Paul Taylor

  • Failure: We Need To Move From Slow And Stupid To Fast And Intelligent

    In the history of pointless technology, it takes a lot to beat the Twitter Peek. Aimed at those interested in Twitter, but who didn’t own a smartphone,  it asked customers to spend $100 plus a monthly subscription. With the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly designed to solve a problem that didn’t really exist.  If you were…

    Paul Taylor

  • We Need To Be Boringly Reliable and Radically Disruptive – At The Same Time

    Our organisations are generally bad at innovation. That’s because they are designed that way. Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any foreign antibodies. Add something new and it can get rejected. It’s not personal. It’s just an automatic survival mechanism. Purposeful thinking –…

    Paul Taylor

  • Ending The Myth Of Collaboration

    The best organisational cultures are tolerant of the loner, the thinker. – John Wade “If I was you,” said a colleague recently “now would be a very good time to involve customers, to get more people involved”. No, I thought, right now that would be the worst thing we could do. Collaboration can kill creativity.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why We Need To Learn To Love Project Managers

    ‘There isn’t a child alive who dreams of being a project manager’ –  so said Scott Berkun. He pointed out that project managers can unintentionally reinforce their work as (let’s be honest) dull – by trying to get everyone to pay attention to spreadsheets, specifications, PowerPoint presentations and status reports, failing to realise these are the…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Kill Innovation In 10 Easy Steps

    Many of our organisations, without realising it, act as inhibitors of innovation. Rules and protocols are put in place — often for very good reasons — that preserve the status quo. Over time, organisations develop a set of social norms — ‘the way we do things around here’ designed to protect the business from failure.…

    Paul Taylor

  • The Problem With Finding Answers

    Don’t Look for a Great Idea. Look for a Good Problem – Greg Satell Yesterday I spent five and half hours in a room with my colleagues Carole and Simon trying to get to the root of a problem. Three colleagues – over 16 hours of valuable time, just thinking. It was worth every minute.…

    Paul Taylor

  • We Need To Stop Talking About Change Or Get Comfortable With Failure

    Every year businesses will embark on a series of reports , meetings, visioning sessions , training events and communication strategies. In almost every case the goal will be the same: to make fundamental changes to how business is conducted in order to cope with a new, more challenging environment. 70% of these programmes will fail.…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Find And Kill Zombie Projects

    According to Clayton Christensen , of the 30,000 new consumer products that are launched each year – 95% fail. Compare this with the public, voluntary and non-profit sectors – where hardly anything fails. The social sector must either be fantastic at launching new initiatives, or there’s a lot of things going on that shouldn’t still be living.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Stop Talking, Start Experimenting

    Thinking different isn’t enough, you have to act different – Jorge Barba I took a call this week from a person working for another organisation, we’ll call her Bill. Despite having a hugely supportive executive team the problems Bill faces are numerous: Managers are asking why are we working on a new initiative when the…

    Paul Taylor

  • Complex Problems Require Rapid Experiments

    “Multiple iterations almost always beat a single-minded commitment to building your first idea” – Peter Skillman Most of you will have taken part in the Marshmallow Challenge or a variant of it. It’s the team exercise where you get a load of spaghetti, some tape, a marshmallow, a piece of string, and 18 minutes to…

    Paul Taylor

  • Do You Default To Simplicity – Or Complexity?

    Although it doesn’t show up explicitly in any personality test, some people seem to be more prone to creating complexity than others. Instead of cutting to the heart of an issue, they tangle it further; rather than narrowing down projects, they allow the scope to keep expanding  –Ron Ashkenas Are you a simplifier or a…

    Paul Taylor

  • Know Your Customers, Just Never Ask Them What They Want

    We do not really know what our potential users will really respond to, what they will understand or what they’ll hate until we really see them using it –Jonathan Courtney If you are working on any new service change or product there’s one question I guarantee will be asked of you at some point: “What…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why We Solve The Wrong Problems

    Everywhere I look I see organisations and people investing heavily in new initiatives, transformation, and change programmes.  And in almost every case the goals will never be met. One of the most crucial causes of the failure? The right questions were never asked at the outset. We default to ideas and plans. Too many of which…

    Paul Taylor

  • Embracing Challenge to Build a Stronger Innovation Culture

      Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any antibodies. Add something new and it can get rejected. As Chris Bolton has written organisations can have immune systems and idea antibodies. As Chris says – It’s not personal. It’s just an automatic survival mechanism.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why Collaboration Does Not Equal Innovation

    Transformation can’t happen without discovery and discovery can’t happen without experimentation. It’s a new year and at Bromford we are planning a reboot of our approach to innovation (actually we are planning a reboot of everything). My emerging thoughts are we need less talk of accelerated fast fail innovation and more a systemic and systematic…

    Paul Taylor

  • Most Services Launched This Year Will Fail – Here’s Why

    According to Clayton Christensen , 30,000 new consumer products are launched every year—and 95% of them fail. There’s no equivalent figure available for the public or social sectors – but I’ve been wondering how many services have been launched in 2016 and how many will have met their objectives by next Christmas. In the social…

    Paul Taylor

  • How To Fast Track Innovation

    If you speak at conferences about innovation you’ll almost always encounter some frustrated people. They approach you at the end, or contact you a few days later. They often have one thing in common. They, and others like them , have ideas that are being shut down because they don’t fit the system. They tend not…

    Paul Taylor

  • Using Design Principles to Describe What Transformation Means

    Digital transformation to me is about the transformation of organisations from silos, outsourced capability and murky strategic goals, to being an organisation that understands the vision, that knows where it delivers the most value and how to focus on it – Michael Brunton-Spall Right now – if my backchannel Twitter conversations are to be believed –…

    Paul Taylor

  • Lessons in Rapid Experiments and Learning from Failure

    In 1943, the U.S. Airforce met with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to express their need for a fighter plane to counter a rapidly growing Nazi jet threat. Because of the need for secrecy “Skunk Works”, as it became known, was allowed to operate undercover. No rules and no bureaucracy that could stifle innovation and hinder progress.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Using Weak Signals To Determine Your Future Organisation

    “Weak signals consist of emergent changes to technology, culture, markets, the economy, consumer tastes and behaviour, and demographics.  Weak signals are hard to evaluate because they are incomplete, unsettled and unclear” – Vijay Govindarajan. Luckily for us the future doesn’t arrive in an instant – but unfolds seconds at a time. Despite our organisational 2025…

    Paul Taylor

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