Year: 2024
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Autonomy, Ownership, Competence and Confidence
A while back I write a post on my definition of what great leadership should really be all about, and I described this as high-reaching informality. High-reaching because great leaders are ambitious, exceptional at getting the best out of their people, and encouraging their teams to think bigger and aim higher. Informal because this supports open…
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Can we learn effectively from AI?
Many have hailed LLMs as excellent tools for learning but is this really the case? Dr Philippa Hardman has done some interesting research to find out if these AI tools can genuinely impact the learning process. And her findings were quite revealing. She fed one of her own research papers into ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5…
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Make the right path the easy path
I was reminded of the quote that I’ve used for the title of this post at a recent workshop with a public sector body. I was talking about the book ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery‘ which is a wonderful account of the early years of the UK Government Digital Service and…
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What a 400 year old ship can tell us about technology projects
A couple of years ago whilst I was on a work trip to Stockholm I went to see the famous Vasa ship. It’s a marvel to see, but it’s also a superb monument to the folly of man, particularly when it comes to technology. The Vasa ship, ordered by King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden,…
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Top-down, bottom-up data
I really liked Robert Van Ossenbruggen’s idea about top-down and bottom-up approaches to data and insights, captured in his visual below. The concept defines a subtle but fundamental difference between bottom-up ‘data-driven decision-making’ and top-down ‘decision-driven analytics’ (for which Robert credits the book of the same name by Bart De Langhe and Stefano Puntoni). The…
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On Agile Marketing
I’ve been writing and consulting about organisational agility for over fifteen years now (amongst other things of course) and there is probably one consistent misinterpretation in the application of agile principles at scale which I see more than any other – the idea that it is a one-size-fits-all solution. This is annoying. I see this…
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On technology acceptance models
One of the critical aspects of navigating technological change effectively is understanding more about how users accept and adopt new technologies. For leaders trying to drive technology acceptance and adoption, and to introduce new ways of working within organisations, or consultants and strategists looking to understand changing contexts and capabilities, it can be really useful…
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Moravec’s Paradox
I came across Moravec’s Paradox via a talk which Stephen Fry gave, titled ‘AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?’, and given as the inaugural ‘Living Well With Technology’ lecture for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute. The concept was first articulated by AI researcher Hans Moravec in the 1980s.…
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On knowledge layering
I was speaking to someone the other day who described me as ‘the consultant’s consultant’ which is a description that I was hugely flattered by (and if I’m honest not sure I deserve). But I suppose I’ve been on this path for almost 15 years now so that must count for something. There are of…
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Action, instability and safe to fail
I enoyed reading Doug Garnett’s thoughts on action and instability (courtesy JP Castlin). The premis of Doug’s piece is that, in his words, ‘certain actions in business are so unstable that even tiny errors do tremendous harm’: ‘Businesses tend to think of stability and instability in broad terms, summarized in questions like “is my business…