Category: leadership
-
Tanks, innovation and transformative thinking
One of my favourite models for navigating technological-driven change (and realising the opportunity of technology-driven innovation) is SAMR, which stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition. Drawn from education, the framework relates to the fundamental options for how new technology can enhance capability: it
-
Autonomy, Ownership, Competence and Confidence
A while back I write a post on my definition of what great leadership should really be all about, and I described this as high-reaching informality. High-reaching because great leaders are ambitious, exceptional at getting the best out of their people, and encouraging
-
Can we learn effectively from AI?
Many have hailed LLMs as excellent tools for learning but is this really the case? Dr Philippa Hardman has done some interesting research to find out if these AI tools can genuinely impact the learning process. And her findings were quite revealing.
-
Make the right path the easy path
I was reminded of the quote that I’ve used for the title of this post at a recent workshop with a public sector body. I was talking about the book ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery‘ which is a
-
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
-
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
-
On technology acceptance models
One of the critical aspects of navigating technological change effectively is understanding more about how users accept and adopt new technologies. For leaders trying to drive technology acceptance and adoption, and to introduce new ways of working within organisations, or consultants and
-
On knowledge layering
I was speaking to someone the other day who described me as ‘the consultant’s consultant’ which is a description that I was hugely flattered by (and if I’m honest not sure I deserve). But I suppose I’ve been on this path for
-
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
-
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