SEPTEMBER 2025 INSIGHTS

INSIGHTS SEPTEMBER 2025

September has been a month of dissonance — between speed, and depth, alignment and drift. Between work and vacation (the last two weeks!). I’ve found myself drawn to questions of

misalignment: in AI systems, in global politics, and sometimes in our own inner compass. What happens when we move faster than we can reflect?

What I’ve learned about the context

• “Emergent misalignment.” When AI is trained to tolerate small errors in one domain (say, coding), those errors can propagate elsewhere — even into moral reasoning. The result: systems that hail Nazis as heroes. Companies are only now confronting this, as @AnjanaAhuja explores in her excellent @FinancialTimes piece (FT link).

• 97% of the UK’s data flows through undersea cables. 70% of our energy is also undersea. Important to understand in the context of UK resilience. (in conversation)

• China is now building the equivalent of the French navy every year. (in conversation)

• “American attitudes towards the world, Dean Acheson wrote, have been dominated by two contrary and equally unrealistic ideas. On one side stands the legacy of George Washington’s farewell address, which warned Americans to steer clear of entanglement in European controversies. Its 20th century expression included a deep native streak of isolationism and an advocacy of “America first.”. On the other side stands the utopian dream of a world order based on international law. It found its expression in Wilsonian idealism, the league of nations, and at its furthest extreme, a sort of fuzzyheaded one worldism.” Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men feels particularly timely reading.

• Roughly 30% of 7,965 cyberattacks in 2024 originated via a third party — double the year before. (Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report). The new frontier of cyber risk is not direct attack, but infiltration through the supply chain (FT).

• Chinese open-source AI models are now being downloaded at nearly the same rate as US models — and are likely to surpass them soon (Interconnects).

What I’ve learned about people

• Performance = understanding × capability × motivation.

• “The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one.” (Plato)

• Experimenting means trying something without knowing how it’s going to turn out. It is different from trying something with the expectation it will succeed (eg: prototyping or piloting). Experimenting is more about noticing and learning and thus will lead to more curiosity and variety. 80% of experiments should fail. (Carolyn Coughlin with Dave Snowden, Coaches Rising podcast, 45 mins in)

• You only need about a quarter of people to get behind a new idea for change to take hold. Momentum doesn’t start with consensus. (Adam Grant in conversation with Brené Brown, Dare to Lead podcast)

• “Genius is eternal patience.” (Michelangelo)

What I’ve learned about myself

• I’ve forgotten that I need to channel my magician — the part that brings lightness and laughter into the serious work of coaching, moderating, and speaking. I learned gravity in the White House; now I want to rediscover joy.

• I keep learning the same lesson: I love what I do, but sometimes I forget that. When work starts to feel heavy, it’s not the work that’s changed, it’s my mindset.

September left me thinking about alignment — between values and systems, effort and joy. Whether in AI, in geopolitics, or in ourselves, the work is the same: to notice the drift early and bring ourselves back to centre.

I hope you find these observations of interest. If you’ve received Insights September 2025 from someone else, please sign up to my blog here. If you’d prefer not to receive these, please reach out to admin@wickettadvisory.com