Category: Agile
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Not as Simple as Pushing a Button
One of Tom Whitwell’s ’52 Things I Learned’ (another excellent list this year as always) related to how the push button was a somewhat controversial interface when it was first introduced in the 1880s. Digging a bit further there’s some interesting parallels
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Dazzle Camouflage and Reframing a Problem
I love this example of reframing a problem that relates to the dazzle camouflage which was invented (by British Marine Artist Norman Wilkinson) and extensively used during World War One to help protect warships. British Zoologist John Graham Kerr had originally proposed