Damian Kington - Strategist & Adviser

I'm an Australian strategist and adviser who helps businesses get clearer and more capable — working out what's slowing them down and where the real opportunities are, across strategy, brand, and applied AI. I work across Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and further afield. Former Chief Marketing Officer at Liquidnet. I write about strategy, AI, brand, and design at: damiankington.com linkedin.com/in/damiankington medium.com/@damiankington damiankington.substack.com socials: instagram.com/damiankington facebook.com/damiankington

[damiankington]

An "AI research project" where almost none of the hard parts were about AI

A barrister I work with wanted the Victorian Court of Appeal's figures on the gender of counsel carried past where the published series stopped. Pulling the judgments and reading them was the straightforward bit. The work was everything the tool couldn't decide: collecting the cases by hand because the database bars bulk downloading, and drawing the line between senior and junior counsel that the court's own statistics never drew. The AI did the reading. The judgment—whose it was, and where it went—was the part that mattered.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/the-judgment-was-the-work/

[damiankington]

AI made fluent writing free. The thinking underneath still isn't.

Years ago I gave Roslyn Petelin a line for the cover of her writing book: whether you're a CEO or an intern, the ability to communicate clearly is your biggest asset. I still stand by it, but the world around the sentence has moved. Type a prompt today and you get back something fluent and grammatical in seconds. What you don't reliably get back is something true, clear, or worth saying—because those were never properties of the words. They belong to the thinking underneath, and that's the part no AI does for you.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/clarity-is-what-you-pay-for/

[damiankington]

AI now builds the website. The deciding is still yours, and it's most of the job.

Standing up a website used to mean assembling machinery: a platform, hosting, a content system, and usually someone to run all three. Most of that has collapsed in cost. What hasn't collapsed is the part that was always the real work—deciding who the site is for, what it should claim on your behalf, whether that claim is true, and how it should sound. The site I publish this on is static HTML on free hosting, with no admin panel and no monthly fee. That's the impressive-looking part, and it's the wrong part to be impressed by, because it's the easy one.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/a-website-you-own/

[damiankington]

Ask AI for a design and it hands you the average of every design like it

A friend asked me to design the flyer for a charity concert in Melbourne—she helps organise it, sings in it, and volunteers with the refugee families it raises money for, so the flyer was the smallest thing on her list. It looked like a quick job. But the event needed a visual idea of its own, and a fresh idea is the one thing AI can't reach for. Ask it to design something and it goes, with great confidence, for what it has already seen: keep the existing name, try burgundy and gold. Getting it off the obvious was the actual work.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/ai-is-fluent-in-cliche/

[damiankington]

I'm still at the party. I just remember it the next morning.

I learned to drink in the City of London, where the pub on the corner functioned as another meeting room, and I got sober in New York thirteen and a half years ago. This isn't an argument against drinking, and it isn't a sermon—no, giving it up did not make me an "authentic leader", a phrase best taken somewhere quiet and put down. What it did was sharpen the dull, useful things: focus, attention, and above all memory. I'm still at the party; I just remember it the next morning—the plan everyone agreed and nobody wrote down—which turns out to be most of what an adviser is paid for.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/my-biggest-upgrade-was-sobriety/

[damiankington]

The hardest part of the rebrand was convincing a thriving institution it needed one

The hardest part of rebranding the New York City Gay Men's Chorus was never the logo. It was persuading a successful, 250-voice institution that it needed to change at all. In a not-for-profit, "the shows sell" is the most powerful argument against doing anything bold or uncertain—so before any design happened, my job was to make a thriving organisation uncomfortable on purpose. The ground it stood on was shifting, and the community's sense of who it was, and who it included, was expanding faster than the brand had.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/nycgmc-rebrand/

[damiankington]

Twice we hired the impressive option. Twice we had to start over.

Twice during Liquidnet's rebrand, we hired the option that looked right on paper. Both times we had to admit we'd got it wrong and begin again. I've thought more about those two reversals than about anything in the finished design—because the hard part of rebranding a twenty-year-old company isn't the logo or the colour. It's looking at a decision you researched, championed, and put your name on, and saying out loud that it isn't working, before pride turns a wrong turn into a dead end.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/the-one-whos-right-on-paper/

[damiankington]

A brand says who you intend to be. The strategy is what makes it true.

A rebrand can only ever announce who an organisation intends to be. Plenty of institutions get a new logo and change nothing underneath. After the New York City Gay Men's Chorus rebrand grew its audiences and revenue, the harder work was closing the gap between looking different and being different—governance, finances, artistic policy, even the definition of membership. As board chair I authored the parent organisation's five-year plan: not a vision statement for the wall, but a resourced document with hard calls attached, written, as it turned out, the month live performance stopped.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/nycgmc-strategic-plan/

[damiankington]

When two people say "AI", they're often describing completely different things

Everyone says they use AI now. But one person means they asked a chatbot for dinner ideas, another means a sparkle icon appeared in their accounting software, and a third means the thing behind the alarming headlines. That gap is why adoption figures swing between a third and two-thirds of Australian businesses—the surveys aren't measuring a behaviour, they're measuring a mood. What you believe AI can do depends almost entirely on which version you've actually seen.

Read the full essay: https://damiankington.com/writing/everyone-means-something-different-by-ai/

[damiankington]

Still under reconstruction. Still awe inspiring. #athens (at Athens, Greece) https://www.instagram.com/p/BzjCOpaJfJ3/?igshid=fas9mkxwypxi

[damiankington]

Dramatic Dalmatia (at Makarska Riviera Beaches) https://www.instagram.com/p/BzSxrGOJbkQ/?igshid=1dxa9dnsiw80b

[damiankington]

@chefannaolson Liége Waffles by @karl_lohnes 😋 (at Toronto, Ontario) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv9SJDJBEPD/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=136iv8pnojg7j

[damiankington]

at Koh Samui https://www.instagram.com/p/Br2Rf7oB4x7/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=r7upy2t3i3z

[damiankington]

at Koh Samui https://www.instagram.com/p/Br1yW4mBJRU/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1uqt0c3ged3f7

[damiankington]

Cancun fly back Nov 2018 from Damian Kington on Vimeo.

A drone fly back in Cancun, Mexico

[damiankington]

Wonderful to see @chefmolson and @chefannaolson in Barcelona for 30 mins! They arrived from Madrid as we head there...AND we’re staying in the same hotel in Madrid! (at Sants Estació)

[damiankington]

“Ombres reflectides” (Reflected Shadows) by Lluis Masiera (at Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya)