Category: Agile
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Groupthink, and management by leaving the room
I had no idea that the original research into the concept of ‘groupthink’ was inspired by what happened with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Irving Janis, a Yale psychologist who studied group cohesion, became fascinated by how a group of highly intellectual politicians and government officials could make such a…
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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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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…
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Leadership, Teams and Bids
Psychologist Dr John Gottman (along with his wife Dr Julie Gottman) is renowned for his work on marital stability, relationships and predicting divorce in couples. In his research he has famously predicted with a 94% accuracy which marriages will end in divorce. After decades studying the way that married couples interact and the factors that…
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Focus means saying ‘no’
Last week Richard Huntington shared this video of Jony Ive talking about how Steve Jobs was brilliant at focusing. Many of us think about focus in terms of being able to sit and work exclusively on one thing and yet this is only the half of it. Jony makes a great point here about how…
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Autonomy doesn’t work without situational awareness
The need to combine team autonomy with situational awareness to truly empower teams and individuals
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The Social Context for New Technologies
There was an interesting example of how the social and anthropological context shapes the use and evolution of technology in Mark Allen Peterson’s book ‘Anthropology & Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium‘. Referencing Naomi Baron, Peterson describes how we have a tendency to think of the modes of how we use technology…