Category: Agile
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Dick Fosbury and Breakthrough Ideas
In the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games a twenty one year old American University student Dick Fosbury won the high-jump gold medal using a revolutionary jumping technique that he had called the ‘Fosbury Flop’. The practice changed the sport forever and quickly became the dominant high-jump technique. By the 1972 Olympics 28 out of 40…
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Complexity Bias, and Looking for Answers in the Wrong Places
I was thinking the other day about complexity bias, which Shane Parrish has described as: ‘…our tendency to look at something that is easy to understand, or look at it when we are in a state of confusion, and view it as having many parts that are difficult to understand.’ Counter-intuitively we often prefer to…
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Incentivising 10X
Sometimes in my workshops with clients I run exercises around how a team can create possible futures as opposed to just plausible and probable ones. This is akin to what Google have termed '10X' thinking. The idea of creating disproportionate rather than incremental gain. Ideas that force you to break things open, work from first…
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Applying Current Reality Trees
Every so often when working with a client on a project there will be a tricky problem that we need to understand better and one of the best tools that I've found to do this is to visualise the challenge using a current reality tree, which is one of the thinking processes in the Theory…
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The Danger of Blindly Following Machines
This episode of Tim Harford's podcast series Cautionary Tales has some brilliant stories about the dangers of blindly following technology. Tim talks about the phenomenon of what rangers in Death Valley California have termed death by GPS – genuine examples of where people have ended up in perilous situations by uncritically following the step-by-step turns…
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Learning Opportunities
There were several well articulated points in this post by Lean specialist John Shook about why it's so important for leaders not to try and solve all the problems on behalf of their teams. An outdated style of leadership believes that all the answers exist at the top of the organisation and flow down. Yet…
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Wardley’s Universal Doctrine
I'm a fan of Simon Wardley's thinking – he did an excellent Google Firestarters talk a few years ago, and I drew on some of his work in my first and second book. His approaches to understanding situational context and strategy with Wardley Mapping are exceptional. The doctrine have been described as value-based ideas and…
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Dynamic resource allocation in a crisis
There's already been a lot of speculation about what's likely to change and not change in the long-term given the current enormous challenges faced by so many businesses, but the reality is that no-one really knows. The one thing that businesses can do right now apart from fire-fight is to stay adaptive, ready to change…
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Cynefin and the Importance of Contexts
Over the years I've frequently referenced Dave Snowden's Cynefin model as a way of understanding problems and contexts (and I talked about it my books). It's fantastically useful. This ten year old film is a good, short run through: In my experience there is rarely enough thought in strategy that goes in to the types…
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Bias to Action
Richard Shotton makes a great point in this post about why marketers so often overemphasise chasing the latest fads at the expense of more established activities. A good part of the reason for this, he says, is demonstrated by a study that was made into (of all things) penalty shoot outs in football: 'In 2007…