Don't be a Tool
Are You the Composer in the New World of Work, Or Just Another Note?
The world of work is being rewritten in real time. You’re no longer simply choosing a job, you’re choosing your place in a landscape shaped by culture, technology, and creativity colliding at pace.
It’s no longer enough to keep up. You need to decide: are you setting the direction, or just following along? This isn’t abstract it’s a fork in the road.
The Jet Pack Principle
Over the past few weeks I’ve been meeting and chatting with friend Jo Taylor. She runs Glow, a concept studio with a lean set up with a keen edge, built around a unique community of leaders across sport, fashion, culture and business.
For Jo, everything starts with conversation. Glow’s strength lies in the depth of dialogue that keeps this network connected. Humanity, not technology, is always the starting point. As she puts it, “AI is simply a jet pack, a way to accelerate context, verify research, and support frameworks.”
But here’s what that actually looks like in practice. When Jo’s working on a brand strategy project, she doesn’t start with a prompt. She starts with her accumulated knowledge, the patterns she’s noticed across industries, and the conversations she’s had with founders and cultural leaders. That foundation is irreplaceable, then she uses AI to stress-test hypotheses, to rapidly generate variations on a concept, and to cross-reference cultural signals she’s picked up.
The tool amplifies her thinking but doesn’t generate it. She’s not hiding from AI, nor handing it the reins. She treats it as a support act, amplifying her thinking, expanding reach, and sharpening outcomes. She stays firmly in the lead, letting the tools play their part without taking over. That’s what it means to be the composer, not the instrument. The mind behind the music.
The Source, Not the System
This thread came up recently in another conversation with Jammz everything starts with you, not the tool or the system, but it flows through you. The tools are just fuel, amplifiers of your insight, your expertise, and your curiosity.
The way I view it, I don’t exist to serve the tools, they exist to multiply me. That shift in thinking changes everything. You stop looking at AI as a threat or even as a shortcut, and start using it as a way to expand what you already do best or cover what your weakest at - in my case my dyslexia. Your ‘idea’ foundation, and everything else builds on top of that.
But here’s where it gets complicated: not everyone wants to be the composer. And that’s not a failure. Some of the most valuable people in any creative process are brilliant interpreters, people who can take someone else’s vision and execute it with precision, craft, and sensitivity. The session musician who can play any style. The designer who can translate a brief into something better than what was asked for. The strategist who can take scattered thoughts and shape them into coherent direction.
Being a note in someone else’s composition isn’t lesser work. It’s different work and theres a ‘joy’ to be found with that. The question isn’t whether you should always be the composer, it’s whether you’re choosing your role consciously or just defaulting to it.
Where the Quality Flattens
Generative tools are already transforming industries. The people treating them as partners, not replacements, are pulling ahead, and I can imagine soon we’ll all be collaborating with real, co-bot, and software teams all working together, and you may not be able to discern between them. Meanwhile, over-automated experiences and under-invested thinking are leading to a flattening of quality and connection. Too much system, not enough soul - ask Russell about his experience with the Bank of Scotland recently!
You can see this most clearly in content production. Brands/Agencies churning out AI-generated posts that say nothing, and using tools to pump out variations on the same campaign concept without stopping to ask whether any of them are actually interesting. Individuals building entire personal brands on templated thinking, optimised for engagement but empty of perspective.
The work looks professional. It hits the metrics. But it doesn’t land. Because there’s no human decision-making in the gaps, no taste, no resistance to the obvious choice. When everything is frictionless, nothing has texture.
In that context, the question isn’t whether change is coming. It’s already here. The real question is: are you composing that change, or just reacting to it?
Cultural Credibility Over Cultural Output
So, if you’re not building cultural credibility, you’re losing relevance. That applies to people as much as it does to brands.
Cultural credibility now sits at the intersection of authorship, clarity, and values you can actually feel. It’s not about volume of output, it’s about consistency of perspective. People are drawn to multiverses of inspiration, ideas, and beliefs, not just what someone does, but what they stand for.
Look at the cultural leaders who’ve built lasting influence. They don’t simply promote things, they shape how people think about a space. They lead with point of view, not product. Virgil Abloh didn’t just design clothes, he changed the conversation about what luxury could mean. Ava DuVernay doesn’t just make films, she redefines who gets to tell which stories. Their work is inseparable from their perspective.
And that same principle applies to you, regardless of your industry or scale. Are you building something people would follow even if you stopped selling? Are you creating from a place of authorship, or just ticking boxes for short-term relevance?
The Practice of Composing
So where does that leave you? If you’re going to take the composer’s seat, it requires practice. Not in the sense of “take a course, watch a talk,” though those might help, but in the sense of building a daily practice of decision-making, of developing taste, and of knowing when to lean on tools and when to resist them.
For Jo, that means constantly questioning whether the work Glow produces could only have come from Glow. Is it shaped by their specific network, their accumulated conversations, and their understanding of cultural momentum? Or could any studio with the same tools have made it?
That’s the filter. That’s the composer’s discipline. For you, it might mean something different. It might mean protecting time for unstructured thinking before you touch any tool. It might mean building expertise so deep in one area that AI becomes genuinely useful rather than just generative. It might mean developing a signature approach to problems that clients or collaborators recognise as distinctly yours.
Or it might mean choosing, consciously, not to be the composer. Deciding that your value lies in interpretation, execution, and craft. Finding someone whose vision you believe in and helping them realise it with more skill than they could alone. That’s a composition too, just a different kind.
The Ending Writes Itself
I feel the future belongs to those who know which role they’re playing and why. Not everyone needs to write the score. But everyone needs to know whether they’re choosing their part or having it chosen for them.
Like I often say and write about, change is the only constant and the tools will keep evolving. The landscape will keep shifting. What won’t change is the need for human decision-making, for taste, and for the accumulated experience that tells you when something is right even if you can’t articulate why. Choose your role. Then compose it deliberately, note by note, until it sounds like something only you could make.
For deeper exploration of these ideas, Jo Taylor shared this wide ranging conversation that sparked some of the thinking above: