Four For Friday | Jan 9, 2026

LF202 Relational Service Design, reinventing innovation consulting, Silicon Valley vs China's Communist Party, Siemens' Digital Twin + ChatGPT Health

Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday, and welcome to a new year, and in Japan, this is the year of the Fire Horse, which only occurs once every 60 years, and represents intense energy and transformation. Let’s hope this is a positive transformation for all of us. Anyway, here are four nuggets of interest I’ve picked up this week, plus an AI tool of the week.

1. Relational Service Design (how not to treat your mum)

This piece makes an important distinction in the delivery of public services (although it can equally apply in the private sector) between realational challenges and transactional tasks. Transactional tasks (passport renewals, bill payments) demand efficiency through thin relationships. Relational challenges (family crises, homelessness) require thick relationships built on trust and adaptation.

The opening absurd but telling scenario hits home - imagine your own mother making you go through call centre hoops to get life advice.... The pathology comes from bureaucrats treating things that are complex as things that are merely complicated. Fragmented care passes citizens between workers like widgets on an assembly line. Perfect processes designed for messy lives inevitably fail.

Trust cannot be standardised. Relationships resist mechanisation. Yet the system remains skewed towards optimisation even where sustained human connection proves essential. Relational services require self-organising teams with autonomy, not customer-journey maps. The challenge lies in matching the right ‘relationship density’ to each problem’s true nature.

So What? Mismatched service design wastes resources while failing the vulnerable citizens who need help most.

2. Reinventing innovation consulting

This article (subscribers only) highlights the flaws in most innovation consulting over the past decade or so; organizations built labs and hired consultants, but mostly just accelerated platform adoption while calling it transformation. Design thinking and lean startups had good intentions but became feature factories producing minimal viable (safe…) products nobody loved.

The core failures: ignoring fringe insights, demanding impossible proof before experimentation, defaulting to digital-first thinking (i.e. forgetting about place), measuring everything except actual human behavior, and forcing promising ideas back into legacy systems that suffocated them.

Real innovation requires curiosity as muscle, place-based observation over dashboards, protected budgets for experimentation, qualitative understanding alongside data, and accepting some ideas must live outside the mothership to survive.

So What? Most corporate innovation spending produces compliance theatre rather than genuine discovery or competitive advantage

3. Silicon Valley vs. the Chinese communist party…

Dan Wong is an acute commentator on US and China, and given the growing global tensions, worth following for signs of where things are going. This year’s annual letter makes a comparison between Silicon Valley and the Communist Party. Both are humorless, self-serious, and speak in bland corporate tones punctuated by apocalyptic warnings. Neither embodies sparkling irony, yet both are reshaping the world.

San Francisco remains America’s most meritocratic city, forward-looking and open to newcomers, yet suffers dangerous insularity. Tech elites rarely travel, dismiss traditional culture, and collapse every conversation into AI. Their narrow focus produces technical excellence but cultural blindness.

Beijing’s elites must think globally despite insularity. Chinese society grows increasingly informal and playful beneath the gerontocratic political system’s grudging formality. Over time, China’s rollicking social exuberance may outlive its lusterless politics.

So What? Cultural narrowness in both superpowers who are shaping our future risks catastrophic misjudgment in their defining technological competition.

4. Siemens and NVIDIA collaborate on digital twins

One of the strong themes I see emerging this year is digital twins. Not necessarily your face or avatar, although that’ll be one application, but more about systems digital twins, that bring together multiple stakeholders and business processes to predict and improve outcomes.

At this year’s buzzy CES, Siemens unveiled a Digital Twin Composer, that lets manufacturers construct photorealistic virtual replicas of products, processes and facilities before committing resources to actually building it. Built with NVIDIA’s Omniverse, the platform integrates real-time operational data with comprehensive digital models.

PepsiCo has been an early adopter - they simulated a manufacturing facility and identified 90 percent of potential issues pre-construction, increased throughput by 20 percent, and reduced capital expenditure by 10 to 15 percent.

The technology addresses persistent industrial fragmentation, where design, engineering and production teams operate in silos. By unifying workflows into contextualized models, manufacturers can test configurations within minutes rather than months.

So what? Virtual validation could fundamentally alter industrial capital allocation, reducing waste while accelerating innovation cycles

AI tip of the week: ChatGPT Health

It was an open secret that OpenAI was moving into health, and with the launch of their new Health feature, they’ve taken a big step in their direction. It’s created a separate, secure data record that ingests your medical records as well as wellness data from the likes of Apple, MyFitnessPal and Function Health, and will allow much deeper and easier access to insights. This article goes into detail on how it’s constructed. Some intrepid users have already been loading their medical records into LLMs (myself included) and this will make the process easier, more secure and potentially more valuable, as they are aiming to connect into clinical workflows, not just support the curious consumer.

---

That’s all for now - happy weekend everyone.

- Stephen