Latest Posts
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Fix The System Problem, Not The People Problem
The phrase ‘shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic’ is believed to have been first used in 1969. It featured in a Time Magazine article that quoted a priest decrying petty internal changes at a time when the Catholic church should… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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The Abilene Paradox And The Dangers of Assuming People Agree With You
The Abilene Paradox is a situation in which a group makes a decision that is contrary to the desires of the group’s members, because each member assumes the others approve of it. It’s titled after an example used by Jerry… Continue reading
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Autonomy Only Happens By Design
Most of us accept that bureaucracy squashes initiative, risk-taking, and creativity, but it doesn’t just stop there. Continue reading
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Agile Isn’t Everything and Everything Isn’t Agile
A friend of mine was recently invited on a two-day training course to teach/indoctrinate them in the ways of agile. It was accompanied by a 500-slide PowerPoint, no doubt explaining terms like ‘scrum of scrums’, ‘time boxing’, ‘epics’, ‘niko niko… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 