Paul Taylor
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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
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How To Kill Ideas
We were asked a really good question last week with the visit to Bromford of the Disruptive Innovators Network. How long should you spend on an idea? In the early days of Bromford Lab we had a 12 WEEKS MAX rule.… Continue reading
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What We Can Learn From The Oldest Companies in The World
Shigemitsu Kongo, a Japanese Buddhist temple builder, formed his construction company Kongo Gumi in in 578 AD. His company built relationships with their customers that lasted for 1,400 years, surviving through many wars and natural disasters, just like their temples. It… Continue reading
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Is It Time To Rethink Industry Awards?
Award schemes have become a form of media. They exist to generate income for an organisation through a combination of entry fees and overpriced chicken dinners – Stephen Waddington It can sometimes feel like there is an industry awards ceremony… Continue reading
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Lessons Learned From Five Years of Failure
Sometimes the execution of the idea doesn’t need to be the best to succeed. In 1989 a video game designer called Gunpei Yokoi changed the world with the launch of the original Nintendo Game Boy. It took gaming out of… Continue reading
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Why We Don’t Collaborate
Everyone says they love collaboration. Our open offices are designed to encourage collaboration. We recruit for people who are collaborative in nature. The digital tools we use are aimed at fostering greater collaboration. We promote the benefits of collaboration ,… Continue reading
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The Social Sector Must Rebuild Trust Through Equal Partnerships
This is a edited version of an article originally written for Inside Housing There is a growing realisation that many of our social institutions and public services have run their course. Communities need something different from what’s currently on offer.… Continue reading
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How Good Company Culture Can Go Bad
Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. One of the best hours I spent this week was with our Governance, Risk and Assurance Team. There – I said it. Joking aside, the relationship between governance and innovation is an… Continue reading
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Creating The Right Culture For Innovation and Change
I’m not sure I buy into the concept of organisations having a culture of innovation. After all, innovation is a process consisting of four things: Having an idea that solves a problem Doing something with that idea Proving that it… Continue reading
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The Fruitless Quest For Inbox Zero: Eight Tips To Protect Your Time
You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about… Continue reading
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How Technology Is Changing Our Conversation
In 2013 a Communications Director named Justine Sacco landed in Cape Town after a flight from New York. As she switched her phone back on she was met with two messages. The first was from someone she hadn’t spoken to… Continue reading
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Who Really Wins From Digital Transformation?
The birth of the change management movement began in the 1960s and 70s – when big consultancy began to see a vast new market – convincing organisations of the benefits of ‘transformation’. Alongside this came the development of a distinctive,… Continue reading
