until you have more than one theory to combine.

In my ‘Structured Thought’ models, ‘The Business Equation’/‘People First’ frameworks … the ‘Systems of Engagement’ work in what I call the Age of Experience - where organisations must engage not with segments and data points, but with people. Where conviction and choice matter as much as probability and pattern.

We are building these systems.

Early days. Building on SOR systems but with SOE thinking. Not entirely unlike what Aurea is trying to do - but I wonder if we are on the cusp of the Einstein breakthrough. I really do.

1. The ‘Market of One’ concept emerged in the 1990s through the work of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers and it wasn’t all theoretical. Broadvision, founded by Pehong Chen, attempted to codify their thinking in their software. Too early, perhaps. Broadvision persisted until 2020, when ‘Aurea’ acquired it. (Aurea is on a similar track - look at their acquisitions over time - it’s all hiding in plain sight. Who’s Aurea? Remember Joe Liemandt’s Trilogy software back in the day? Yeah - that Joe Liemandt. Alive and well and still working to join the dots. ↩

2. The Universal Theory hunt has been physics' dream for over a century. But the real insight isn’t that we need one grand theory. It’s that the moment you stop trying to force incompatible systems together, you can actually work with both. Einstein didn’t disprove Newton. He showed us they operate at different scales. Business is still trying to prove Newton works everywhere. ↩

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:55:48 +1200

Like us all, truly sad to read of Om’s passing so early in his life. I have read a lot of writing about him since then. Matt’s is the one that shines.

I’d like to celebrate his life with an awesome event on September 29, 2026 (his 60th) in San Francisco, like an OmFest. I’ll find a space where every community from the many facets of Om can come together … I can’t wait for the beautiful collision of his tech / journalism / Indian party planner / pen / coffee / shoes / photography circles, and probably some niches I couldn’t even imagine.

💬 Matt Mullenweg

🔗 All Roads Lead to Om

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:49:05 +1200

🔗 Establishment Democrats are promising “war”

Establishment Democrats are promising “war” on incoming progressives and Democratic socialists. When they said “vote blue no matter who,” they were lying. So-called centrist Democrats are more loyal to the establishment than they are to their constituents. These establishment sellouts are willing to work with the Grandpa Puddingbrains and his fascist supporters to protect their oligarch masters.

💬 Mitch Wagner

.. and come Christmas the Dems will wonder why they lost.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:46:56 +1200

🔗 No, jailbreaking your phone isn’t.

Apple — which now advocates criminalizing jailbreaking — was “literally founded on theft," writes Cory Doctorow.

💬 Mitch Wagner

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:46:10 +1200

🔗 Micro.blog News

There are many unused accounts in Micro.blog. Some people just didn’t get around to blogging, and some potential spammers who created accounts but couldn’t post. We plan to slowly delete these old accounts to make things faster for active users.

@manton - personally I see this as a really good idea. Particularly if it enhances speed fr the current community. Wondering how this sits with your declaration that:

This is why on Micro.blog when you stop paying, we keep hosting your blog indefinitely.

I am presuming no posts = no blog = delete?

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:37:22 +1200

🔗 Ranked: America’s Best-Selling Albums Ever

I have questions.

The Wall outsold Dark Side in America? Apparently - yes.
Dark Side not even on the list - despite by anything I look up - it should be somewhere around ‘Rumours’.
Dark Side globally sits around 4th or 5th on reported AND certified lists.
Should ‘greatest hits’ albums be included?

.. and so much more

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:01:21 +1200

👁️ Unintended Consequences

Saturday night’s match in Kansas City should be a showdown for second place in the group and automatic qualification to the knockout rounds, except the catch is that it may be more beneficial for Austria or Algeria to finish in third. Eight of 12 third-place teams in group play advance to the knockout stage. And the Round of 32 draw potentially appears more favorable for a third-place qualifier from Group J than for its runner-up.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:03:00 +1200

💬

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:44:39 +1200

👁️ Tomorrow will be my 60th ‘Crucial Post’. The day after will be 2 months. The intention is to stop the ‘daily’ on one of those two dates - I just wanted to get an initial foundation in place and then fall back to an ‘as and when’ cadence. 60 Days - or 2 Months. Which will it be❓

Crucial Track 🎵 June 28, 2026

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:32:09 +1200

"Prove It" by Television

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They did.

Reminded of Tom today when I read that his collection of 4.000 vinyls were being sold at auction.

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Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:15:47 +1200

📺 Watched 🔗 I Will Find You. Said it before, say it again - Harlan does bad, good and great shows based on his books. This one easily sits in a ‘3’ and at times hit ‘4’. All the usual twists and turns - including the big one at the end. Like he does.

★★★ in the end.

🖇️ Review Ratings

The Boston Consulting Group Isn’t Wrong

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:41:05 +1200

Every system you own makes a fundamental assumption about you: that you’re predictable. The question your organisation never asks is whether the next generation should make the same assumption.

That’s the difference between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement. Same systems. Same technology. Different thinking about what they’re for.

For two years I’ve been writing about this distinction. It’s not a technology story. It’s a thinking story.

Same systems. Same technology.
Different thinking about what they’re for.

This is what Human By Design is about. Not building new systems but rather changing how we think about the ones we’ve already built, designing for the future and making space for people to be unpredictable, to surprise, to lead.

Even today, organisations choose the first path. They record history. They extrapolate. They execute. And that is rarely questioned because people don’t realise that there is a choice.

In the ‘Age of Engagement’ choosing wrong is catastrophic.

The Misunderstanding

Mention the need for ‘Systems of Engagement’ and people hear ‘CRM’, ‘triggered emails’, ‘personalisation engines’ et al - and assume they’re covered.

They are not.

CRM is a loaded euphemism. It sounds like relationship management because that is the pitch. The fact is your CRM is fundamentally for ‘Customer Records Management’ - it records data.

The system ‘knows’ you, but it (and the organisation) ‘doesn’t understand you’.

And we never stop to think about it. Muscle memory, autopilot, sleepwalking - whatever you call it - our thinking and questioning goes out the window. Context gets lost.

The system knows you. The organisation doesn’t understand you.

What they’re actually describing (though they use the language of engagement) are ‘Systems of Record’. Still based on history. Still optimised for prediction. Still assuming the next action is predetermined by the last one.

The thinking didn’t shift. Only the deployment. The governance model is identical. The control architecture is identical. They’ve just repackaged the same operating model in shinier language.

Boston Consulting Group

This weekend a friend sent me Part 3 of an ongoing BCG series: ‘The Science Behind Next-Best Action Programs’1

It was new to me, but given who sent it, I read it. Turns out this is the third of three papers, with two more to come. It was very clear why they thought I needed to read this.

BCG are describing a different approach to how systems work. Coming at it from architecture and technology. The infrastructure required to support what they call the ‘agentic era’. They’re right about the problem.

BCG is primarily describing the path to technical implementation. The real work seems to be buried.

Which means they’re missing the real gap. You can have the most elegant three-layer stack in the world. If your organisation can’t articulate what it actually believes, if your leadership hasn’t made the operating model explicit, if you haven’t aligned on what responsiveness means. Then you’ve just built a very fast machine that amplifies confusion at scale.

You don’t need AI to amplify confusion. You need thinking to cure it.

One Problem. Two Lenses.

Both are describing Systems of Engagement. BCG describes the technical architecture, the systems. PHI⑊PIN describes the underlying philosophy that makes the architecture worth building.

BCG’s three-layer stack (propensity scoring, contextual bandits, foundation model agents) only works if the thinking underneath it is sound. If you don’t know what your organisation actually stands for, if you haven’t made your operating model explicit, if you haven’t aligned on what responsiveness means, then the most elegant architecture amplifies confusion at scale.

BCG gives you the how. PHI⑊PIN starts with the thinking that determines whether the how actually serves your organisation.

This is why organisations burn through AI budgets and see nothing. Action without thinking has been the problem for decades. You don’t need AI to amplify it; you need thinking to cure it. The smartest companies in the world are discovering this the hard way. They build capability without clarity. They deploy without conviction. Then they wonder why the system works beautifully but the organisation is confused.

This isn’t new. It’s as old as business itself. But now you can do it at scale, at speed, with the ‘confidence’ that the problem is the tool and not the thinking.

BCG has published three of five papers. Two more are coming and I think that this is where the rubber will meet the road. The architecture is elegant. The ‘science works’. BUT - architecture without coherence is just very fast confusion.

Let me not attempt to predict. When I read them I will return with part two.

Why Humans Break Every Pattern

Jacob Collier made a point about why humans are better than AI.

The best people are unpredictable. They catch the zeitgeist precisely because they don’t follow a script. Not even their own.

The Population Problem

Systems of Record assume predictability. They build models on historical behaviour and extrapolate. They’re fundamentally designed to assume tomorrow looks like yesterday. I won’t get into the emerging ‘prediction market category’ but in many ways, it’s doubling down on the SOR approach. Humans are assumed to be predictable.

If you read Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy - pay close attention to Hari Seldon’s core insight. Psychohistory works. It’s elegant, powerful, mathematically sound. But it only works at the population level. It predicts the behaviour of masses, trends, civilisations. The moment an individual acts from conviction rather than pattern. The moment someone surprises. The entire prediction collapses.

That’s the gap between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement. SOR assumes the system works on individuals the way psychohistory works on populations. Predictable inputs produce predetermined outputs. Scale the pattern. Automate the response.

But humans aren’t populations. They’re individuals. And the ones who matter most are the ones willing to surprise.

Systems of Engagement assume unpredictability. They don’t predict what humans will do. They create conditions for humans to do surprising things and learn from it.

Systems of Record assume you’re predictable.
Systems of Engagement assume unpredictability.

The playing field doesn’t level because we built a bigger machine. It levels because we rethought the problem.

BCG will publish two more papers. I’ll read them. And I expect the architecture will get more elegant still. But elegance is not the bottleneck. Clarity and conviction are. The willingness to ask what your organisation actually believes before you ask what your system should do next.

That’s the work. It was always the work.

The conversations are happening. The commitments are real. If you’re sensing this and already asking these questions, then you don’t need a better system - yet. You need a clearer answer to a simpler one: what are you actually trying to do?

That’s where we start.

Better Call John

Silvio Palumbo, Yun Lim, Nabeel Siddiqi, Mark Abraham, Karl Johnson.
May/June 2026 - Boston Consulting Group.

Crucial Track 🎵 June 27, 2026

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:37:49 +1200

"America Is Waiting" by Brian Eno & David Byrne

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Two of the masters delivering a master

The video is well worth a watch aswell.

📼🔗 America Is Waiting

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Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:52:03 +1200

The distance between deciding and doing is the single most reliable predictor of whether your life will be extraordinary or ordinary. Not talent, not circumstances, not even the quality of your decisions-but how quickly you collapse the space between intention and reality. Think of this gap as a kind of friction coefficient on your existence: the smaller it is, the more of your internal force actually translates into external motion. When you can move from “I should do this” to physically doing it within hours instead of weeks, you’re not just accomplishing more-you’re operating in a fundamentally different mode of being where your thoughts have immediate consequences in the world, where your inner life and outer life are in a constant, tight, conversation.

💬 Derek Sivers

… via 🔗 Swiss Miss via 🔗 Instagram

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:48:36 +1200

🎥 I touched on this in an 🖇️ earlier post. 🔗 Outcome … Yeah … Nah Nah Nah.

I have tried it. Final effort was earlier tonight. Sorry Keanu … ★

🖇️ Review Ratings

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:40:13 +1200

Earlier I wrote 🖇️ this - after reading 🔗 this from Alex Hyett who in turn referenced 🔗 this from Brennan Day. It all came after seeing a post in my feeds from 🔗 Ton Zylstra

💡**I was Inspired. **

If you are keeping up, you will know that I have been wrestling with Web Mentions off and on for nigh on 8❓years.

Q - can that really be right?

A - apparently yes according to Mars Edit ….

As of today - no longer. I am ready and able to receive web mentions.

Now - a little like Alex - I need proof - so here I am.

I’m also just a guy, standing in front of the internet, asking it to show him.