Category: Agile
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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