That Was The Week That Was — 5th July 2026

It is not the ideas we do not have that block our thinking but the ideas we already have.
— Edward de Bono

This week — after finishing Catch-22 by Joseph Heller — I started reading Edward do Bono's How to Have a Beautiful Mind. I was first introduced to de Bono by my friend Adam Todd many years ago via The Six Thinking Hats which we used in many meetings to great effect back when I was Creative Director of a design agency. Since then I've always been keen to constantly explore different ways of thinking so I can continually improve how I come up with ideas, listen, debate and generally explore the world around me.

One recurring theme or methodology in de Bono's work is asking What if? Creating often absurdist provocations to encourage you to look at an issue or an idea in a completely different way. It's what he calls a Provocation Operation; deliberately outlandish statements designed to shock the brain away from regular patterns. I've always liked that idea and so in the process of creating something in another project I wondered if I could create a system which took the current Zeitgeist of what's happening in the world and create provocations for these themes and get those provocations e-mailed to me in the morning to help my alternative thinking.

So, with the help of Claude Code, we put together such a system — a daily provocation digest. Below is an example of the first tests.

It seemed to work pretty well. It then got me thinking what if it scraped the projects on my website and did similar provocations generated from my work output?

I'll see over the next few weeks if it does help with my thinking, creating interesting, alternative jumping off points for discussion, exploration and debate.