Category: strategy
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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…
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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…
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‘Good enough’ prompting
I really liked Ethan Mollick’s thoughts this week about ‘good enough’ prompting for AI tools. He references a study of Doctors using GenAI tools which revealed some interesting observations around algorithmic aversion (our hesitancy to take advice from machines when they conflict with our judgement, even when the machine may have a higher degree of…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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 stability and instability in broad terms, summarized in questions like “is my business…
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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 technical change is typically that which relates to more tangible or visible things…
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The power of common knowledge in driving change
I liked Ian Leslie’s review (from a few years ago) of the book Rational Ritual, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe, which focuses on an intriguing aspect of ‘common knowledge’ which Ian summarises thus: ‘For everyone to know something is not enough to force change; what matters is that everyone knows that everyone knows’. There’s an important…
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Why cognitive diversity is a superpower
‘If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately. And this requires us to take a step back and view performance from a fundamentally different vantage point’ I’m reading Matthew…