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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 […]
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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.
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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 […]
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Strategic Foresight and Escaping the Tyranny of the Present
Most of us struggle to imagine the future – even our future selves are complete strangers to us. Studies have shown that when we think about our own future we imagine ourselves as a wholly different person. This week I attended an event run by the Disruptive Innovators Network featuring the futurist Tracey Follows. She […]
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Why We Try To Solve Problems By Adding Complexity
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” Andy Benoit When companies want to change they almost always add something to the mix. A new team, a new senior leader, a new process, a new system. We’re obsessed with adding new elements as a way of attempting […]
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Are We Really Becoming More Distracted At Work?
Rather than blame technology we should accept that we over-value noise and activity, and under-value silence and contemplation.
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Built Not To Last: Could Planned Obsolescence Be Good For The Social Sector?
Planned obsolescence is the practice of deliberately creating consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete (or out of date) and therefore need to be frequently replaced. If we designed our organisations to have an expiry date would we get better social outcomes?
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The Convoluted Mess of The Hybrid Workplace
What if hybrid ends up being a mix of the worst of both worlds?
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The Anatomy of a Great Idea
Ideas are not invented equally. I’d suggest that anyone who repeats the adage that ‘no idea is a bad idea’ has never attended a management away day. So what makes a great idea?
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Whatever You Do Today, Don’t Start A Transformation Programme
New research indicates that corporate transformations have a 78% failure rate. The default position is that most top down change programmes will fail. Smaller, well focused, spreadable changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way trump big change almost every time.
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The Great Resignation and The Relentless Rise of Work About Work
We really need to start treating people’s time as being more valuable than the organisation’s money. Mark McArthur-Christie In 2012 a civil servant in the German town of Menden wrote a farewell message to his colleagues on the day of his retirement stating that he had not done anything for 14 years. “Since 1998,” he […]
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Poor Service Isn’t Always An Accident. It’s Often By Design
In markets without much competition, organisations can deliver bad service not because of poor design and management, but simply because they can. Benjamin P. Taylor shared a great thread on Twitter this week outlining the experience of attempting to get some housing support for an elderly relative. I say ‘great thread’ when I really mean […]
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The People Vs The System – and Why The People Rarely Win
What if we overstate the effect of the people in our organisations, and we spend too much time addressing what they feel and think without addressing the more complex, systemic problems that influence how they perform or behave?
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How Do You Solve A Problem Like The NHS?
There comes a point when numbers get so big as to become near incomprehensible. Almost five million people are waiting for health treatment in England alone. Almost 1.2m of them have been waiting at least six months for ‘vital appointments’. Some within the NHS say that in reality that number is far, far greater – […]
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The Hawthorne Effect: Why Employers Need To Be Cautious In Post-Pandemic Planning
In lockdown you can’t really experiment as people have constraints. There are too many variables at play. But now we have the opportunity to test out the best of multiple worlds; home, roam, office, wherever.
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Why We Stigmatize The Poor And How To Fight It
Stigma functions as a form of power which is why we need to treat it seriously. When it is left unchallenged it can lead to the exploitation, control or exclusion of others. More positively, stigma is not a one way street -it can be understood, tackled, and reversed.
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The Difference Between Good And Bad Organisations
Both good and bad organisations make mistakes, but the good ones are better at learning from them.
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What Effect Does Environment Have On Our Ability To Think Creatively?
When you think of the “space to innovate” what immediately springs to mind? Is it the physical space , the mental space, the calendar space? All three? I’ve been thinking a lot about spaces and environments this week: specifically what are the best creative spaces to boost collaboration? Few companies measure whether the design of […]
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Moving From ‘Big Change That Rarely Happens’ To ‘Small Change That Always Does’
We’re obsessed with big change, but what if we’re underestimating the power of the small changes that lie more easily within our reach?
Paul Taylor 