I’ve been hybrid for longer than I knew what to call it.

One of my first real job titles actually had the word in it.

At the time, it mostly meant I worked across different kinds of media.

It turned out to be a pretty good description of the next twenty years.

I moved through communications, media, digital, strategy, product, client solutions, insights and performance. Not in a particularly elegant straight line. The work kept expanding because the questions kept getting bigger.

And, eventually:

Why are all of these things being treated as separate problems?

That last question has caused me a considerable amount of trouble.

I like finding connections between things that aren't organized to connect. Data and a story. Media and an experience. A customer complaint and a business model. Something one person remembers and something another system can prove.

I particularly like the point where a complicated problem stops being abstract and becomes something you can actually see, test, argue with or make better.

For most of my career, that happened through teams.

I have spent a lot of time around people with very different specialties, personalities and ways of seeing the world. Managing them taught me something I still believe: the intelligence of a good team is not simply the sum of everybody's expertise.

A lot of it exists between them.

That probably explains my fascination with what happened next.

Artificial intelligence arrived in my working life first as another tool.

I didn't stay interested in it as a tool for very long.

I became interested in what happened when different forms of intelligence could work together.

Today, I spend a significant amount of my time inside a system I call the Foundry.

It isn't one model.

It isn't really an AI assistant either.

It is a working environment made from people, models, tools, accumulated knowledge and a growing set of practices for deciding which of them should be involved in a problem—and when.

Different models have different jobs.

One may be useful for building. Another for research. Another for criticism. Another for seeing something the others missed. Some operate comfortably inside the enterprise. Others are useful precisely because they sit outside it.

They disagree.

I like that.

The objective isn't consensus. And it certainly isn't to remove the human from the equation.

The objective is better judgment.

That work has pulled me into some unexpected places.

I now spend time thinking about agents, evaluation, knowledge architecture, code, interfaces, organizational memory, research systems, measurement, visual design, governance, publishing, motion, images and the peculiar mechanics involved in getting an idea all the way from interesting to real.

Depending on the day, I might be studying a competitive signal, building a website, arguing with several models about an assumption, designing a measurement system, writing something, making an image, testing an interaction, or trying to understand why a group of humans behaves differently after its tools change.

I don't consider myself an expert in all of those things.

I have become increasingly comfortable being the person who wanders between them.

Maybe that's what strategy became for me.

Or maybe strategy was always that.

I still care enormously about people.

Probably more than the technology.

I'm interested in what people notice. What they remember. What makes them change their minds. Why good teams work. Why others don't. What happens when someone's capability suddenly expands. And what organizations should preserve when the way work gets done begins changing underneath them.

I also like making things.

That's an important distinction.

I learn differently once an idea has to survive contact with reality.

This site is still becoming the place where that work can live.

Over time, it will hold essays, PDFs, videos, films, experiments, paintings, interfaces, observations, systems and probably a few things that resist classification.

I'm assembling it as the work is finished—not manufacturing the appearance of a complete archive before one exists.

Some things will arrive resolved.

Some will be evidence.

Some will be questions I'm still carrying around.

As it grows, I think the collection will become a better explanation of me than a list of jobs ever could.

The jobs are elsewhere on the internet anyway.