Category: leadership
-
On the Agentic Organisation
The next wave of AI innovation is already upon us, and it’s the era of agentic AI. In fact, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has already said that ‘agentic’ will be the word of 2025. The pace of progression has been remarkably fast from simple chatbots that were primarily designed to engage in conversation, answer questions,…
-
Learning from Formula One
There’s some interesting things happening with Formula 1 right now, and Scott Galloway wrote this week about how the sport is at an inflection point as it tries to build from the huge broadening of appeal that ‘Drive to Survive’ has given it (not least with women). As well as the obvious (fast cars, glamour, drama, exotic…
-
The Lindy Effect, and the optimisation trap
A while back I read Shaw Talebi’s reflections from doing Nassim Taleb’s Real World Risk Institute course. One of the concepts featured in the course is The Lindy Effect – a principle derived from the observation that the future life expectancy of non-perishable entities, such as technologies, ideas, or institutions, is proportional to their current age. Put…
-
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 can be a direct substitute with no functional improvement; it can optimise and augment without changing the…
-
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 their teams to think bigger and aim higher. Informal because this supports open…
-
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. She fed one of her own research papers into ChatGPT 4o, Claude 3.5…
-
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 wonderful account of the early years of the UK Government Digital Service and…
-
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 to technology. The Vasa ship, ordered by King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden,…
-
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 book of the same name by Bart De Langhe and Stefano Puntoni). 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 strategists looking to understand changing contexts and capabilities, it can be really useful…