Paul Taylor

Latest Writing

  • Designing For Connection Rather Than Transaction

    Designing For Connection Rather Than Transaction

    Health is not made in health systems, it’s made in homes, in communities, in workplaces. So unless we can build horizontal bonds between communities and the kind of expertise and resource in health systems, we can’t really make change. Hilary Cottam In a world that has become obsessed with efficiency , speed, and digitisation, a… Read more

  • The Importance of Connectors

    The Importance of Connectors

    “The point about connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.” ― Malcolm Gladwell If you want to change something or spread ideas you need to mobilise people – and that’s often through identifying those individuals who have influence outside their position on… Read more

  • We Should All Delete More Work

    We Should All Delete More Work

    At my organisation, during a cyber incident which meant no access to any computer system for several weeks, some teams reported becoming more effective not less. Many other people noticed this at the beginning of the 2020 lockdowns. Deprived of their usual tools and processes, creativity took over, and the work still got completed. Subtraction… Read more

  • Efficiency Isn’t Always Effective

    Efficiency Isn’t Always Effective

    Being efficient is not half as effective as conventional management would like to think. Working across health, the criminal justice system, mental health, housing, social care, or education requires us to take a whole person view of someone. It requires us to be bespoke. Typically though, we offer a top down approach, where the citizen… Read more

  • How To Behave In A Legacy Organisation

    How To Behave In A Legacy Organisation

    “I was a Legacy manager in a Legacy organisation. We were mainly caretaking a broken model, trying to make it function better.” Kate Davies It’s always refreshing to hear a CEO, or ex-CEO, offer a pragmatic take on their career accomplishments. As I’ve said before there’s a fairly repeatable pattern in the behaviour of senior… Read more

  • The Inauthentic Authenticity of LinkedIn

    The Inauthentic Authenticity of LinkedIn

    Amidst all the talk about about the chaos/decline of the network formerly known as Twitter, hardly anyone is talking about what is happening on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the world’s top professional social platform, with over 930 million members from 200 countries and regions worldwide. It will soon top a billion users, putting it within touching… Read more