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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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The Anatomy of a Bad Idea
Bad ideas can share several features: They take a complex problem and apply a one-shot solution: the silver bullet that ignores the root cause. They are easy to understand, and don’t require you to know much about the subject. They worked somewhere else. ‘This company have this best practice and it has worked – so… Read more
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The Batcave of Innovation: Disruptive Thinking in Healthcare
“The biggest users of pagers are drug dealers, Hezbollah and the NHS” Why has Alder Hey Children’s Hospital innovated in ways the NHS cannot? It’s all about First Principles.. Read more
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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 become too central to decision-making. In his book The Tyranny of Metrics Jerry Z. Muller… Read more
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The Desperate Need To Reorganise Our Resources
Brooks’ Law is a principle in software development that states: “Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.” It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book “The Mythical Man-Month” As more people join, the number of communication channels increases exponentially. This leads to more meetings, more discussions, and more coordination efforts, which… Read more
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Place Based Working Upends Business As Usual
There’s a major shift in the Bromford Strategy that upends our legacy business model: our move to place-based working by 2027. But how do you shift to a completely new model within the constraints of a 60 year-old organisation? Read more
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Moving from ‘Decided Upon’ to ‘Decided With’
I’ve recently finished Dan Davies’ book The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions. In it, he describes how systems have evolved to create “accountability sinks”: situations in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account. “The… Read more
Paul Taylor 