• Net Zero and The Law of Horse Manure

    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

  • The Gravitational Pull Of Business As Usual

    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

  • How To Make A Manager Receptive To Your Idea

    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 correct when she says this a terrible state of affairs – with the dial hardly Read more

  • Do People Really Want Community-Led Solutions?

    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 in 20) believe they are in it for their country’s best interests. Does the answer Read more

  • Society Has Digital Transformed, But It Isn’t Evenly Distributed

    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 humans settled on a 30 minute commute time to work long ago, and no matter Read more

  • The Case Against Collaboration

    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, we’re told, because collaborating with one another has been harder to do when everyone is Read more

  • Top-Down Approaches Hit The Poorest First and Worst

    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. Read more

  • Is Digital Bureaucracy Making Us Less Productive?

    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 do, or a sign of a lack of empowerment? Or is it a sign of Read more