Year: 2024
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Balancing comfort and urgency in transformation
I’ve long been a fan of Dr Ronald Heifetz’s (of the Center For Public Leadership at Harvard University) delineation between what he frames as ‘technical change’ and ‘adaptive change’. In his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership and elsewhere he describes how technical change is typically that which relates to more tangible or visible things…
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Why some innovations take years to come to market
Matthew Syed has a great example of how easy it is for innovative ideas to be frustrated or delayed in his book Rebel Ideas. It’s the story of how the wheeled suitcase came into the world. The wheeled suitcase is one of those ‘why did no-one think of this before?’ inventions but the truth is…
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The power of common knowledge in driving change
I liked Ian Leslie’s review (from a few years ago) of the book Rational Ritual, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe, which focuses on an intriguing aspect of ‘common knowledge’ which Ian summarises thus: ‘For everyone to know something is not enough to force change; what matters is that everyone knows that everyone knows’. There’s an important…
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Emotion AI
The latest version of Gartner’s hype cycle for Digital Marketing has an interesting addition which they’ve placed almost at the top of the peak of inflated expectation: ‘Emotion AI for marketing’. Gartner VP Nicole Greene describes Emotion AI as using: ‘…AI techniques to analyze the emotional state of a user (via computer vision, audio/voice input,…
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Why cognitive diversity is a superpower
‘If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately. And this requires us to take a step back and view performance from a fundamentally different vantage point’ I’m reading Matthew…
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The Three Types of Problem in the World (Redux)
In a complex, fast-changing world situational awareness and the ability to understand context in decision-making is all important. A few years back I described an approach to problem definition (originally from education) based on three fundamentally different types of contexts: simple, complicated, and complex. And I was reminded of just how critical this is only recently. Simple…
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Navigating uncertainty
I loved the approach that Sam Conniff (author of the brilliant Be More Pirate, and the founder of Uncertainty Experts) takes in the latest episode of Google Firestarters to how we should respond to uncertainty in the modern world. His fundamental point is that we have a choice about how we react to unpredictability and…
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On Climbing the Wrong Hill
This week, after first reading it several years ago, I was prompted to return to Chris Dixon’s wonderful post about climbing the wrong hill. The term comes originally from computer science, but to illustrate it he uses the example of a young, smart graduate who works on Wall Street and is considering staying despite hating…
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Transformers, and creative innovation
What’s the connection between Transformers and one of the most innovative lunar rovers to have been invented? The answer is this wonderful example of using partnerships and external perspectives to challenge norms. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, asked Takara Tomy (the company behind toys such as Transformers, amongst many others) to design it’s small lunar…
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Joy
Writer Donna Ashworth, who authored the book Wild Hope has written many wonderful words on the topic of joy, happiness and hope. Here are a couple of favourites that I’ve come across lately, in case you need it today. I love the line ‘Joy is supposed to slither through the cracks of your imperfect life’.…