Facilitator, researcher, and intensive AI user

For more than two decades, I have been designing conversations that help organisations move from good intentions to meaningful action. From boardrooms and hospital auditoriums to international summits, I create dialogue spaces where complex ideas become shared direction, trusted relationships, and lasting impact.

My approach was shaped during my doctoral research at Lancaster University, where I earned a PhD in Management Science. There I discovered Soft Systems Methodology — a framework for navigating complexity that continues to inform how I reflect, reframe, and move forward with clarity.

When AI tools became genuinely capable — around 2022, 2023 — I adopted them enthusiastically. I use Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a handful of others every day. They've made me faster, broader, and in some ways more creative. But I also started noticing things.

My attention span felt shorter. I was sleeping less well. I had a vague sense that some of my thinking was being outsourced in ways I hadn't consciously chosen. As someone who has spent a career helping people think together more clearly, I found this unsettling — and worth investigating.

Brain Hygiene is my attempt to investigate it honestly, without anti-AI alarmism and without uncritical enthusiasm. I write for experienced professionals who are curious about these tools but also a little wary. People who want to use AI well, not just use it more.

That curiosity began with my own brain, but it is increasingly connecting with an older professional question. For more than two decades I have studied and practised what helps groups think together: how participation, space, process and shared memory shape the quality of a conversation. Brain Hygiene is where I explore the individual side of the same puzzle. What conditions help us think well — alone and together — when AI can answer, draft, record and remember almost instantly?