tony fish

I write about “Decision Making in an Uncertain World”

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking." that’s Joan Didion

I once assumed writing was the tidy part, where you take the thoughts you've already had and arrange them nicely for others (that is a book). It turns out that's backwards for new thinking. I write to find out if my thinking can survive contact with narrative and structure. Sometimes it can. More often, something I was certain about at 9am looks embarrassingly thin by lunch. Ideas that felt sturdy in my head turn out to be held together with wishful thinking and caffeine. It is why I dislike slides, where you can skip over and avoid all the problems in logic.

So often I have to walk away (go to the mountains) and come back weeks later. Something shifts… the idea, something I read, or me. Honestly, I can never tell which.

The struggle, the difficulty, the revision, the giving up and trying again? That's not what gets in the way of writing. That is the writing. It's the irreducibly human bit. An LLM optimises against a loss function. I wrestle with a vaguer, more annoying question: does this actually say what I mean/feel? Often the answer is no, and I have to sit with that, usually while making more coffee.

Start reading: my latest insights on decision making in uncertain times.

This space isn't sponsored. Nobody pays me to write there. The purpose is to work through where value gets created, to articulate opportunities and threats to myself first, before sharing with boards and leadership. I don't ask permission… but often forgiveness. This is just my thinking, pinned down.

Why I Publish

There's a line I keep returning to: You are only rebellious in the eyes of those who cannot control or manipulate you.

Publishing makes control harder. Once ideas exist on a screen [tested, revised, outthere] they're easy to copy but difficult to twist. They become part of the chain, a record. Nobody gets to tell you what you believe when you've already written it down. That's not performance. It's commitment. It fixes thinking in time and space, open to scrutiny. Including my own, which is usually the most uncomfortable kind.

I hope my thinking makes you think.

My articles are the result of careful human work with "machine" assistance for structure and flow. But the thinking, the resistance, the false starts, the staying with something long enough to find words equal to it - well, that part's mine.

Writing trains my attention. Publishing makes it stick.

Everything I do is published under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Free to share and adapt with attribution, for non-commercial purposes, under the same license. Go copy, mix, blend and add ; it is what makes us human.

Author of "Decision Making in Uncertain Times" | Helping leaders navigate complexity with confidence