Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
In today’s highly personal newsletter, everyone’s favorite writer, Claire Strickett, returns to talk about decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, the ways in which we fool ourselves, and what made a wine book author give up drinking.
Now accepting keynotes for 24Q4-25Q2
Every year for the last decade or so, I have created three main presentation decks. For 2025, however, I have (for the first time) added a fourth due to popular demand. They are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn change into a competitive advantage. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Leadership in a Time of Change: How to steer an organization through a sea of uncertainty. (Executive audiences only.)
Resilient Retail: How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2025 follow-up to the highly praised 2022 white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
Artificial Intelligence Beyond the Hype: How to understand the narratives, risks, opportunities, and best uses of a new technology.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
So, it turned out that the sniffles were Covid. I spent the weekend floored, and am still feeling the aftershocks. The rest of the family, thank Jebus, have been completely unaffected (or at least asymptomatic).
Meanwhile, as if the fevers were not providing enough warmth, Sweden entered into a historic heatwave this week, with temperatures surpassing 30 degrees C (86 F). Global warming deniers have no idea why.
Interesting to see the US financial market at the moment. Since the conventional models have stopped working (almost as if the economy indeed is complex, eh?), bankers are overreacting to pretty much every published report. In the coming weeks, we will see job figures (today), inflation data (next week), and the Fed’s interest rate decision on September 18. Expect swings accordingly.
Maybe we should have a chapter in the new book on adaptive finance (we will not, but the principles that we discuss also apply there). Clearly there are a lot of people in a lot of industries who do not know what to do at the moment.
Speaking of complexity, once the guest writing season is over for the year, it will be our first big theme. I have previously published guides and introductions, but I feel the time is as good as any to go into the details and blow some minds.
And I mean that. Without so much as a drop of hyperbole, I genuinely believe that explaining complexity properly will change perspectives - not just on strategy, management, and operations, but life in general. It certainly changed mine. Fundamentally so.
Moving on.
JP’s note: today’s guest writer, Claire Strickett, is one of my favorite people in marketing and advertising. In fact, she is probably one of my favorite people anywhere. A brilliant strategic mind, certainly, but her talents go far beyond our usually trodden lands: she has, for example, also written a universally adored book on wine and food called Which Wine When: What to Drink with the Food You Love (I thoroughly recommend it). In today’s highly personal and intimate newsletter, she writes about giving up drinking - and the feelings that came with it.
In the interest of honesty and transparency, I had originally intended her newsletter to be the first of the new season, that is to say, a premium subscriber exclusive (remember, the new schedule will be three paid newsletters followed by one free-for-all). However, the topic that she touches upon is such an important one that I am making it available for everyone.
The Wine Drinker Who Accidentally Gave Up Drinking
This May, I passed a wonderful month. I went to Paris to see Taylor Swift - and consume a lot of Burgundy - with friends. I spent a week in Greece, passing every evening in a taverna with a carafe of something local and ever so easy to drink. Then, to round the month off, a dear friend’s 40th birthday weekend, full of love and creativity, including the signature cocktails that everyone brought and served. There were 35 of us, which meant a lot of cocktails. As June came along, I was tired, happy, and very conscious of what a boozy previous month it had been – far, far beyond what I am used to. So I decided, somewhat begrudgingly, to give my liver the next one off.
I may have written a book about wine, but I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been a big drinker. Not by British standards, anyway; I never drink what one might call habitually. So I’ve never felt the need to do Dry January, or commit to lay off the sauce for any particular period. I can go days without a drink if no occasions present themselves, so it had never felt necessary. But now it really did. I needed a break. So I diligently counted out four weeks, and marked my calendar on the date when I would let myself have my next drink – in triumphant capital letters, no less, fully expecting that I’d find myself counting down the days, struggling to make it through the weeks without missing a habit that, while not problematic, had been a feature of my life since I was 16.
The days passed, but I didn’t count them off. I didn’t even think about it, other than to realise that I wasn’t thinking about it. When that calendar entry finally popped up, giving me permission to have my first drink in a month, I didn’t feel any of the relief and jubilation I’d expected to feel when I marked my diary. The day came, and passed, and I felt no desire to have a drink. So did more days. And weeks. And months.
Maybe the day will come when I really, really want a drink (and not just the non-alcoholic beers that I do crave, and enjoy – the real thing). But so far, it just … hasn’t. I’ve had a glass of champagne at a wedding, because, well, weddings. I had a night of drinks during a holiday as an experiment, and then realised I had enjoyed all the nights I hadn’t drunk – and the following days – much more. So I’ve stuck to it, more or less, and now it’s September.
It's strange when something that you’ve always thought of as part of your identity falls away. Even stranger, perhaps, when you choose to put it aside yourself - or, in this case, do so accidentally. I’ve felt a bit sheepish telling people that I don’t drink any more, when I’m so used to being “the person who knows about wine” among my friends and colleagues. They’re not wrong, exactly, but it’s just much less relevant. And it’s strange (and pleasant) to realize I still have the capacity to surprise myself; to learn something about myself.
Firstly, and perhaps most predictably, I learned that I feel less anxious, less tired, more focused, when I’m not drinking - even though I didn’t drink very much to start with. I learned that I don’t actually like the feeling of being drunk: that I like my mind the way it is. Or certainly, that I like it more the way it is than under the effects of alcohol. The worries I had about awkward social events, FOMO and the rest all failed to materialize. But there have been countless excellent books and articles written on this subject, to which I can add very little, and this is not intended to be an essay about the joys of sobriety.
Secondly, and more importantly, this experience has been a compelling reminder for me of something that can feel paradoxical: namely, that it can sometimes be much harder to make a decision than to live with the consequences of that decision.
The opposite has always been clear to me, and even been a source of anxiety; that decisions we make lightly, or even unthinkingly, can have consequences that hit us hard, far harder than we had anticipated. As someone with, shall we say, something of a tendance to overthink, this can lead me to fret over decisions, hoping to stave off the risk of a careless choice, and the horrible things that might unfold if I choose wrongly - as if the state of anxiety now could act as a sort of amulet that, in itself, would protect me against suffering later.
But I hadn’t reflected much, if at all, until now, on the opposite possibility – that a decision which might feel very hard to lean into, precisely because we anticipate that its consequences will be difficult to endure, might not feel at all hard to live with once we’ve made it.
Of course, there’s a third category of decision - those which are hard to make, and hard to live with – as well as the category of easy decisions that come with no challenging consequences at all. One of the many irritating things about the human condition is that we often can’t tell which sort of decision we find ourselves facing into at any one time.
Yet it has been liberating to remember that these sorts of decisions most certainly exist – the decisions that we fear, whose consequences we wince at, and yet which turn out to be nothing but sweet. I may no longer have Dutch courage to lean on, but the experience of accidentally giving up drinking has given me a new kind of courage to face what I fear.
So, in summary:
Habits and instincts are easy to confuse, but it is powerful to learn to differentiate between them. I thought I liked drinking, but when I actually listened to my mind and body, my instincts told me that it had only been habit that had kept me doing it all along. I’ll be on the lookout now for more instances in life where I might be confusing the two.
Your brain is not a clairvoyant, and the concern you feel about making a decision might be as much about ego or anxiety as it might the actual consequences or future experience of that choice and its outcome. In fact, the two might be entirely at odds. If this gives you more encouragement to embrace what feels challenging, this will have been well worth the time it’s taken to read.
Guinness Zero is a triumph of modern science.
Zero alcohol beers are amazing these days, yes. 🙌