25 Things I Learned in 2025

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I’m sorry. I really am. It’s lazy and predictable, I know. But 2025 has been so brilliantly frenetic and fast-paced that, selfishly, I feel I need to write this list to remind myself of some interesting things I’ve seen. 

It’s been a full-on year. The Foundation is growing, the news is, well, everywhere, and there’s this little thing called AI that’s either going to change everything, or change absolutely nothing. It’ll probably be a bit of both.

I’ve been lucky enough to work on some brilliant projects with some brilliant clients (and, as always, with some brilliant colleagues). Mumbai, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, even a presentation to Alton Towers. The amount of time I’ve spent on trains is probably equal to the amount of time I haven’t. 

I’m incredibly grateful for you reading and sharing the things I’ve written this year. It’s so lovely to receive any emails or comments on anything I post, and I really appreciate your eyeballs and attention. 

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So, here’s the random list of things that caught my eye this year, all vaguely connected to creating better customer experiences and more customer-led organisations. 

1. I love Disney’s approach of ‘it’s not our fault, but it is our problem’
2. In March, we released our ‘Myth of Feedback’ report, showing that 53% of business leaders aren’t customers of their own business and 56% haven’t spoken to a customer in over a month
3. The Toronto Raptors offer first-time visitors a different coloured lanyard, so colleagues know to offer them a little extra help
4. Rory Sutherland introduced me to the concept of ‘Reverse Benchmarking’, finding the thing your competitors are worst at and being brilliant at it – like the service station (Buc-ees) in the US which aims to have the cleanest toilets in the country
5. Young people are spending more time alone than ever before

6. When Doctors give patients more time to talk, they give better diagnosis and the appointment time isn’t any longer
7. Octopus Energy chose to go against the regulator’s rules – and in the process, saved vulnerable customers nearly £7m

8. We learnt a huge amount about Sam Altman by observing him in his kitchen
9. London’s oldest insurance companies used to put metal markers on the outside of people’s houses to show they were insured
10. In 2007, there were still 24 payphone in the centre of London Victoria station

11. Vodafone launched their ‘Just Ask Once’ feature to try and stop the customer service doom loop 
12. An industrial designer who spent two years working on a new MRI machine realised within seconds of it’s first use that been looking at it all wrong – so turned it into a ‘Fun Jungle’ and reduced child sedation rates from 80% to 27%
13. Customer Experiences come in all different shapes and sizes. Look out for Transitions, Milestones, and Pitfalls
14. Forget the AI hype – we’re never going to stop working
15. Roald Dahl’s writing room shows the importance of habit and routine in creativity

16. The 95/5 rule says you should tightly control 95% of your company spending – which gives you 5% to spend frivolously on the things that create joy.
17. Self-checkouts are a failed experiment 
18. If you want to really understand what people think, you might want to be more annoying as an interviewer
19. The end is in sight for the UK‘s Parking App nightmare
20. People will queue for anything if they think they might get something for free:

‘Why are you queuing?’

‘Well, there was just a queue and I thought we’d join it’

21. UK water is some of the cleanest in the world – so clean you could drink your toilet water (if you wanted to. And post-flush.)

22. The African Union rightly called for an end to the use of the Mercator map
23. If you want to stop yourself getting dizzy when going down lots of stairs, put up photos of wild animals
24. People really enjoy my misery. Of all the posts I wrote this year, the most popular were:
    1. Me repeatedly getting stuck between the barriers on the Paris Metro
    2. Me spending a month trying to find a lost Royal Mail parcel, and ending up writing a letter to the CEO and MP (but the real story was how brilliant ReMarkable were)
    3. Me buying a corded hedge trimmer, cutting through the cord, short-circuiting the house, getting it fixed, then immediately cutting through it again
25. But the thing that resonated most this year was how organisations have made it easy to do the easy things and hard to do the hard things – and AI might be about to make that so much worse

(And a bonus 26 as we look forward to more technological advancements in the new year. I asked CoPilot to assess our server and tell me which client we’d worked the most with in our 26 year history. It’s answer? The Foundation…)

Thank you again for reading and sharing this year, I really do appreciate it. And as always, feel free to let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more of (or less of) as we head into 2026.

I hope you have a great Christmas and New Year time, however and with whoever you spend it.