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Net Zero and The Law of Horse Manure
Catastrophic predictions that spell dark days for humanity are nothing new. The Times predicted in 1894 that in 50 years time, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure. It was the crisis of all crises. There was, to be fair, some evidence for this. As urban populations rapidly increased… Read more
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The Gravitational Pull Of Business As Usual
The interior secrets of black holes are guarded by a one-way light-trapping boundary called the event horizon. This horizon is the point, according to NASA, that the gravitational influence of the black hole becomes so intense that not even light is fast enough to escape it. A very different horizon exists in many organisations, except… Read more
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Positive Deviance Versus Deficit Fetishism
Positive Deviance is a strength-based approach with some core principles: Communities possess the solutions and expertise to best address their own problems These communities are self-organising with sufficient human resources and assets to derive solutions to communal problems Communities possess a ‘collective intelligence’, equally distributed through the community, which the approach seeks to foster and… Read more
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AI Is Doing The Paperwork Of Centralisation, Faster.
The price that made it right to centralise might be disappearing. Whilst artificial intelligence doesn’t eliminate the need for a centre it fundamentally redefines its purpose. Rather than managing the centre becomes enabling. Rather than seeking consistency the centre can promote local variation and innovation. Rather than requiring managers to do work about work, AI… Read more
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Is Our ‘Finite Pool of Attention’ Sabotaging Strategic Thinking?
The finite pool of attention is not a myth; it is a profound biological and psychological constraint that shapes every facet of our economy and landscape. The relentless pressure of immediate targets forces our brains into a reactive survival mode, crowding out the abstract, complex thinking required to safeguard our future. Read more
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The Paradox of Standardisation
The modern administrative state is still trapped in the paradox of standardisation: a situation where the relentless pursuit of narrow, technical efficiency through the measurement of anything and everything, actually manufactures the very demand it seeks to manage. Read more
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Organisational Main Character Syndrome
Organisational Main Character Syndrome (OMCS) is when an institution stops viewing itself as a collaborative partner in a wider ecosystem and instead adopts the persona of a singular hero with a unique purpose. Read more
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The Existential Threat Of ‘Work About Work’
The idea that constant distraction and fragmented attention are purely modern, digital-era phenomena is directly challenged by Henry Mintzberg’s 1973 study, The Nature of Managerial Work. Through direct observation of executives long before the advent of email and smartphones, Mintzberg shattered the classical idea that managers were reflective, systematic planners who spent large blocks of… Read more
Paul Taylor 