Embrace brand, performance and the future of creative work with James Hurman

For those who have followed Zoe Scaman on LinkedIn, she stands out not only for her intelligence, but her refreshing honesty. She exudes someone who has spent a career refining who she is and how she thinks. In this session, she showed us her working.

The topic of her talk was “The Whetstone” - the name perfectly encapsulates a competitive advantage that starts with mapping out our own practice. Not easy, but we left feeling it’s a rewarding journey to undertake. As she says, a sharper blade cuts further.

And that is what choosing the Whetstone path is really about. It’s a decision to use AI not to do the work for you, but to sharpen your mind. While many people are still using AI for efficiency, Zoe offered the perspective of levelling up. She uses AI to map her unique thinking processes and continues to sharpen as she sharpens. The journey of self-discovery that it takes to get there involves extracting tacit knowledge you’ve built up over a lifetime, but often can’t articulate.

Over the course of our careers, many of us have learned how to become an arbiter of our own taste. How to form our own distinct views. How to define and sharpen our personal brand. Our creative industry isn’t one you can simply learn out of a textbook. It has always been about tapping into the unique strengths and experiences that give us our own way of seeing the world and the challenges in front of us.

Zoe’s map of tacit knowledge will look different to each of ours. It was fascinating to hear how she holds a mirror up to the different experiences that make her think the way she does today. It’s not something you or I can simply copy and paste. That is the beauty of the human, unpredictable paths we have all taken.

Zoe’s advice is simple. Go on a walk. Get introspective. Map out the things that make your thinking different. Then use AI to help you extract the things you can’t put into words. Ask it to make you react and give your opinion. Do the hard work to put those indescribable strengths into codified thinking that you can continue to shape. It is not a one and done exercise. Our daily experiences will continue to change our viewpoint.

This is exactly why Springboards exists. In a world where unique perspectives are being whittled away to a sea of sameness, this is the work worth doing. We built a tool that takes on the tension between creativity and the pattern prediction of AI.

When you bring your own map of tacit knowledge into a session, you start to use AI in ways that do not feel like a path to average. It was a breath of fresh air to think that we can continue to defend the quirks of our humanity that lead to unexpected, creative thinking.

Most surface-level AI output isn’t wrong. It’s just dull. It will get you through the day, but it won’t cut through. Zoe’s point is that sharpness is still a choice. You either use these tools to smooth your edges, or you use them to find them and refine them. In choosing the Whetstone path, you’re protecting the most important creative differentiator you have, yourself.

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Up next: James Hurman

Join us May 28 @ 8:00 NZST with James Hurman for his "Future Demand" masterclass uncovering why marketing to tomorrow’s customers will break your brand out of the performance trap.

James will reveal why so many brands have optimised themselves onto a growth plateau, and share the evidence-based way out. Drawing on decades of global research, he’ll show what brands can do to create profitable growth that scales.

This session proposes a new mental model for marketing, built on how markets really work, how humans really make decisions, and how advertising really creates sales. Sign up today.

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We never planned to launch a tech startup. But when my partner Pip and I were laid off within three weeks of each other, we needed to back ourselves. It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned more in the last three years than in the first decade of my career.

Up until that point, my career had been pretty well mapped out. I started in Sydney media agencies learning the industry and then landed a job at a creative agency in San Francisco, which almost inevitably led to jobs in the tech sector at Twitter and then Shopify. Pip’s journey was very similar, but substitute tech for creative agency land and a Web3 company (remember those?).

COVID hit and we decided to move back to Australia - Noosa in fact - and we were able to work our roles remotely from there for a while. Then, in mid-2022, the music stopped very suddenly for us both and we had some choices to make.

We began consulting remotely from Noosa and started using in earnest some of the new AI tools which were emerging on the market at the time. It all felt like a kind of magic, but too often we were finding that the end result was generic and disappointing and we knew there had to be more they could do for us.

So we taught ourselves to code so we could engineer them to be fit for the work we were doing and give us the output we were looking for. We presented the first MVP version at a conference in Sydney just to demonstrate the potential - what we didn’t expect was people’s immediate reaction in asking how they could buy it, invest in the company or partner with us there and then.

We left that room with 50 people willing to pay to beta test a product that didn't yet exist but the knowledge we were really onto something. We brought in Kieran, our technical co-founder, and gave him four weeks to build it properly. No pressure!

That's how Springboards started. Not with a vision statement or a pitch deck, but with redundancy, curiosity and a deadline we'd created for ourselves before we were ready for one.

I tell that story because everything I've learned about collaboration, ambition and what it actually takes to build something came from the particular kind feeling that we were really onto something and the energy that is generated when you’re feeling inspired.

Taking off the mask

Corporate America is fairly performative. It can be fast paced and invigorating, but there’s always a lot of internal politics to navigate and egos to stroke. I learned quite quickly I needed a work version of myself to help navigate that environment.  

But when your co-founder is also your life partner, there's no work version of you to present. No polished front, no selective disclosure. Pip has seen every version of my thinking including the terrible ideas, the half-formed ones and the ones I was confident about at 11pm that I quietly abandoned by morning.

That's confronting at first because there’s nothing to hide behind - you’re totally exposed. It's the things that make you more creative. You can diverge and converge in a really natural and safe way that feels intuitive to the vision.

We can challenge each other without ego in the way. We can say "that's not working" without it requiring a meeting. And when the great ideas do spring forth it also means there is no friction or ego to manage, we trust each other wholeheartedly to just run hard at it.

We can also, genuinely, call it when one of us is being the problem rather than solving it.

External perspective

That last one is harder than it sounds, both professionally and personally. Knowing when to step back, when your idea isn't the right one, when you're blocking rather than building and being able to do that without taking it personally is probably the most important skill we've developed.

What makes it work is having a third co-founder who has nothing to do with our relationship. Kieran is the person we can go to when Pip and I have genuinely opposing views. He's measured, external to our dynamic, and willing to pressure-test the thinking without the noise of two people who also happen to share a mortgage and daycare pickups.

Every partnership needs a version of that: someone who sits outside the gravity of the relationship and can give trusted guidance or bring the temperature down.

Balance is about being realistic

The other thing I've stopped pretending about is boundaries.

Our worlds are completely intertwined - an early-stage startup, two young kids, constant decision-making - some weeks "switching off" is a fiction. What we've found works better than strict separation is integration: being genuinely aligned on what matters, having honest conversations about what needs doing and who's best placed to do it and recognising when the conversation needs to stop because it's not useful anymore.

Our potential is far greater than we typically give ourselves credit for and you can’t have everything at once. Both of those things are true at the same time and sitting with that tension honestly is part of what building something real requires.

We invested everything into this. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, there was no big  upfront conversation about what happens if this fails or if we’re willing to back each other - that was something we both knew coming into this, and still do.

It’s important to have that psychological safety to know this one, very important, part of your lives won’t bring down the other more important part - that creates the freedom to make bold decisions day to day.

Taking your place at the table and building better

Building in AI has meant spending time in a lot of rooms where I'm the only woman at the table. What's shifted for me isn't volume or presence in any performed sense, it's conviction. When you believe in what you're building and you know it matters, you stop needing permission to be in the conversation.

We've also been deliberate about the company we're creating: around 70% of our leadership team are women and most senior roles are held by women. In a space where AI tools are being built to influence how people think and create, who's in the room when those decisions get made is not a secondary consideration - it's the work.

International Women's Day tends to celebrate the moment of stepping forward. What gets less attention is the architecture underneath - the trust, the honesty, the people who will still be there if it goes sideways.

That trust removes more friction than any strategy document I've ever written - although to be clear, we do now have a very robust plan and roadmap as well as a fantastic team driving things forward with us.

The village matters, the honest conversations matter and the willingness to be genuinely okay with all versions of the outcome is what makes the bravery possible in the first place.

What I have very much realised is startups are like children - you can read all the books and guides on what to do and what to expect, but the only way to actually make them thrive is to be guided by what’s in front of you, trust your gut instinct and your own expertise in what you’re building.

Ultimately, you’ve got to run your own race the best way you see fit and lean into the support around you.

How do you define creativity?

It sounds overly simple, but expression at its purest. The way only you see the world and the weird way in which you decide to express that. That can be in music or art or math or a silly little pitch deck or in the song you make up to sing to your dog.

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Is AI a friend or a foe?

Neither - that gives it way too much power. Practically speaking, at a systems level, AI is going to raise the floor, but it's also going to lower the ceiling. I saw Chris Anderson from Wired do a talk in the early days of Maker culture mania. He likened the era to early internetting and Geocities. There's going to be a lot of shit until it gets really good. And then it's going to get intrusively spectacular. And then it's going to be frictionlessly and technically excellent that we don't notice it. When AI is no longer THE thing, I look forward to what things we can actually do with AI.

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Name a piece of work that AI could never have come up with?

Anything Hunter S. Thompson. That level of chaos and "wrongness" is impossible to be predictable.

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What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever found a great idea?

I don't know the weirdest place I've ever gotten an idea, but I'm keeping my weirdest billion-dollar idea a secret for now!

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Favourite AI hack or use case? What do you think it is good for?

Mine's incredibly practical right now. I think it's valuable for pressure testing brand frameworks, especially for quite specialty audiences in complex fields. It's never the answer, but it's enough of a starting point, I can fumble my way through it.

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