Paul Taylor

Latest Writing

  • 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

  • Resisting the Rush to Technology for Solutions

    Resisting the Rush to Technology for Solutions

    Is anyone else getting tired of the talk –  and it is mainly talk – of digital transformation? The endless rounds of conferences, clubs and lists of so-called digital leaders – all promising a tech utopia. At a recent event I observed an audience listlessly staring at their iPhones as a speaker described how digital was… Read more

  • Can Working Out Loud Inspire Creativity and Inclusion?

    Collaboration – for all the rhetoric – is much harder , and for many of us less preferable, than working in isolation. Today we’ve woken up to find the  UK has made a historic choice. A choice that could be interpreted as a desire to go it alone rather than working with others. To seize… Read more

  • To Boost Innovation We Need To Make Ourselves Obsolete

    To Boost Innovation We Need To Make Ourselves Obsolete

    If you’re of a certain age you’ll sometimes find yourself reminiscing about an age where things were built to last. My own mother swears her first washing machine lasted for over 20 years. Today,  Apple expects the lifecycle for an average iPhone to be just three. Firstly – this is almost certainly a rose tinted view… Read more

  • Stepping Behind The Rhetoric of Digital Transformation

    Fundamentally the challenge for current leaders and public sector organisations is the legacy thinking and a business model which is rooted in serving a de facto purpose which is disconnected from the people and places the organisation or leaders serve – Carl Haggerty   Yesterday I chaired an event where the CEO of HACT ,… Read more

  • How Organisations May Stifle Community Creativity

    One of the many challenges for the public sector is that it must start believing in people and communities again. We know that many organisations are out of sync with technology , but there’s an argument that they are increasingly distant from an economy where sharing and collaboration trump paternalism and top down protocols. One of the… Read more

  • People Don’t Believe Our Organisations – Here’s Why

    People Don’t Believe Our Organisations – Here’s Why

    There’s not a week goes by – and I mean that quite literally – in which we don’t see a sector bemoan its image problem. The launch of some campaign or other to raise awareness of a ‘message’ and get people to see the valuable contribution it makes to society. This week it’s housing, but… Read more