The Accidental Experiment

I was a digital hoarder drowning in my own curiosity. Bookmarks breeding like rabbits across seventeen different apps, insights scattered like puzzle pieces that never quite formed a complete picture. My research for various projects had become unmanageable. I couldn't find what I'd saved, couldn't cluster related ideas, and was increasingly failing to develop the cross-industry insights that drive real innovation.

Sound familiar? If you're working in healthcare innovation, you know the feeling. We're swimming in a sea of information from technology trends, regulatory changes, clinical studies, and business implications. The challenge isn't finding content, it's transforming that chaos into actionable intelligence.

The honest experiment begins

Instead of continuing to study and organise, and fail, I decided to build a forcing function. What better way to structure my material than committing to write a weekly piece of inspiration? Publicly. A newsletter. On LinkedIn. With a deadline that couldn't be ignored.

My hypothesis was simple: Use this newsletter as a laboratory for weekly experiments in AI integration and knowledge synthesis. I wanted to learn how AI could help me read faster, analyse trends more effectively, automate processes, improve workshops and manage projects more efficiently. The secondary goal (and I'll be honest) was generating some business leads along the way.

But the deeper motivation was transforming my frustration with healthcare's glacial pace of innovation. Instead of bashing the Luddites and lamenting regulatory roadblocks, I wanted to build a modest lighthouse. Something that could inspire others to innovate, offering positive alternatives rather than just critique.

The laboratory results

A little over a year later, the experiment has yielded surprising insights. I've grown from 200 to 700+ subscribers, steady, organic growth that secretly disappointed me (I'd hoped for more). But that disappointment taught me something valuable about authentic growth versus marketing optimisation.

The LinkedIn algorithm remains mysteriously unpredictable. Despite publishing at the same day and hour weekly (every Wednesday), engagement varies wildly. The editions I laboured over, convinced they were groundbreaking, often fell flat. Meanwhile, pieces I wrote in record time during creative flow gathered more reactions. There's a lesson about overthinking versus authentic expression buried in that data.

I switched from Evernote to Obsidian early in the process. Good data architecture became foundational for improving my work. The weekly discipline forced me to develop systems for capturing, connecting, and synthesising information across healthcare, technology, and business domains. Exploring hundreds of AI tools and models by applying them to concrete, real-world tasks was an intensive yet essential process to genuinely grasp their potential impact and practical value.

The real discovery

What started as a personal productivity hack hasn't yet become a business strategy, and I'm intentionally keeping it that way. The tension between genuine knowledge sharing and business development is real, but maintaining authenticity remains my priority. The newsletter serves as proof that you can build meaningful professional relationships through value-first content without sacrificing credibility.

The most unexpected outcome? The creative process itself became an innovation forcing function. Weekly deadlines combined with systematic curation sparked cross-industry pattern recognition I never anticipated. Constraints, it turns out, don't limit creativity — they channel it.

Why graffiti art frames every edition

Each newsletter features graffiti art imagery, and there's a deliberate reason beyond aesthetics. Hip hop culture represents the ultimate example of combinatorial creativity: sampling across genres, manipulating speed and loops, scratching to alter how music is played, weaving together fashion, behaviour, and visual art into a coherent whole. I can't think of another movement that combines so many disparate influences while maintaining such strong cultural identity.

Growing up with Run DMC and LL Cool J, I was completely hooked after watching a Dutch documentary in late 1986 about hip hop's origins. That culture taught me something profound about innovation: true breakthroughs come from unexpected combinations, not isolated genius. The graffiti imagery reminds me, and hopefully my readers, that healthcare innovation needs that same combinatorial mindset — blending insights from technology, policy, clinical practice, and human behaviour into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Your own forcing function experiment

Here's my challenge to you: What's your equivalent of drowning in curiosity? What forcing function could transform your passive consumption into active creation? Whether it's a newsletter, podcast, or internal knowledge-sharing initiative, the key is public commitment with regular deadlines.

The healthcare innovation ecosystem needs more positive provocateurs — people willing to build lighthouses rather than just complain about the darkness. Your unique perspective, systematically shared, could be the catalyst someone else needs to take action.

What experiment will you commit to this week?