Paul Taylor
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When Everything Is A Crisis, Nothing Is
Who would win in a fight between the housing crisis in one corner and monkeypox in another? We live in a world that now has competing, intersecting, and sometimes conflicting crises. There are the old standards like the climate crisis,… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
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The Case Against Collaboration
The challenge is not to cultivate more collaboration. Rather, it’s to cultivate the right collaboration Morten T. Hansen One of the most popular arguments for getting employees back to the office is about collaboration. We need to be on site,… Continue reading
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Top-Down Approaches Hit The Poorest First and Worst
The cost of lockdowns, poor energy policy and new sustainability initiatives are conspiring to hit the poorest first and worst. Continue reading
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Is Digital Bureaucracy Making Us Less Productive?
Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work. Albert Einstein. Some context for this post: I’ve been doing some thinking recently about why people keep saying they are ‘too busy’. Is busyness an indicator of having too much work to… Continue reading
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Strategic Foresight and Escaping the Tyranny of the Present
Most of us struggle to imagine the future – even our future selves are complete strangers to us. Studies have shown that when we think about our own future we imagine ourselves as a wholly different person. This week I… Continue reading
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Why We Try To Solve Problems By Adding Complexity
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” Andy Benoit When companies want to change they almost always add something to the mix. A new team, a new senior leader, a new… Continue reading
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Are We Really Becoming More Distracted At Work?
Rather than blame technology we should accept that we over-value noise and activity, and under-value silence and contemplation. Continue reading
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Can We Really Trust People To Do The Right Thing?
TLDR: the answer is yes Continue reading
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Built Not To Last: Could Planned Obsolescence Be Good For The Social Sector?
Planned obsolescence is the practice of deliberately creating consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete (or out of date) and therefore need to be frequently replaced. If we designed our organisations to have an expiry date would we get better social outcomes? Continue reading
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The Convoluted Mess of The Hybrid Workplace
What if hybrid ends up being a mix of the worst of both worlds? Continue reading
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The Anatomy of a Great Idea
Ideas are not invented equally. I’d suggest that anyone who repeats the adage that ‘no idea is a bad idea’ has never attended a management away day. So what makes a great idea? Continue reading
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Whatever You Do Today, Don’t Start A Transformation Programme
New research indicates that corporate transformations have a 78% failure rate. The default position is that most top down change programmes will fail. Smaller, well focused, spreadable changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way trump big… Continue reading
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The Great Resignation and The Relentless Rise of Work About Work
We really need to start treating people’s time as being more valuable than the organisation’s money. Mark McArthur-Christie In 2012 a civil servant in the German town of Menden wrote a farewell message to his colleagues on the day of… Continue reading
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Poor Service Isn’t Always An Accident. It’s Often By Design
In markets without much competition, organisations can deliver bad service not because of poor design and management, but simply because they can. Benjamin P. Taylor shared a great thread on Twitter this week outlining the experience of attempting to get… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 