Every significant technological shift in history has come with a version of the same anxiety: what happens to the people who used to do the thing the machine now does?

It’s not a bad question. But it’s the second question. The first one is: what does this change actually make possible?

I’ve been sitting with AI and creative work for a while now as someone who thinks strategically, writes, and illustrates for a living. And what strikes me most isn’t the capability of the tools (though it’s remarkable). It’s how clearly they reveal what was always true: that the craft itself not the point. The thinking is the point.

Design in the broadest sense, designing communications, designing organisations, designing change was never really about the making. It was about the meaning-making. The capacity to look at a complex system and ask: what does this need to become? Who does it need to speak to? What story would shift something?

AI can generate a lot of outputs. It can’t tell you which output matters.

That distinction between production and purpose is becoming the thing of most value. It’s moving us, I think, from an era of individual expertise to something more collective. The designers who will do the most interesting work in the next decade won’t be the ones who are fastest or most technically fluent. They’ll be the ones who can hold the room, ask the right questions, and synthesise across domains.

Curiosity. Purpose. Hope. Those were always the core competencies.
The tools just make it more obvious.

Why I Chose Hope as a Leadership Practice

Last year, our family moved from our beloved village of Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast to Ōtautahi Christchurch, so that my husband could work on the animated feature film Kiri and Lou - an opportunity he couldn’t possibly turn down. I used that year of upheaval to make a transition of my own.

I could see that changes in the economy were going to reshape the world of work, and my industry sits squarely in the crosshairs - vulnerable to both AI and shifting Government spending priorities.

Rather than asking fear-based, scarcity-thinking questions like “what can I do that won’t be automated in two years?” or “what could I retrain for that doesn’t require four more years of study and debt?” - I asked the biggest, most expansive question I could think of:

“How can I make myself of indispensable value to the world?”

In that question, there is hope. There is service. There is alignment. There is honesty.

It felt like something I should have asked myself much earlier - and kept asking. But there is no better time than now to start : )

The answer surprised me: I can bring hope in dark times. I can use everything I know about communication to tell a story I’m not hearing out loud - how to move through this difficult, uncertain moment and arrive, eventually, at the shores of our greatest longing. Because we should be allowed to set that destination as our compass.

As Brandan “BMike” Odums wrote in his well-known mural: “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” So we have to keep wild dreams too.

I have always been an optimistic person. But I’ve also watched my positivity land badly - feeling more like toxic positivity than honest hope. So I had to learn what real hope was. I had to live inside its tutelage.

That, I believe, is what this moment is calling for. Who will be honest and hold hope at the same time? Who will do that work?

I put my hand up - knowing it was my vocation, if not yet my career. And with that, I launched the Hope Dispatch. It is now a year old, and I’ve just developed a new video format so it can be listened to, watched, and enjoyed however suits you.

With a year of hope under my belt, and time spent in the Hope Dojo at Rogue Union honing my Hope-Based Communication practice, I can now offer services that make communications more potent - leading to greater uptake of ideas and, ultimately, greater impact.

Hope-based communication is not lightweight - it is strategy. It’s an evidence-informed approach to leadership in complex, change-heavy environments.

Here’s what I’ve discovered: hope isn’t a soft idea. It’s a practical leadership competency; the capacity to hold realistic challenges and genuine possibility at the same time, to maintain agency when everything feels unstable, and to lead others forward when the path isn’t clear.

Leaders who develop hope as a practice don’t just survive complexity, they navigate it with more clarity, more confidence, and more capacity to bring others with them.

Hope isn’t positive thinking. It’s about building the internal and strategic conditions that make forward movement possible, even when everything around you is shifting.

Sign up to get an almost-weekly dose of hope here.

Here’s something I’ve been rumbling with since the very beginning of the roll out of AI. As we know, the large language models reshaping knowledge work were trained on the internet. Which means they were trained on publicly funded research, on journalism produced by people who weren’t paid enough, on forums where strangers answered each other’s questions for free, on creative work that was shared without expectation of return.

The intellectual commons built these systems, yet the returns are flowing almost entirely to a small number of companies and their shareholders.

This is not a conspiracy, it’s has become a structural reality.
Structural realities, when they become visible, provide us an opportunity to redesign them to serve the public good.

I’m interested in what an AI dividend could look like. So is Sam Altman.
But I don’t want his version. I want our homegrown version, infused with our values and our tikanga. I want genuine reciprocity baked in.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a utopian fantasy, it is a genuine policy question.

If AI is going to compress labour markets (and it is) and if it was built on public intellectual infrastructure (and it was) then that productivity gain should find its way back into the public systems it drew from.

Universal basic income. Retraining and transition support. Investment in the creative and caregiving work that AI will never be able to replicate meaningfully. Climate resilience. Health equity. The underfunded commons.

We’re at the moment (briefly ) when the shape of this transition is still being decided.

The narrative we choose for this technology, what it’s for, who it serves, what obligations come with it, will determine a lot of what comes next.

Better stories drive better systems. This is one that needs telling now, and we are its mouthpiece.

#HumaneTech #AIDividends #DigitalJustice #SystemicReform #HopeBasedComms #PublicInfrastructure #TechForGood

This is not a romantic vision, it is a strategic one.

The problems we’re navigating downunder - the climate transition, housing, the future of work, the health of our waterways, the regeneration of our communities - are the same problems keeping leaders awake all over the world. We just happen to be small enough to move fast, and connected enough across culture and ecosystem to try things that larger nations can’t.

That’s the solutions economy. It’s not a niche aspiration, it’s essentially an economic survival strategy.

The old model - extract, export, repeat - is losing both returns and social licence to operate. The new one looks like this: local problems become local solutions, and local solutions find global markets. Multi-solving becomes the design brief. One investment that moves the needle on carbon, on equity, on jobs, and on health at once. Connected leadership - people who can hold the complexity, speak across sectors, translate kaupapa into strategy - becomes the scarcest and most valuable resource in the room.

At this point, Aotearoa doesn’t lack the ideas or a plethora of ready made solutions. We lack the narrative holding them together.

That’s what I think about a lot at Big Picture Thinking: how the stories we tell about what’s possible shape what we’re willing to try. A scarcity story produces scarcity policy. A solutions story produces something else.

Aotearoa has always punched above its weight when we believed we were doing something worth doing. The question isn’t whether we have the capacity. It’s whether we’re willing to name the ambition clearly enough to organise around it.

I think we are. Check out the manifesto.

BTW - I think everyone should write a manifesto. It is a powerful tool for shaping intention and a great way to force oneself to think deeply and broadly. Plus it’s a fun exercise. What is your burning aspiration for your economy, community, nation?