Gurteen Knowledge Letter: Issue 307 - January 2026

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 307 – January 2026

Welcome to 2026. Another year begins, shaped as much by what we carry forward as by what lies ahead.

Over the past year, much of my writing has centered on a simple idea: that how we talk together shapes how we think, decide, and act.

Again and again, the focus has returned to Conversational Leadership not as a set of techniques, but as a practice rooted in attention, judgment, and care.

What matters is not talking more, but creating conditions where we can think together, notice what is changing, and make sense of situations that resist easy answers.

As the year ahead unfolds, the work feels less about adding new tools and more about deepening this practice, especially in a time of increasing uncertainty, fragmentation, and noise.

1. A Handy Speech to Text Tool
   Effortless speech to text on your computer
   
2. Dave Snowden's Views on AI
   AI can assist our thinking but it shouldn’t replace our judgement
   
3. Anthropomorphising AI, or Misunderstanding Ourselves?
   Reflection on dialogue, meaning, and where human qualities really reside
   
4. Skate to Where the Puck Is Going, Not Where It’s Been
   Hockey as a lived lesson in complexity
   
5. Beyond Optimize and Maximize
   Why machine thinking fails in complexity
   
6. Help Keep My Work Alive
7. Coaching
8. Unsubscribe
9. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

I came across a speech-to-text tool called Handy over the Christmas period. It is simple to install, easy to use, and works exceptionally well. You hold a key, speak, and your words appear wherever your cursor happens to be on your computer screen. No accounts, no setup rituals, no friction. Try it out, I think you will love it.

There is a great deal of hype, noise, misunderstanding, and argument around artificial intelligence, especially generative AI. It will take time to really understand what is going on, to make sense of it, and to see through the myths and general confusion that surrounds it at the moment.

One person who is particularly good at cutting through this fog is Dave Snowden. If you are trying to make better sense of AI, this long conversation, An AI Rant between Dave Snowden and Simon Wardley is well worth listening to.

The video runs for two hours and twenty minutes, and it does wander at times, but there are some real gems in it. If you would like something shorter, take a look at this second video from Dave AI Can Assist Our Thinking But It Shouldn’t Replace Our Judgement

I recently read a Substack post titled "Who are 'we' really?" by Rupert Wegerif, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, and shared it with my friend David Creelman. David drew my attention to a particular line, which prompted me to reflect on it more deeply.

Rupert writes:

People accuse me of anthropomorphising the technology, of projecting human qualities onto what is really just a sophisticated tool. But I think this objection rests on a misunderstanding—not so much of AI, as of ourselves.

What I think Rupert is pointing to is a deeper assumption we often make about what it means to be human. When people worry about anthropomorphising AI, they usually assume that qualities such as understanding, meaning, or thinking live inside individuals as fixed properties. From that perspective, engaging with a technology in conversational terms appears to be a category error, as if we were mistakenly treating a tool as a person.

But there is another way of seeing ourselves. Much of what we call human does not reside neatly within us as individuals. Meaning, understanding, memory, and learning often emerge between us, through language, interaction, and shared attention. Conversation is not something one person does alone. It is something that happens in relationship.

Seen this way, engaging with AI conversationally is not necessarily about projecting humanity onto a machine. It may be about recognising that human thinking has always been shaped by tools, symbols, writing, and shared practices. Dialogue has never been purely internal. It has always been mediated by the ways we think together.

So the question shifts. It is not whether AI is human, but what kind of conversational space is being created, and how that space shapes our thinking and sense-making. In that light, Rupert’s comment feels less like a claim about AI itself and more like an invitation to rethink what we mean by being human in the first place.

I love the hockey metaphor in Jen Briselli's post, Head Up, Feet Moving, especially the way she challenges the familiar “skate to where the puck is going” line. Instead of prediction, the focus shifts to sensing, positioning, and responding from within the play.

Hockey is treated not as a neat analogy but as a lived example of a complex adaptive system, where understanding comes through participation, not analysis from a distance.

What matters is reading possibilities, staying agile, and recognising that our actions help shape what emerges. The post is an excellent introduction to complexity.

In business writing and on LinkedIn, certain words appear with remarkable confidence: minimize, maximize, optimize. They sound sensible, even responsible. But they rest on a quiet assumption that the world behaves like a machine.

In a complex environment, that assumption does not hold.

We cannot meaningfully optimize a complex system. We cannot know that we have maximized output, minimized risk, or optimized performance. There is no stable baseline, no fixed endpoint, and no reliable way of knowing in advance what “best” even means. We can make things better or worse, but only ever provisionally.

This is why the language of “best decisions” is so misleading. As Margaret Heffernan has pointed out, in complex situations, a decision is better understood as a hypothesis. It is an informed guess about how the world might respond. It can only really be evaluated afterwards, once consequences have unfolded.

I explore this perspective more fully in a recent post in my blook, including why this shift in thinking matters far beyond decision-making alone.

For almost 25 years, I've been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I'd be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

Thank you to the 50+ patrons who have already supported me - your generosity means a great deal.

If you're curious about how a more conversational approach might shift the way you work with others, whether in leading, learning, or collaborating, I offer one-to-one coaching tailored to your context.

We explore real challenges and possibilities through dialogue, helping you develop your own way of practicing Conversational Leadership in daily work.

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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom