Paul Taylor
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Ending Our Obsession With Leadership
Organisations need to completely rethink what it means to lead. It’s not about one person or even those residing at the top anymore. In today’s world, everyone has to adopt a leadership mindset. We have to think of ourselves as… Continue reading
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Collaboration, Creativity and Crap Offices: The Top Five Posts of 2019
The word blog is a conflation of two words: Web and log. This blog is essentially a diary of what I’m thinking; albeit a diary that is meant to be read by others, and that hopefully inspires some creativity. I… Continue reading
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The Problem With Seeing People As Vulnerable
Never mistake your Twitter feed for your country — Nick Cohen (@NickCohen4) December 12, 2019 Now, more than ever, it’s easier to exist within a bubble. We spend a lot more time communicating through screens than talking face to face.… Continue reading
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Why You Shouldn’t Ask Customers What They Want
The customer is always right. If you involve customers – you’ll make better decisions. The only problem with statements like these is that they don’t seem to account for all those occasions when the customer wasn’t right. They don’t explain… Continue reading
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Redesigning Organisations For Positive Deviance
What if the traditional way that we think change happens is all wrong? What if our focus on the spread and scale of innovative business solutions isn’t the answer – but is part of the fundamental problem? In 1990, an… Continue reading
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The Complex Task of Simplicity
If you want to make things truly simple to use by your customers, you will nearly always have to make your organization take on more complexity – Gerry McGovern Yesterday, I delivered a talk at a conference that was aimed at… Continue reading
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How To Keep Focussed (And Remain Sane) In A World Of Complex Problems
In our heart, we know the solution does not lie in reforming silo by silo but in organizing our silos the way people organize their lives, so that the neighbourhood becomes our primary unit of analysis and change – Cormac… Continue reading
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An A-Z of Office Jargon
Apparently – ‘Touch Base” is the most-hated office phrase for a second year in a row. Certainly – it’s a mainstay of contact requests I get from Linkedin. And if I fail to touch base I usually get someone ‘circling… Continue reading
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How Technology Can Increase Collaboration And Build Trust
This post is an shortened version of a plenary talk delivered in Cardiff for the Wales Audit Office Depending on your age it’s likely that the two things you were not taught in school were: a) how to collaborate effectively… Continue reading
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The Smartest People Will Never Work For You
Joy’s law is the principle that “no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”. Bill Joy, the computer engineer to whom it’s attributed argued that if you rely solely on your own employees, you’ll… Continue reading
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a short post about death
Even during the most pivotal moments of our lives we are only a few minutes away from being digitally distracted. Twelve to be precise. We check our phones for new messages every 12 minutes. Four weeks ago today we were… Continue reading
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Why Do We Hate Our Offices?
If you are working in an office today you will be interrupted – or you will interrupt yourself – every 3 minutes. And what’s worse is it will take most of us up to 23 minutes to recover from that distraction. If… Continue reading
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What If We Replaced All Our Managers With Robots?
Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done Peter Drucker Management is the greatest inefficiency in any organisation. Many of you will be familiar with the work of Gary Hamel , but his… Continue reading
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How To Kill Doomed Projects
The challenge for managers in the “can-do” culture of business is to distinguish between belief as a key driver of success—and belief as something that can blind managers to a project’s ultimate failure – Isabelle Royer It’s always easier to… Continue reading
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Why We Are So Bad At Defining Problems
If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. – Albert Einstein I don’t know whether Einstein ever used those words. It may be just like… Continue reading
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Does Regulation Really Stifle Innovation?
Last week I did a presentation to a group of managers when the issue of governance and regulation ‘getting in the way’ of innovation came up. People often think regulations stifle innovation, new business and services. They assume that regulators… Continue reading
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The No.1 Problem With The Digital Workplace
“Collaboration is an essential skill of the digital economy. And yet how to collaborate productively is hardly ever taught either in universities or in the workplace.” – Gerry McGovern It’s only a couple of months since I posted Why We… Continue reading
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Four Factors Hindering Transformation
The problem with good service design is that you don’t notice it. It’s only when you experience truly bad design that you appreciate the good stuff. That’s why so few organisations are design led. They focus on designing out the… Continue reading
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Why Story Will Always Beat Statistics
Data is not fact and fact is often just a hypothesis anyway. We humans design how data is created and we humans are the ones who interpret data and draw conclusions from it. Therefore, data will always be inherently fallible… Continue reading
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How To Avoid Corporate Initiativitis
We’ve never felt so busy at work, and never been less engaged. 90% of people say they expect to find a substantial degree of joy at work, yet only 37% report that they do. Many of our organisations remain afflicted… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 