Four For Friday | March 21, 2025
LF165 | Plastic List, a simple systems change recipe, McKinsey on profiting from AI, ambient tracking for caregivers + AI deep dive: MCP
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.
Plastic List | Alarming, but a potential silver lining…
The slowly unfolding realization that ubiquitous plastic is killing us and literally wiping out our species - see the fertility impacts below - should be getting more attention than it is. But cutting through in today’s cacophony of chaos is not easy. The Plastic List studies 300 food products, and found 86% contain plastic-related chemicals, including all tested baby foods and prenatal supplements.
One of the inspirations for Plastic List, created by the former CEO of Github, was this report by the Minderoo Foundation, which provides a succinct but alarming commentary, referencing the kinds of health impacts plastics have across the lifecourse: miscarriage, weight, genital malformation, lower IQ, ADHD (girls), obesity, blood pressure, asthma, psychomotor development, non-hodgkin’s lymphoma, thyroid function, cardiovascular disease, bronchitis, allergic rhinitis (“hay fever”), endometriosis, sperm concentration and quality, diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome, insulin resistance, type II diabetes, obesity, liver cancer, lung cancer, hepatic disease, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, thyroid function, malignant melanoma and non-hodgkin’s lymphoma. For a start.
Some endocrine-disrupting chemicals can interfere with testosterone and estrogen pathways, affecting reproductive health and fertility rates in exposed populations. This is likely a cause of plummeting fertility around the world, and not just consumer preferences.
Key findings in the Plastic List report:
Boba Guys Bubble Tea BPA was 32,000% of recommended intake, and their other products weren’t much better. The company did however spring into action to change this.
Hot food in takeout containers for 45mins showed 34% higher chemicals then the same food in the restaurant.
Plastic chemicals were in all products from Starbucks, Gerber, Chobani, Straus, Celsius, Blue Bottle, RXBAR, Coca-Cola, Tartine, and Ghirardelli.
Phthalates were in 73% of the products tested.
Interestingly, water in glass bottles had similar chemical levels to plastic bottles.
Interestingly, most products met current safety standards, so the issue is whether current standards are adequate given emerging science.
The So What? One of the themes we’re exploring with Healthy Habitats is the power of ‘hero’ metrics to drive systemic change. This requires new data architectures and value chains - e.g. rewarding citizen scientists for ferreting out data on these kinds of externalities. Boba Guys’ speedy response suggests transparent metrics can drive real change.
A simple guide to Systems Thinking
If you want someone to stop talking to you at a dinner party, introduce yourself as a systems thinker. The phrase combines inaccessibility and superiority, suggesting that mere mortals can’t connect the dots. The reality is that most systems thinkers are the opposite - innately collaborative and interested in the other, and not themselves. Donella Meadows, one of the pioneers, embodied this spirit.
Rejecting the systems thinking approach is a mistake, so this simple framework draws on that thinking to help people work through problems in an accessible way:
Begin with neutral observation of current reality
Identify stakeholders and understand why the situation is problematic
Expand conversation boundaries to include all relevant perspectives
Project consequences if no action is taken
Identify root causes rather than symptoms
Establish scope boundaries by recognizing factors beyond influence
Map interactions between factors to reveal system dynamics
Locate ‘high-leverage intervention points’ for maximum impact
Find shared interests to motivate cross-stakeholder collaboration
Create learning mechanisms to adapt as new information emerges
This approach shifts from spending countless hours mapping systems - where systems mapping exercises often get stuck - to identifying "the minimum piece of information to move forward". This is about collaborative understanding rather than perfection.
The So What? The more we can automate and embed this kind of thinking into everyday decision making, the more chance we have of developing collaborative solutions to the mess we’re in.
McKinsey: AI widespread, but profits elusive
McKinsey's latest AI report says that while 78% of organisations now deploy AI across at least one business function, tangible enterprise-level EBIT remains a distant prospect for over 80% of firms.
Some highlights:
Initiatives to redesign workflows tend to be higher value i.e. ‘rewiring’ the organization
CEO leadership of AI governance correlates with better outcomes.
Nearly half of respondents reported that AI resulted in cost-reductions
Risks re compliance, cyber security and ethics are generally unaddressed
Less than a third of companies are following the twelve “adoption and scaling practices” for gen AI - see chart below:
The So What? While AI is so nascent, having CEO buy-in is crucial, and a focus on successful integration and culture change is as important as which tool to use.
Ambient audio to transcribe care tasks
Australian Catholic University has secured a half million dollar government grant to develop ‘Jessie’, an AI solution automating tedious data entry in aged care. They’re partnering with Microsoft and BaptistCare, and will aim to use this to address Australia's looming 110,000 carer shortfall by 2030. They describe the goal as being to develop solutions to deliver higher quality care and improve human dignity, liberating staff from tedious, unrewarding tasks such as data entry.
I’ll be watching with interest, as we’ve been exploring doing something similar with ambient audio monitoring (using simple consumer devices such as Bee, Omi or Amulet) to improve care and efficiency of the care workforce.
The So What? The heavy emphasis in the press release on ethical AI and patient-centered innovation is a good reminder of the delicate balance innovators need to manage when introducing new AI tools. Bad experiences and negative press could set progress back for everyone.
Bonus: AI Classroom: Welcome ‘MCP’, the USB for AI
For those of you looking to build AI agents, a new standard developed by Anthropic, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), promises to make the job of building them a lot easier. I’ve been using N8N (a grown up, cheaper, self-hosted version of Zapier) and connecting up all the different services has been very fiddly.
MCP is basically a middle layer between these LLMs and the tools you want to use, and takes care of the messy connecting bits. It’s been described as the USB to connect up AI services. Nerding.io has created the first MCP server for N8N users to integrate this.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen