Year: 2023
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Writing changes how we think about the world
I came across this lecture by Larry McEnerney from the University of Chicago Writing Program over on LinkedIn and I got so much from it. Larry makes some wonderful points about writing better. He talks about how we’re taught to follow the rules of writing rather than thinking about how our writing can be valuable…
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QWERTY, and lessons on user-centric design
Why are keyboards set out in the way that they are? Why aren’t the letters in alphabetical order? It turns out that the answer to these questions reveals a brilliant piece of user-centric thinking. After some early attempts at creating writing machines which were less than user friendly, inventors Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel…
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‘Gigantomania’ and why big projects fail
I’m looking forward to reading Bent Flyvbjerg’s new book ‘How Big Things Get Done‘. Bent, an academic at Oxford, has compiled a database of over 16,000 significantly-sized projects (including things like infrastructure and systems investment) which has revealed that only 8.5% of projects deliver to their original projected cost and time projections, and only 0.5%…
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Categorising Cognitive Bias
I’m not a behavioural science expert but I do think it provides a useful lens to consider when we’re trying to understand how people make decisions. One of the things I’ve always struggled with however, is how to navigate the long list of cognitive biases (there’s something like 150+ cognitive biases listed on the Wikipedia…
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Scott Brinker on MarTech trends: Composability & Orchestration
The two critical technology trends that speak to the future of marketing technology
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Stocks and flows of knowledge
One way that I’ve found very useful to articulate how leaders can catalyse innovation in an organisation is to consider organisational knowledge in terms of ‘stocks and flows’. In economics and accounting a stock represents a quantity of something, measured at a specific time, but which may have accumulated over a period. Flows are measured differently, usually…
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On the application of A.I.
There’s so much breathless hype about A.I. going on right now, and so many examples of tools, prompts and ways of using it being shared that it can be difficult to separate signal from noise. The strategist in me wanted some way of capturing and categorising all the different potential applications for businesses to provide…
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Google Firestarters: Leo Rayman on Green Growth
The latest episode of Google Firestarters has just been published, featuring the brilliant Leo Rayman (CEO of EdenLab) on the challenging but inspiring topic of achieving ‘green growth’ and real sustainability transformation. Leo has a good provocation for this episode about how marketing needs to step up – he talks about how most of the green debate is (rightly) owned…
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Creativity from ignorance
Sheer ignorance – you know, there’s no confidence to equal it.’ – Orson Welles. After reading two excellent posts today on the trend towards banality (Martin Weigel on ‘fighting the astro-turfing of culture’, and Alex Murrell’s ‘the age of average’) my thoughts turned to this fantastic film featuring journalist Huw Wheldon interviewing Orson Welles in 1960. In it Orson talks…
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First order change, second order change, and double loop learning
We talk so much about the need to respond to changing environments in business and yet there is often little attention paid to differentiating the different types of change that can so adeptly frame how we should respond. I’m a big fan of situational awareness and the importance of understanding the contexts of the challenges…