Organisational

Rubens designed the major works, established the compositional framework, and reviewed his apprentices' execution. Van Dyck eventually forked the codebase, established his own studio, and surpassed Rubens in the field he chose. Git, the version control system underpinning most of the world's software, formalises exactly this: a master repository, branches, independent lines of work, the ability to merge or to diverge permanently.

Just about every senior leader has already decided to adopt AI. The all understand the risks of not doing, and a large proportion of them understand the risks of doing so. The question some aren't asking is what happens when one of the risks becomes real, and whether they can recover from it.

Developing concepts with Claude means understanding how Gen AI works and working with it's limitations. During an exploratory workflow today I ask it several questions as starting points to develop the nucleus of a concept. It came back with systems logic: structure, audience, constraints, examples. I told it the thinking would emerge from exploration instead. The AI pushed back. We went sideways anyway.

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.