Starting 2026
As we entered the second week of 2026, I sent a note to my team. I’m sharing it here, largely as written, because it reflects how I’m thinking about work, technology, and time as the year begins.
Hello, 2026.
If you’re like me, you have some app that mines your photo library and surfaces past experiences. The older you get, the more you get.
On this day…
Januarys of the past…
Magical sunsets…
As sleet hits the window on a dark Sunday morning, I am served "At the beach over the years." Thanks, Google Photos. Thanks.
Sometimes, the notifications are plainly wrong. Every January 4th I get served pictures of “the gang all together” or “rousing times”—the system doesn’t know it was school friends at a funeral, ten years past. Or “culinary delights,” which were not.
But more often than not, these small nudges do something quietly effective. They surface moments I had forgotten. They compress time. They remind me how quickly years stack up, and how little perspective we have while we’re inside them. Days are long; years are short.
I think now of these reminders as an allegory for work, for the time we’re in, and for the year we’ve just finished.
The technology itself isn’t the point. What matters is the content. Every image came from a person. Every memory is anchored in something that happened: time spent together, care, conversation, effort, beauty, frustration, pride. The system that surfaces the memory doesn’t create meaning. It reflects it back, sometimes imperfectly, using whatever human experience we gave it to work with. However sophisticated it becomes, it has nothing without us.
Last year was full. Demanding. At times relentless (for me, in a very different way than the pandemic). We worked across distance and complexity, tried new tools, moved quickly, and delivered for clients who were themselves navigating unfamiliar ground. None of that will surprise anyone reading this.
All of it unfolded against a backdrop of uncertainty—economic, political, geopolitical—that has felt closer to home and impossible to ignore as 2026 begins.
What stands out to me, looking back, isn’t the volume of work or the technical difficulty of it. It’s the way the work held together. The way people showed up for one another and for our clients. The moments where pride was earned. The way ideas improved through debate and curiosity. The way collaboration and focus made speed possible without flattening the work into pablum or automated at the expense of judgment.
The moments that worked best were the ones where connection was present—between people, between ideas, between intent and execution, and between dots that were otherwise far apart.
Which brings me back to those photo reminders.
Just as those reminders work only because of what they contain, our best work isn’t about the formula alone (though we need process), or the tools alone (though we focus daily on AI innovation), or anything that can be fully offloaded to a system. The tools matter. The infrastructure matters. But they only reflect what we put into them. This is a time to keep this top of mind.
At some point—five years from now, seven years from now—a tool will prompt a look back at this period.
Early 2026…
Laughing with friends…
You at whiteboards…
The software will do its part, even better than it does today. The more interesting question is what part we will have played in what gets remembered. What will this year look like in hindsight? What will we have filled the system with?
As 2026 begins, that feels like a useful thing to hold lightly in mind. Not as pressure. Not as performance. Just as awareness. What we do this year—how we work together, where we put our attention, how we treat complexity, whether our energy lifts up or holds back—accumulates quietly and eventually tells a story.
That story starts in January.
That feels like a good place to begin.
“Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” --George Saunders.
“This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done.” --Joseph Campbell
"It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.” --Patti Smith, and my favourite quote.
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