Productivity
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What Gets Measured Gets Gamed
Campbell’s Law builds on earlier ideas, notably Goodhart’s Law, which states: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Campbell extended this concept to social indicators, emphasising the systemic distortions that can arise when metrics… 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
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Why Big Teams Keep Getting Bigger
Large teams, like large movie studios, are more likely to generate sequels than produce anything new 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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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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The Hawthorne Effect: Why Employers Need To Be Cautious In Post-Pandemic Planning
In lockdown you can’t really experiment as people have constraints. There are too many variables at play. But now we have the opportunity to test out the best of multiple worlds; home, roam, office, wherever. Continue reading
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The Rise of The Four Day Work Week
A shorter work week might force us all to cut meetings, limit email and interruptions, and operate at a much more deliberate, productive and happier level. Continue reading
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The Productivity Paradox and Zoom Fatigue: Why Technology Won’t Solve Our Problems
“Imagine in the physical workplace, for the entirety of an 8-hr workday, an assistant followed you around with a handheld mirror, and for every single task you did and every conversation you had, they made sure you could see your… Continue reading
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Why Do So Many People Want Us Back In The Office?
After the sudden and miraculous shift to remote work – the office fightback has well and truly begun. Continue reading
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Smaller, Flatter, Faster. Is The Two Pizza Team Finally Going Mainstream?
This weeks post looks at the two pizza team which was popularised by Jeff Bezos. In the early days of Amazon he instituted a rule that every internal team should be small enough that it could be fed with two… Continue reading
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Death By Zoom: Have We Failed The Mass Home Working Experiment?
One of the few positives of the pandemic lockdown was the opportunity to reset the way in which we spend our working day. This was the chance to prove that remote work actually works. As someone whose job it is… Continue reading
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The Way We Work Isn’t Working
The office, after management, is arguably the biggest inefficiency tax that organisations layer over themselves. They cost huge amounts to procure and maintain, they become an all too convenient base for meetings (another inefficiency tax), and they set a precedent… 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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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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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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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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Why Small Teams Win
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos came up with a rule: every team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas. The ‘Two Pizza Rule’ signalled that Bezos didn’t want more talking, more line reports… Continue reading
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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,… Continue reading
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Continuous Partial Attention: Designing A Less Distracted Future Of Work
Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better – Nicholas Carr ,… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 