• 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

  • Standing Out and Keeping Attention in the Digital Age

    Standing Out and Keeping Attention in the Digital Age

    24hrs before Donald Trump – who communicates almost exclusively via Twitter and YouTube – became President Elect I was in conversation with Grant Leboff at the first Comms Hero event in Cardiff. “He’ll win” said Grant. “He’s changed the narrative. He had the balls to take a position and make an emotional connection with people.” Read more

  • Technology Won’t Kill Meetings – But We Can

    Technology Won’t Kill Meetings – But We Can

    Technology failed us. We thought the world of work was to be reimagined. The death of the office. The end of email. A utopia of work/life integration fueled by work-where-you-want technology. It hasn’t happened. Six years ago 2.8 million people made daily commutes of two hours or more. In 2016 that’s risen to 3.7 million. Read more

  • Moving Away From The Reactive Organisation

    Moving Away From The Reactive Organisation

    Our job is to the mind the gap between the bureaucracy of our systems and the opportunities in our communities – Cormac Russell The first step is realisation. Accepting that most of us in the social sector are employed because of failure. As Matthew Manos has written – it’s a field of business that profits Read more

  • Building Trust and Standing Out in the Digital Age

    Building Trust and Standing Out in the Digital Age

    In many ways the events of 2016 are less a surprise and more the logical outcome of what we already knew. As I wrote early last year – we are in an era of ‘trust deficit’ – where more people distrust institutions than believe in them. When belief in government, business, media and nonprofits dips below 50%, Read more

  • Is the social sector really getting better at learning from failure?

    Is the social sector really getting better at learning from failure?

    Guest post with Shirley Ayres , Chris Bolton and Roxanne Persaud Innovation in the digital sphere can be complex and risky and there are not sufficient opportunities to share learning from failure. One year on from the Practical Strategies For Learning From Failure Workshops we asked the organising team: Is the social sector getting better at Read more

  • Using Design Principles to Describe What Transformation Means

    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 – Read more