Latest Writing
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Do Poor People Waste Money More Than Anyone Else?
Ever since I first started working in social housing, there’s been one trope that’s never really gone away. Poor people waste money. I was only a week into my first job when I was told that tenants kept spending money on satellite TV and we should ‘stop them’ for their own good. I’ve heard it… Read more
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The More We Reduce Conversation, The More We Increase Demand
A few weeks ago I visited a GP surgery with a family member to discuss a few issues that had been bothering them. They were told – with no uncertainty – that they shouldn’t attempt to discuss more than one issue per appointment as they were limited to 10 minutes. It was stated that there… Read more
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How To Make A Paradigm Shift
Last week I was in Amsterdam with the Disruptive Innovators Network (you can read my daily updates, here, here, and here) and it got me thinking about how we make the shift from current behaviours and ways of operating. Travelling across the city you’d think Amsterdam had been designed in a lab rather than being… Read more
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How To Make A Manager Receptive To Your Idea
According to Gallup , only 30% of employees strongly agree that their opinions seem to count at work – and less than 1 in 10 report having the freedom to take risks to improve products and services. Amy Edmondson is correct when she says this a terrible state of affairs – with the dial hardly… Read more
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Do People Really Want Community-Led Solutions?
Trust in national politics appears to be tanking across the board – both blurring and eroding traditional allegiances to the left or right. 63% of people now believe politicians are mainly in it for themselves. Most strikingly, only 5% (one in 20) believe they are in it for their country’s best interests. Does the answer… Read more
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Society Has Digital Transformed, But It Isn’t Evenly Distributed
We often blame innovations for the way they make our lives faster, busier, more intrusive, but in reality our core human behaviours and beliefs are slow to change. Marchetti’s constant, named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, is the principle that humans settled on a 30 minute commute time to work long ago, and no matter… Read more
Paul Taylor 