Great to drop in at the Miro Canvas 25 event briefly today for some good conversations and to see Tomás Dostal Freire and Peter Bradd launch Miro’s new AI Innovation Workspace.
My highlight was seeing Professor Joel Pearson speak live for the first time. His keynote was on “The Human-Al Symphony: Turning Disruption Into Your Competitive Edge”.
I’m a big fan of his work as a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of Future Minds Lab at UNSW. He researches a bunch of my favourite stuff: intuition, consciousness, positive psychology, and the neuroscience of creativity and decision-making.
Of even more direct personal interest (I have multisensory aphantasia) is his really interesting research on aphantasia and hyperphantasia. His research has helped establish aphantasia as a legitimate neurological variation – and he also takes a strengths-based approach rather than pathologising it.
Uncertainty
From a neuroscience perspective, he talked about how human prediction has evolved at a gradual and relatively linear rate, while genAI is going through exponential growth – and doubling in capability roughly every six months.
This causes uncertainty. And uncertainty hurts.
We need practical strategies and tactics to navigate this rapid rate and volume of change – to down-regulate our nervous system so we’re not in a perpetual state of fight, flight, freeze, fawn. The states that shut down our creativity, openness, and effective decision-making. Riley Coleman and I were having a good chat about this last week.
This is about our mindset. Our happiness habits that drive our quality of life. A couple of my favourites that he mentioned and that I talk about often are the power of reframing (or cognitive reappraisal)… and the “beginner’s mind”.
There are no experts in complex change. Only emergent practice.
These are some of the reasons I’m a big fan of his work. Check out his book The Intuition Toolkit with his SMILE acronym to help decide when to trust our intuition and when not to.
Miro AI Innovation Workspace
At one level this event was just a digital product feature launch.
What gets me more excited is the framing that this is about AI evolving from single-player tools to multiplayer collaboration.
The new AI Innovation Workspace promises to be a space where humans and AI can co-create, automate, and deliver work collaboratively from idea to execution.
Three new/updated features:
- Visual Context Processing – so the canvas is the prompt
- Sidekicks – AI teammates that live on the canvas so they’re multiplayer and context-aware and can interact conversationally with the human team
- Flows – that turn workflows into shared, visual processes rather than static checklists
I see this as an important stepping stone. A practical way to integrate and augment human team intelligence and artificial intelligence – with the human very much in the loop.
What next?
So much of the current AI rhetoric either amplifies fear – especially among product and design people – but also what it means more broadly for society… or it paints a techno-optimist utopian future with little recognition of the risks.
Neither of these extremes resonate with my lived experience of digital tech over the past 30 years, knowledge of history, or my ongoing intense learning and experiments with genAI over the past few years.
So much of the conversation is abstract and conceptual – which I love – but not much applies that in practical ways that are truly integrated in workflows with humans in the loop to ensure ethical use and quality outputs and outcomes.
I’m a sometimes user of Miro rather than it being one of my primary tools. I’m looking forward to seeing how it unfolds.
So many interesting possibilities and opportunities ahead. And risks to manage.
I’ll continue being open and curious, keep saying yes to let serendipity in and increase my surface area for luck… and practise a beginners mind.
