Category: Agile
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AI and the OODA Loop
Most AI use today is open-loop. People prompt, get an output, use it, and move on, meaning that each interaction is consumed the moment it’s produced. Last week I wrote about AI as compounding capability in the context of agencies and operating models, but it’s a principle that has much broader application. Getting value from AI and…
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Transforming systems and thinking differently
I once did a fascinating project with the operations team of a big pharma business helping them to understand how they could combine agile ways of working with Lean manufacturing techniques. As part of the research for it I did a dive into the origins and principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS) from which…
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How to innovate like Amazon
I spent a few days with Diageo’s European leadership team in Dublin recently and whilst there I saw a talk from Amazon’s supply chain lead Marcus Mallon who talked about how the company innovate. Amazon are of course known for their customer obsession and ‘working backwards’, their relentless experimentation and openness to fail, and for combining a long-term…
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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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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…
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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…